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. Nor can anyone who desires to write consistently and well, afford to neglect the laborious discipline which excellence entails. 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. Perfection is impossible, and yet he must never desist from pursuing perfection.
"If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' 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 these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least.
Which into words no virtue can digest." —Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great Flaubert believed that every thought 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. 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 essential 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, "scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons." 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 revolt against Ciceronian prose which occurred almost simultaneously in several nations toward the middle of the 16th century and in England is best represented by Lyly in his celebrated Euphues. Montaigne in France and Castiglione in Italy, by their easiness and brightness, their use of vivid imagery and their graceful illumination, marked the universal revulsion against the Ciceronian stiffness. Each of these new manners of writing fell almost immediately into desue tude, and the precise and classic mode of writing in another form came into vogue (Addison, Bossuet, Vico, Johnson). In the 19th century admiration of the ornamental writers of the 16th and 17th centuries revived. A facility in bringing up before the memory incessant analogous metaphors is the property, not merely of cer tain men, but of certain ages ; it flourished in the age of Marino and was 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 witness to the lack of sympathy which has not perceived this axiom and has wrecked the credit of dogmatists. Yet that particular species of affectation which encourages untruth, affec tation, parade for the mere purpose of producing an effect, must be wrong, even though Cicero be guilty of it.
See Walter Pater, An Essay on Style (1889) ; Walter Raleigh, Style (1897) ; Antoine Albalat, La Formation du style par l'assimilation des auteurs (19o1) and Le Travail du Style (1904) ; Remy de Gour mont, Le Probleme du style (1902) ; J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (1922) ; H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). (E. G.; X.) For style in architecture, etc., see PERIODS OF ART.