Style

Style

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Style, by Walter Raleigh (#2 in our
series by Walter Raleigh)
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Title: Style
Author: Walter Raleigh
Release Date: September, 1997 [EBook #1038] [This file was first
posted on September 2, 1997] [Most recently updated: May 23, 2003]

Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, STYLE ***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

STYLE

Style, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that
handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of
speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an
epitome of literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instruments
has lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts. Thence the
application of the word has been extended to arts other than literature,
to the whole range of the activities of man. The fact that we use the
word "style" in speaking of architecture and sculpture, painting and
music, dancing, play-acting, and cricket, that we can apply it to the
careful achievements of the housebreaker and the poisoner, and to the
spontaneous animal movements of the limbs of man or beast, is the
noblest of unconscious tributes to the faculty of letters. The pen,
scratching on wax or paper, has become the symbol of all that is
expressive, all that is intimate, in human nature; not only arms and arts,
but man himself, has yielded to it. His living voice, with its undulations
and inflexions, assisted by the mobile play of feature and an infinite
variety of bodily gesture, is driven to borrow dignity from the same
metaphor; the orator and the actor are fain to be judged by style. "It is
most true," says the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, "stylus
virum arguit, our style bewrays us." Other gestures shift and change
and flit, this is the ultimate and enduring revelation of personality. The
actor and the orator are condemned to work evanescent effects on

transitory material; the dust that they write on is blown about their
graves. The sculptor and the architect deal in less perishable ware, but
the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not take the impress of all
states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and aesthetic, mood and
conviction, creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstration--what
art but the art of literature admits the entrance of all these, and guards
them from the suddenness of mortality? What other art gives scope to
natures and dispositions so diverse, and to tastes so contrarious? Euclid
and Shelley, Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer, King David and
David Hume, are all followers of the art of letters.
In the effort to explain the principles of an art so bewildering in its
variety, writers on style have gladly availed themselves of analogy
from the other arts, and have spoken, for the most part, not without a
parable. It is a pleasant trick they put upon their pupils, whom they
gladden with the delusion of a golden age, and perfection to be sought
backwards, in arts less complex. The teacher of writing, past master in
the juggling craft of language, explains that he is only carrying into
letters the principles of counterpoint, or that it is all a matter of colour
and perspective, or that structure and ornament are the beginning and
end of his intent. Professor of eloquence and of thieving, his winged
shoes remark him as he skips from metaphor to metaphor, not daring to
trust himself to the partial and frail support of any single figure. He
lures the astonished novice through as many trades as were ever housed
in the central hall of the world's fair. From his distracting account of the
business it would appear that he is now building a monument, anon he
is painting a picture (with brushes dipped in a gallipot made of an
earthquake); again