# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Style (literary)

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​STYLE, in literature a term which may be defined as language regarded from the point of view of the characteristics which it ​ reveals; similarly, by analogy, in other arts, a mode or method of working characterized by distinctive features. The word (which is different from that used in architecture, see above) is derived from the instrument stilus (wrongly spelled stylus), of metal, wood or ivory, by means of which, in classic times, letters and words were imprinted upon waxen tablets. By the transition of thought known as metonymy the word has been transferred from the object which makes the impression to the sentences which are impressed by it, and a mechanical observation has become an intellectual conception. To " turn the stylus " was to correct what had been written by the sharp end of the tool, by a judicious application of the blunt end, and this responds to that discipline and self-criticism upon which literary excellence depends. The energy of a deliberate writer would make a firm and full impression when he wielded the stylus. A scribe of rapid and fugitive habit would press more irregularly and produce a less consistent text. The varieties of writing induced by these differences of temperament would reveal the nature of the writer, yet they would be attributed, and with justice, to the implement which immediately produced them. Thus it would be natural for any one who examined several tablets of wax to say, " The writers of these inscriptions are revealed by their stylus "; in other words, the style or impression of the implement is the medium by which the temperament is transferred to the written speech.
If we follow this analogy, the famous phrase of Buffon becomes at once not merely intelligible but luminous—" le style est l'homme même." This axiom is constantly misquoted ("le style c'est l'homme "), and not infrequently miscomprehended. It is usual to interpret it as meaning that the style of a writer is that writer's self, that it reveals the essence of his individuality. That is true, and the statement of it is useful. But it is probably not the meaning, or at least not the original meaning, that Buffon had in mind. It should be recollected that Buffon was a zoologist, and that the phrase occurs in the course of his great Natural History. He was considering man in the abstract, and differentiating him from other genera of the animal kingdom. Hence, no doubt, he remarked that " style was man himself," not as every reviewer repeats the sentence to-day, " the man." He meant that style, in the variety and elaboration of it, distinguished the language of man (Homo sapiens) from the monotonous roar of the lion or the limited gamut of the bird. Buffon was engaged with biological, not with aesthetic ideas.
Nevertheless, the usual interpretation given to the phrase " le style est l'homme même " may be accepted as true and valuable. According to an Arab legend King Solomon inquired of a djinn, " What is language? " and received the answer, " a wind that passes." " But how," continued the wisest of men, " can it be held?" " By one art only," replied the djinn, " by the art of writing." It may be well to follow a little closely the processes of this art of writing. A human being in the artless condition, in whom, that is to say, the conception of personal expression has not been formed, uses written language to state primitive and general matters of fact. He writes, " The sea is rough to-day; the wind is cold." In these statements there is some observation, but as yet no personal note. We read them without being able to form the very smallest conjecture as to the character or condition of the writer. From these bald and plain words we may rise in degree until we reach Victor Hugo's celebrated parallel of the ocean with the genius of Shakespeare, where every phrase is singular and elaborate, and every element of expression redolent of Victor Hugo, but of no other person who ever lived. Another example, in its own way still more striking, is found in comparison of the famous paragraph which occurs in the Cyrus-Garden (1658) of Sir Thomas Browne. A primitive person would say, " But it is time to go to bed "; this statement is drawn out by Browne into the wonderful page beginning, " But the quincunx of Heaven runs low," and collects around it as it proceeds on its voluptuous course the five ports of knowledge, cables of cobwebs, the bed of Cleopatra, the ghost of a rose, the huntsmen of Persia, and a dozen other examples of prolific and ornamented style. In its final form it is so fully characteristic of its author that it may be justly said that the passage is Browne himself.
It follows from what has just been said that style appeals exclusively to those who read with attention and for the pleasure of reading. It is not even perceived by those who read primarily for information, and these form the great majority of readers. Even these have a glimmering impression that we must not live by bread alone; that the human heart, with its imagination, its curiosity and sensitiveness, cannot be satisfied by bald statements of fact delivered on the printed page as messages are shouted along the telephone. This instinct it is which renders the untaught liable to fall into those errors of false style to which we shall presently call attention. In the untrained there yet exists a craving for beauty, and the misfortune is that this craving is too easily met by gaudy rhetoric and vain repetitions. The effect on the nature of a human being which is produced by reading or listening to a book, or a passage from a book, which that being greatly admires, is often so violent as to resemble a physical shock to the nerves. It causes a spasm of emotion, which is betrayed by tears or laughter or a heightened pulse. This effect could not be produced by a statement of the fact conveyed in language, but is the result of the manner in which that fact is presented. In other words, it is the style which appeals so vividly to the physical and moral system of the reader—not the fact, but the ornament of the fact. That this emotion may be, and often is, caused by bad style, by the mere tinsel of rhetoric and jangle of alliteration, is not to the point. The important matter is that it is caused by style, whether good or bad. Those juvenile ardours and audacities of expression which so often amuse the wise man and exasperate the pedant are but the effects of style acting on a fervid and unripe imagination. The deep delight with which a grown man of experience reads Milton or Dante is but the same phenomenon produced in different conditions.
It is, however, desirable at the outset of an inquiry into the elements of style to insist on the dangers of a heresy which found audacious expression towards the close of the 19th century, namely, that style is superior to thought and independent of it. Against this may be set at once another of the splendid apothegms of Buffon, " Les idées seules forment le fond du style." Before there can be style, therefore, there must be thought, clearness of knowledge, precise experience, sanity of reasoning power. It is difficult to allow that there can be style where there is no thought, the beauty even of some poems, the sequence of words in which is intentionally devoid of meaning, being preserved by the characteristics of the metre, the rhymes, the assonances, all which are, in their degree, intellectual in character. A confusion between form and matter has often confused this branch of our theme. Even Flaubert, than whom no man ever gave closer attention to the question of style, seems to dislocate them. For him the form was the work itself: " As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, is a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm, the form in all its characteristics." This ingenious definition seems to strain language beyond its natural limits. If the adventures of an ordinary young man in Paris be the matter of L'Éducation sentimentale it is not easy to admit that they " imposed, necessarily," such a " unique " treatment of them as Flaubert so superlatively gave. They might have been recounted with feebler rhythm by an inferior novelist, with bad rhythm by a bad novelist and with no rhythm at all by a police-news reporter. What makes that book a masterpiece is not the basis of adventure, but the superstructure of expression. The expression, however, could not have been built up on no basis at all, and would have fallen short of Flaubert's aim if it had risen on an inadequate basis. The perfect union is that between adequate matter and an adequate form. We will borrow from the history of English literature an example which may serve to illuminate this point. Locke has no appreciable style; he has only thoughts. Berkeley has thoughts which are as valuable as those of Locke, and he ​
has an exquisite style as well. From the artist's point of view, therefore, we are justified in giving the higher place to Berkeley, but in doing this we must not deny the importance of Locke. If we compare him with some pseudo-philosopher, whose style is highly ornamental but whose thoughts are valueless, we see that Locke greatly prevails. Yet we need not pretend that he rises to an equal height with Berkeley, in whom the basis is no less solid, and where the superstructure of style adds an emotional and aesthetic importance to which Locke's plain speech is a stranger. At the same time, an abstract style, such as that of Pascal, may often give extreme pleasure, in spite of its absence of ornament, by its precise and pure definition of ideas and by the just mental impression it supplies of its writer's distinguished vivacity of mind. The abstract or concrete style, moreover, what Rossetti called " fundamental brain-work," must always have a leading place.
When full justice has been done to the necessity of thought as the basis of style, it remains true that what is visible, so to speak, to the naked eye, what can be analysed and described, is an artistic arrangement of words. Language is so used as to awaken impressions of touch, taste, odour and hearing, and these are roused in a way peculiar to the genius of the individual who brings them forth. The personal aspect of style is therefore indispensable, and is not to be ignored even by those who are most rigid in their objection to mere ornament. Ornament in itself is no more style than facts, as such, constitute thought. In an excellent style there is an effect upon our senses of the mental force of the man who employs it. We discover himself in what he writes, as it was excellently said of Châteaubriand that it was into his phrases that he put his heart; again, D'Alembert said of Fontenelle that he had the style of his thought, like all good authors. In the words of Schopenhauer, style is the physiognomy of the soul. All these attempts at epigrammatic definition tend to show the sense that language ought to be, and even unconsciously is, the mental picture of the man who writes.
To attain this, however, the writer must be sincere, original and highly trained. He must be highly trained, because, without the exercise of clearness of knowledge, precise experience and the habit of expression, he will not be able to produce his soul in language. It will, at best, be perceived as through a glass, darkly. Nor can anyone who desires to write consistently and well, afford to neglect the laborious discipline which excellence entails. He must not be satisfied with his first sprightly periods; he must polish them, and then polish them again. He must never rest until he has attained a consummate adaptation of his language to his subject, of his words to his emotion. This is the most difficult aim which the writer can put before him, and it is a light that flits ever onward as he approaches. Perfection is impossible, and yet he must never desist from pursuing perfection. In this connexion the famous tirade of Tamburlaine in Marlowe's tragedy cannot be meditated upon too carefully, for it contains the finest definition which has been given in any language of style as the unapproachable fen-fire of the mind:—  " If all the pens that poets ever held  Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts,  And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,  Their minds, and muses, on admired themes—  If all the heavenly quintessence they 'still  From their immortal flowers of poesy,  Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive  The highest reaches of a human wit—  If those had made one poem's period,  And all combined in beauty's worthiness,  Yet should there hover in our restless heads  One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least.  Which into words no virtue can digest."
Flaubert believed that every thougnt or grace or wonder had one word or phrase exactly adapted to express it, and could be " digested " by no other without loss of clearness and beauty. It was the passion of his life, and the, despair of it, to search for this unique phrase in each individual case. Perhaps in this research after style he went too far, losing something of that simplicity and inevitability which is the charm of natural writing. It is boasted by the admirers of Flaubert that his style is an enamel, and those who say this perhaps forget that the beauty of an enamel resides wholly in its surface and not at all in the substance below it. This is the danger which lies in wait for those who consider too exquisitely the value and arrangement of their words. Their style becomes too glossy, too highly varnished, and attracts too much attention to itself. The greatest writing is that which in its magnificent spontaneity carries the reader with it in its flight; that which detains him to admire itself can never rise above the second place. Forgetfulness of self, absence of conceit and affectation, simplicity in the sense not of thinness or poorness but of genuineness—these are elements essentia] to the cultivation of a noble style. Here again, thought must be the basis, not vanity or the desire to astonish. We do not escape by our ingenuities from the firm principle of Horace, " scrivendo recti sapere est et principium et fons."
In speaking of originality in style it must not be forgotten that memory exercises a strong and often an insidious effect upon writing. That which has been greatly admired will have a tendency to impregnate the mind, and its echo, or, what is worse, its cadence, will be unconsciously repeated. The cliché is the greatest danger which lies in wait for the vapid modern author, who is tempted to adopt, instead of the one fresh form which suits his special thought, a word or even a chain of words, which conventionally represents it. Thus " the devouring element " was once a striking variant for the short word " fire," and a dangerous hidden place was once well described as " a veritable death-trap," but these have long been clichés which can only be used by writers who are insincere or languid. Worse than these are continuous phrases, and even sentences, such as are met with in the leaders of daily newspapers, which might be lifted bodily from their places and inserted elsewhere, so completely have they lost all vitality and reality.
With regard to the training which those who wish to write well should resign themselves to undergo, there is some difference of opinion, based upon difference of temperament. There are those who believe that the gift of style is inborn, and will reveal itself at the moment of mental maturity without any external help. There are others who hold that no amount of labour is excessive, if it be directed to a study and an emulation of what are called " the best models." No doubt these theories are both admissible. If a man is not born to write well, no toil in the imitation of Addison or Ruskin will make his style a brilliant one; and a born writer will express himself with exactitude and fire even though he be but an idle student of the classics. Yet, on the other hand, the very large number of persons who have a certain aptitude for writing, yet no strong native gift, will undoubtedly cure themselves of faults and achieve skill and smoothness by the study of those writers who have most kinship with themselves. To be of any service, however, it seems that those writers must have used the same language as their pupils. Of the imitation of the ancients much has been written, even to the extent of the publication of manuals. But what is that imitation of the verse of Homer which leads to-day to Chapman and to-morrow to Pope? What the effect of the study of the prose of Theophrastus which results in the prose of Addison? The good poet or prose-man, however closely he studies an admirable foreign model, is really anxious to say something which has never before been said in his own language. The stimulus which he receives from any foreign predecessor must be in the direction of analogous or parallel effort, not in that of imitation.
The importance of words, indeed, is exemplified, if we regard it closely, in this very question, so constantly mooted, of the imitation of the ancients, by the loss of beauty fatally felt in a bad translation. The vocabulary of a great writer has been, as Pater says, " winnowed "; it is impossible to think of Sophocles or of Horace as using a word which is not the best possible for introduction at that particular point. But the translator has to interpret the ideas of these ancient writers into a vocabulary which is entirely different from theirs, and unless he has a genius of almost equal impeccability he will undo the winnowing work. ​He will scatter chaff and refuse over the pure grain which the classic poet's genius had so completely fanned and freed. The employment of vague and loose terms where the original author has been eclectic, and of a flood of verbiage where he has been frugal, destroys all semblance of style, although the meaning may be correctly preserved.
The errors principally to be avoided in the cultivation of a pure style are confusion, obscurity, incorrectness and affectation. To take the earliest of these first, no fault is so likely to be made by an impetuous beginner as a mingling together of ideas, images, propositions which are not on the same plane or have no proper relation. This is that mass of "stunning sounds and voices all confused" which Milton deprecates. One of the first lessons to be learned in the art of good writing is to avoid perplexity and fatigue in the mind of the reader by retaining clearness and order in all the segments of a paragraph, as well as propriety of grammar and metaphor in every phrase. Those who have overcome this initial difficulty, and have learned to avoid a jumble of misrelated thoughts and sentences, may nevertheless sin by falling into obscurity, which, indeed, is sometimes a wilful error and arises from a desire to cover poverty of thought by a semblance of profundity. The meaning of "obscurity" is, of course, in the first instance "darkness," but in speaking of literature it is used of a darkness which arises from unintelligibility, not from depth of expression, but from cloudiness and fogginess of idea.
Of the errors of style which are the consequences of bad taste, it is difficult to speak except in an entirely empirical spirit, because of the absence of any absolute standard of beauty by which artistic products can be judged. That kind of writing which in its own age is extravagantly cultivated and admired may, in the next age, be as violently repudiated; this does not preclude the possibility of its recovering critical if not popular favour. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of this is the revolution made against the cold and stately Ciceronian prose of the middle of the 16th century by the so-called Euphuists. This occurred almost simultaneously in several nations, but has been traced to its sources in the Spanish of Guevara and in his English imitators, North and Pettie, whom Lyly in his turn followed with his celebrated Euphues. Along with these may not unfairly be mentioned Montaigne in France and Castiglione in Italy, for, although these men were not proficients in Guevara's artificial manner, his estilo alto, still, by their easiness and brightness, their use of vivid imagery and their graceful illumination, they marked the universal revulsion against the Ciceronian stiffness. Each of these new manners of writing fell almost immediately into desuetude, and the precise and classic mode of writing in another form came into vogue (Addison, Bossuet, Vico, Johnson). But what was best in the ornamental writers of the 16th century is now once more fully appreciated, if not indeed admired to excess. A facility in bringing up before the memory incessant analogous metaphors is the property, not merely of certain men, but of certain ages; it flourished in the age of Marino and is welcomed again in that of Meredith. A vivid, concrete style, full of colour and images, is not to be condemned because it is not an abstract style, scholastic and systematic. It is to be judged on its own merits and by its own laws. It may be good or bad; it is not bad merely because it is metaphorical and ornate. The amazing errors which lie strewn along the shore of criticism bear evidence to the lack of sympathy which has not perceived this axiom and has wrecked the credit of dogmatists. To De Quincey, a convinced Ciceronian, the style of Keats " belonged essentially to the vilest collections of waxwork filagree or gilt gingerbread "; but to read such a judgment is to encourage a question whether all discussion of style is not futile. Yet that particular species of affectation which encourages untruth, affectation, parade for the mere purpose of producing an effect, must be wrong, even though Cicero be guilty of it.
The use of the word " style," in the sense of the present remarks, is not entirely modern. For example, the early English critic Puttenham says that " style is a constant and continual phrase or tenour of speaking and writing " (1585). But it was in France and in the great age of Louis XIV. that the art of writing began to be carefully studied and ingeniously described. Mme de Sévigné, herself mistress of a manner exquisitely disposed to reflect her vivacious, tender and eloquent character, is particularly fond of using the word " style " in its modern sense, as the expression of a complete and rich personality. She says, in a phrase which might stand alone as a text on the subject, " Ne quittez jamais le naturel, votre tour s'y est formé, et cela compose un style parfait." Her contemporary, Boileau, contributed much to the study, and spoke with just pride of " mon style, ami de la lumière." The expression to form one's style, à se faire un style, appears, perhaps for the first time, in the works of the abbé d'Olivet (1682–1768), who was addicted to rhetorical speculation. Two great supporters of the pure art of writing, Swift and Voltaire, contributed much to the study of style in the 18th century. The former declared that " proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style "; the latter, more particularly, that " le style rend singulières les choses les plus communs, fortifie les plus faibles, donne de la grandeur aux plus simples." Voltaire speaks of " le mélange des styles " as a great fault of the age in which he lived; it has come to be looked upon as a principal merit of that in which we live.
The problem of how to obtain a style has frequently been treated in works of more or less ephemeral character. In France the treatises of M. Albalat have received a certain amount of official recognition, and may be mentioned here as containing a good deal cf sound advice mixed with much that is jejune and pedagogic. If M. Albalat distributes a poison, the antidote is supplied by the wit of M. Remy de Gourmont; the one should not be imbibed without the other.
See Walter Pater, An Essay on Style (London, 1889); Walter Raleigh, Style (London, 1897); Antoine Albalat, L'Art d'écrire enseigné en vingt leçons (Paris, 1898), and De la Formation du style par l'assimilation des auteurs (Paris, 1901); Remy de Goureront, Le Problème du style (Paris, 1902). Also Coyer-Linguet, Le Genie de la langue française (Paris, 1846), and " Loyson-Bridet " (i.e. Marcel Schwob), Moeurs des diurnales (Paris, 1902), a satire on the principal errors to which modern writers in all languages are liable. (E. G.)