theoryofliteratu00inwell

Style and Stylistics 183
tern of the language, into spoken and written, cliche and indi-
vidual ; and, according to the relation of the words to the author,
into objective and subjective. 14 These classifications can be applied
to practically all linguistic utterances ; but obviously most
of the evidence is drawn from works of literature and directed
to an analysis of literary style. Thus conceived, stylistics seems to
have found the right mean between the old disjointed study of
figures based on the classifications of rhetoric and the more
grandiose but less concrete speculations on period styles (the
Gothic or Baroque).
Much of this work, unfortunately, has been inspired either by
narrowly prescriptive purposes—which make stylistics the recommendation
of a certain "middle" style of exposition, with its
ideals of precision and clarity, and presently a pedagogic
discipline—or by nationalistic exaltation of a specific language.
The Germans are especially guilty of fanciful generalizations on
the differences between the main European languages. Even
prominent scholars like Wechssler, Vossler, and Deutschbein 15
indulge in conjectures not really verifiable and rush to conclu-
sions about national psychology. This is not to deny the existence
of a problem: the "behavioristic" point of view that all languages
are equal seems manifestly absurd if we compare a language
without developed literature with one of the great European
languages. The great European languages differ widely in syn-
tactical patterns, "idioms," and other conventions, as any trans-
lator has discovered. For certain purposes, English or French or
German seems less fit than one of its rivals. But the differences
are undoubtedly due to social, historical, and literary influences
which, though describable, have not yet been described fully
enough to warrant reduction to basic national psychologies. A
"comparative" stylistics seems a science of the distant future.
A purely literary and aesthetic use of stylistics limits it to the
study of a work of art or a group of works which are to be de-
scribed in terms of their aesthetic function and meaning. Only if
this aesthetic interest is central will stylistics be a part of literary
scholarship; and it will be an important part because only
stylistic methods can define the specific characteristics of a literary
work. There are two possible methods of approaching such a
stylistic analysis : the first is to proceed by a systematic analysis of