I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes. …
She died a year or two later. She may have been too beautiful to live long. I have a thought that she may also have been too good.
For I saw her with the crowd about her: I saw led up and presented among others the man who was to be, for a few months, her husband: and then, as the men bowed, pencilling on their programmes, over their shoulders I saw her eyes travel to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you remember Crossjay in Meredith’s The Egoist? It was just such a boy) who sat abashed and glowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. Promptly with a laugh, she advanced, claimed him, and swept him off into the first waltz.
When it was over he came back, a trifle flushed, and I felicitated him; my remark (which I forget) being no doubt “just the sort of banality, you know, one does come out with”—as maybe that the British Navy kept its old knack of cutting out. But he looked at me almost in tears and blurted, “It isn’t her beauty, sir. You saw? It’s—it’s—my God, it’s the style!”
Now you may think that a somewhat cheap, or at any rate inadequate, cry of the heart in my young seaman; as you may think it inadequate in me, and moreover a trifle capricious, to assure you (as I do) that the first and last secret of a good Style consists in thinking with the heart as well as with the head.
But let us philosophise a little. You have been told, I daresay often enough, that the business of writing demands two—the author and the reader. Add to this what is equally obvious, that the obligation of courtesy rests first with the author, who invites the séance, and commonly charges for it. What follows, but that in speaking or writing we have an obligation to put ourselves into the hearer’s or reader’s place? It is his comfort, his convenience, we have to consult. To express ourselves is a very small part of the business: very small and almost unimportant as compared with impressing ourselves: the aim of the whole process being to persuade.
All reading demands an effort. The energy, the goodwill which a reader brings to the book is, and must be, partly expended in the labour of reading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the author means. The more difficulties, then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or careless writing, the more we blunt the edge of his attention: so that if only in our own interest—though I had rather keep it on the ground of courtesy—we should study to anticipate his comfort.
But let me go a little deeper. You all know that a great part of Lessing’s argument in his Laoköon, on the essentials of Literature as opposed to Pictorial Art or Sculpture, depends on this—that in Pictorial Art or in Sculpture the eye sees, the mind apprehends, the whole in a moment of time, with the correspondent disadvantage that this moment of time is fixed and stationary; whereas in writing, whether in prose or in verse, we can only produce our effect by a series of successive small impressions, dripping our meaning (so to speak) into the reader’s mind—with the correspondent advantage, in point of vivacity, that our picture keeps moving all the while. Now obviously this throws a greater strain on his patience whom we address. Man at the best is a narrow-mouthed bottle. Through the conduit of speech he can utter—as you, my hearers, can receive—only one word at a time. In writing (as my old friend Professor Minto used to say) you are as a commander filing out his battalion through a narrow gate that allows only one man at a time to pass; and your reader, as he receives the troops, has to reform and reconstruct them. No matter how large or how involved the subject, it can be communicated only in that way. You see, then, what an obligation we owe to him of order and arrangement; and why, apart from felicities and curiosities of diction, the old rhetoricians laid such stress upon order and arrangement as duties we owe to those who honour us with their attention. “La clarté,” says a French writer, “est la politesse.” Χἁρισι καἰ σαφενεἱᾳ θῦε, recommends Lucian. Pay your sacrifice to the Graces, and to σαφήνεια—Clarity—first among the Graces.
What am I urging? “That Style in writing is much the same thing as good manners in other human intercourse?” Well, and why not? At all events we have reached a point where Buffon’s often-quoted saying that “Style is the man himself” touches and coincides with William of Wykeham’s old motto that “Manners makyth Man”: and before you condemn my doctrine as inadequate listen to this from Coventry Patmore, still bearing in mind that a writer’s main object is to impress his thought or vision upon his hearer.
“There is nothing comparable for moral force to the charm of truly noble manners. …”
I grant you, to be sure, that the claim to possess a Style must be conceded to many writers—Carlyle is one—who take no care to put listeners at their ease, but rely rather on native force of genius to shock and astound. Nor will I grudge them your admiration. But I do say that, as more and more you grow to value truth and the modest grace of truth, it is less and less to such writers that you will turn: and I say even more confidently that the qualities of Style we allow them are not the qualities we should seek as a
