These two traits -the one indicative of rather surprising ignorance of the nature of the matter in hand, the other of a profound error-are what has prompted me to prepare this book. Year by year I have seen more and more clearly that although the work of a teacher or a technical critic of style concerns itself largely with the correction of erratic detail, the really important thing for one who would grasp the subject to master is not a matter of detail at all, but a very simple body of general principles under which details readily group themselves. I have seen too that although a small part of the corrections and criticisms I have had to make are concerned with matters of positive error, by far the greater, and incalculably the more important part are concerned with what I may call matters of discretion. The question is not whether a given word or sentence is eternally right or wrong; but rather how accurately it expresses what the writer has to say, whether the language we use may not afford a different and perhaps a better means of phrasing his idea. The truth is that in rhetoric, as distinguished from grammar, by far the greater part of the questions that arise concern not right or wrong, but better or worse; and that the way to know what is better or worse in any given case is not to load your memory with bewilderingly innumerable rules, but firmly to grasp a very few simple, elastic general principles. Consciously or not, these principles, I believe, are observed by thoroughly effective writers. Of course, nothing but long and patient practice can make anybody certain of writing, or of practising any art, well. Of course too if the principles I state be, as I believe them, fundamental, whoever practises much cannot help in some degree observing them; but the experience of ten years' teaching leads me more and more to the belief that a knowledge of the principles is a very great help in practice. I may best begin, I think, by stating these principles as briefly and as generally as I can. Then I shall try to show how they apply to the more important specific cases that present themselves to writers. Each case, I think, presents them in a somewhat new light. Certainly, without considering them in various aspects we can hardly appreciate their full scope. First of all, it will be convenient to fix a term which shall express the whole subject under consideration. I know of none more precise than Style. A good deal of usage, to be sure, and rather good usage too, gives color to the general impression that style means good style, just as criticism is often taken to mean unfavorable criticism, or manners to mean civil behavior. Very excellent authorities sometimes declare that a given writer has style, and another none; only a little while ago, I heard a decidedly careful talker congratulate himself on having at last discovered, in this closing decade of the nineteenth century, a correspondent who, in spite of our thickening environment of newspapers and telegrams, wrote letters that possessed style. I dwell on this common meaning of the word style for two reasons: in the first place, clearly to define the sense in which I mean not to use the word; in the second place, to emphasize the fact, which we shall find to be highly important, that in the present state of the English language hardly any word not unintelligibly technical can be trusted to express a precise meaning without the aid of definition. Style, as I shall use the term, means simply the expression of thought or emotion in written words; it applies equally to an epic, a sermon, a love-letter, an invitation to an evening party. This definition brings us face to face with an obvious trait which the art we are considering shares with all the other arts of expression,- painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and indeed those humbler arts, not commonly recognized as fine, where the workman conceives something not yet in existence (a machine, a flower-pot, a sauce) and proceeds, by collaboration of brain and hand, to give it material existence. Thought and emotion, the substance of what style expresses, are things so common, so incessant in earthly experience, that we trouble ourselves to consider them as little as we bother our heads about the marvels of sunrise, of the growth of flowers or men, of the mystery of sin or death, when they do not happen to touch our pockets or our affections. But for all that they are with us from morning till night, and not seldom from night till morning, - for all that together they make up the total sum of what to most of us is a very commonplace affair, our earthly existence, thought and emotion, when we stop to consider them, are the most fascinatingly marvellous facts that human beings can contemplate. They are real beyond all other realities. What things are, no man can ever know; analyzed by astronomy, the material universe vanishes in infinite systems of spheres revolving about one another throughout infinitely extended regions of space, in obedience to law that may be recognized, but not comprehended; analyzed by physics, this same material universe vanishes again in infinitely small systems of molecules bound together by the same mysterious forces that govern the stellar universe. The more we study the more we learn that neither the heavens nor the very paper on which I write these words are what they seem, and that what they really are is far beyond the perception of any faculty which the history of the human race can lead us rationally to hope for even in our most remote posterity. But what we think of all these marvels, the forms in which they present themselves to us, we know as we know nothing else. Our whole lives, from the day when our eyes first open to the sunlight, are constant series of thoughts, sometimes seemingly springing from within ourselves, often seeming to come from without ourselves, through the medium of those senses that in careless moods we are apt to think so comprehensive. To each and all of us, the final reality of life is the thought, which, with the endless surge of emotion,-now tempestuous, again almost imperceptible. makes up conscious existence. - Final realities though they be, however, thought and emotion are essentially things that in our habitual thoughtlessness we are apt to call unreal. As we know them, they are immaterial. No systems can measure their extent or their bulk; and though they are in some degree conditioned by time, it is so slightly that we may almost say—as in a single instant our thought ranges from primeval nebulæ to cosmic death and celestial eternity - they are free from time-limit, as well as from the limits of space. Real at once, then, and unreal, or better, real and intangible, real yet immaterial, each of us who will stop to think must find the thought and the emotion that together make that fresh marvel,- himself. Each of us, I say purposely; for there is one more thing that we must remember here. Like one another as we seem, like one another as the courses of our lives may look, there are no two human beings who tread quite the same road from the cradle to the grave. No one of us in any group has come from quite the same origin as any other; no two, be they twin brothers or husband and wife, can go thence by quite the same path. The laws of space and of time forbid; unspeakably more the still more mysterious laws of thought forbid that any two of us should know and feel just the same experience in this world. If two or three of us, habitually together, suddenly utter the same word, we are surprised. The thought and emotion of every living being, then, is an immaterial reality, eternally different from every other in |