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322 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
great lesson writers have to learn namely, that they should
think of the immediate purpose of their writing, which is to
convey truths and emotions, in symbols and images, intelligible
and suggestive. The racket-player keeps his eye on the
ball he is to strike, not on the racket with which he strikes.
If the writer sees vividly, and will say honestly what he sees,
and how he sees it, he may want something of the grace and
felicity of other men, but he will have all the strength and
felicity with which nature has endowed him. More than that
he cannot attain, and he will fall very short of it in snatching
at the grace which is another's. Do what he will, he cannot
escape from the infirmities of his own mind: the affectation,
arrogance, ostentation, hesitation, native in the man will taint
his style,
no matter how closely he may copy the manner of
another. For evil and for good, le style
est de Vhomme
meme. 5
The French critics, who are singularly servile to all established
reputations, and whose unreasoning idolatry of
their own classics is one of the reasons why their Literature
is not richer, are fond of declaring with magisterial emphasis
that the rules of good taste and the canons of style were
fixed once and forever by their great writers in the seventeenth
century. The true ambition of every modern is said to be by
careful study of these models to approach (though with no
hope of equalling) their chastity and elegance. That a
writer of the nineteenth century should express himself in the
manner which was admirable in the seventeenth is an
absurdity which needs only
to be stated. It is not worth
refuting. But it never presents itself thus to the French. In
their minds it is a lingering remnant of that older superstition
which believed the Ancients to have discovered all wisdom,
so that if we could only surprise the secret of Aristotle's
thoughts and clearly comprehend the drift of Plato's theories