Style

THE other day, a reviewer, after bestowing very high praise upon a very mediocre performance, said, in effect: " It is to be clearly understood that no book will commend itself to us as literature ; what we want is life — ideas, and not form.”

Of course we demand ideas from an author. They are not so essential, it seems, in a critic. This critic, indeed, is quite to his own satisfaction, without, apparently, any idea that there is such a thing as art.

There must be workmanship as well as design. The way a thing is done can kill it or give it life. The touch of Cellini makes the precious metal a hundred fold more precious. We do demand ideas from an author; but if he does not know, or does not care to know, how to express them, he might as well not have them, and had better set up as a reviewer. It is easier business to disparage literature than to produce it; easier to undervalue style than to acquire it. However, that indefinable distinction which we call style is quite capable of taking care of itself. A page of prose or verse without this quality is like a man without good manners : he may be a person of excellent intentions, but he is not desirable company, and ultimately finds himself dropped.

A notable thing in every work — poem, history, or novel — that has survived its own period is perfection of form. It is that which has kept it. It is the amber that preserves the fly. I have no doubt that thousands of noble conceptions have been lost to us because of the inadequacy of their literary form. Certain it is that many thoughts and fancies, of no great value in themselves, have been made imperishable by the faultlessness of their setting. For example, if Richard Lovelace — whose felicities, by the way, were purely accidental — had said to Lucasta : “ Lucasta, my girl, I could n’t think half so much of you as I do if I did n’t feel it my duty to enlist for the war. Do you catch on?”—if Richard Lovelace, I repeat, had put it in that fashion, his commendable sentiment would have been forgotten in fifteen minutes ; but when he said —

he gave to England a lyric that shall last longer than the Thames Embankment. The difference in the style of these two addresses to Lucasta illustrates just the difference there is between literature and that formless commonplace which certain of our critics suppose to be Life.