of thought and hand and pen, that gives most of its merit to every-day journalism. Fluency may be fatal, of course; no commonplace is more familiar. But more fatal still to most human interest is that lack of fluency which makes a writer separately conscious of every letter he forms. It was this, almost as much as the necessity of daily observation, that first made me ask pupils for daily work; and daily work means not only daily observation of life, but daily mastery of the pen. After all, commonplaces tell the story; and there is no truer commonplace just here than the one you will find in so many literary memoirs: Nulla dies sine linea,-"Let no day pass without its written record." Sympathy, then, with what we would express, with those to whom we would express it, and more subtilely still, with the scope and the limits of the engines at our disposal, is what we must cultivate when we wish to strengthen our style. Even one of these things. will go far to help us. It is profound understanding of what is to be expressed that gives such curious force to novels like the Brontes'. It is profound understanding of those who are addressed that gives such force to a speech like Mr. Phillips's Phi Beta Kappa oration, or like any specious argument by any tricky lawyer or politician. It is perfect mastery of the merely physical mechanism of style that gives its. peculiar and undoubted force to so much cheap journalism. It is a fusion of all these that underlies the excellence of work that we may honestly call excellent, work where the effect the writer has in mind - is produced by a fine, firm sense of what the elements of his style may be made to do, in denotation and in connotation alike. For, as we have seen, the secret of clearness lies in denotation, the secret of force in connotation; the secret of clearness in what is said, the secret of force in what is left unsaid. And I believe that one experience very familiar to any teacher, will go far to prove this. I have somewhere seen a story of the younger Dumas, that when his first successful play was produced, some old Parisian man of letters complimented him on the firmness of his style. To which Dumas is said to have replied, Il y a un fier dessous ("There is no end of it out of sight"). He meant, I take it, that he had produced the notable firmness of his dialogue - a trait remarkable in most of his dramatic work by the very simple process of courageously striking out needless words and phrases, -making each word do full work. By this very process, you see, he would make what words are left stronger and stronger in their connotation. In a similar way, every teacher must have discovered, in his own work as well as in that of pupils, what surprising gains in force may be made by what at first sight seems to a writer a deliberate process of weakening. The truth is that in written style as well as in declamation there is at any given moment a fairly distinct limit to the power of any given man. You can shout just so loud and no louder; you can be just so passionate, just so funny, just so pathetic, and not a bit - more. Now, if you often do your utmost, anybody will recognize it. That terrible sanity of the average man is always watching you. But if you keep your ultimate power in reserve, nobody will be able to say just how much farther you might easily have gone, had you chosen. There are moments, of course, that call for your utmost power; but these are rare. And your utmost strength should be reserved for them. The analogy of rant on the stage or in the pulpit is a very close one. You all know how fatal the effect of that is; and the final weakness you all feel there is a question of connotation. Slowly but surely, amid all this racket, comes to you a growing conviction that this man cannot do a bit more. There is no mere technical device for strengthening style, then, more apt to be of value than the deliberate weakening of passages you have written in your very strongest way. Such deliberate weakening of all but the very rare passages which really demand your utmost power results at once in a connotation directly opposite to that of vocal or written rant. It is evident, in such cases, that there is power in reserve. The more you listen, the more you read, the more you feel it. And how great it may be there is nothing to show. The tact with which style may be kept strong enough to connote no weakness, and weak enough to connote indefinite strength, is perhaps the finest trick of the writer's trade. Whoever has begun to master it will have learned for himself that the secret of force lies in connotation. ELEGANCE. THE last quality of style is far more subtile than either of the others. Any style that we can understand, we have found, is clear; and the secret of clearness lies in the denotation of our words and compositions. Any style that will hold the attention, we have found, is forcible; and not so obviously, but I hope almost as surely, we have determined that the secret of force lies in the connotation of our words and compositions. But we come at last to a more elusive matter than force. What is it in style that may be trusted to please us; and what trait in the elements of style may be expected to secure it? In my first chapter, I suggested to you both the name by which I shall describe the quality in question and the definition I shall give it. Elegance is the distinguishing quality of a style that pleases the taste. By framing and repeating this definition, however, I do not mean that it satisfies me. On the contrary, both name and definition are among the least satisfactory things I have ventured to offer you. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, this very fact has inclined me not to attempt to change them; for no single example could much better illustrate what I believe to be the real nature of the quality. What we have in view, you see, is the aesthetic in quality of style, that subtile something in a work of literary art which makes us feel delight in the workmanship. Beauty, some call it; charm, others; others still, grace, ease, finish, mastery. Yet none of these terms, any more than the one I have chosen, speaks for itself. Most palpable, of course, in kinds of writing whose first object is to give pleasure, poetry, or in that finer kind of prose that we recognize as belonging to literature, the quality I mean need not be wholly absent from even the most technical style or the most commonplace matter. We all feel it in the great poets; we all feel it in such prose as Addison's; in less certain form we all feel it in such modern prose as Mr. Matthew Arnold's, or Mr. Walter Pater's, just as we feel its absence in every-day journalism or in the astonishing vagaries of Carlyle or of Mr. Addington Symonds. But I think we do not all feel it in other places where nevertheless it exists; in technical treatises, for example, in every-day letters, in every case where human beings attempt the task of embodying in written words the elusive, immaterial reality of thought and emotion. Our first task, then, is to realize what we mean; to fix in our minds the quality to which we are now trying to give a name. By so doing, we shall see why any name yet found for it must be unsatisfactory; and |