Appreciations, With An Essay on Style | Page 9

removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of
specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which
language as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own sake, to
whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant
observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for
obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is
mixed in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of
it. Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements
or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first that
occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the resources
of expression. The elementary particles of language will be realised as
colour and light and shade through his scholarly living in the full sense
of them. Still opposing the constant degradation of language by those
who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear;
and while half the world is using figure unconsciously, will be fully
aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but of the
vague, lazy, half-formed personification--a rhetoric, depressing, and
worse than nothing, [21] because it has no really rhetorical
motive--which plays so large a part there, and, as in the case of more
ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from syllable to
syllable, its precise value.
So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art
arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the
essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent
ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good
taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate quality
of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist himself. The
otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent to the true
literary artist, except because, in literary as in all other art, structure is
all-important, felt, or painfully missed, everywhere?--that architectural
conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never
loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last
sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the

first--a condition of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another
quality of the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the
necessity of mind in style.
An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose
works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and with
obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift) wrote a
book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to show that all
the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in each and all of
its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the
apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity
or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is
associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty,
when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of
simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural
member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its
subject and with itself:-- style is in the right way when it tends towards
that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and
identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all
art, which therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive
reason-- insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action--true,
most of all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely
cognate to the abstract intelligence. Such logical coherency may be
evidenced not merely in the lines of composition as a whole, but in the
choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with, but may
even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for
instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of
this or that [23] part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp
sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate
with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence,
born with the integrity of a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in
which, if you look closely, you can see much contrivance, much
adjustment, to bring a highly qualified matter into compass at one view.
For the literary architecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves
not only foresight of the end in the beginning, but also development or
growth of design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities,
surprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary