CHAPTER IX

THOUGHT AND STYLE

We have been studying the principles that underlie literary expression, and we may have felt sometimes that we have been studying the body of literature instead of its soul. Why pay such careful attention to style? Because the style is as much a part of the poem or the story as the thought is, just as a man's physical traits and habits are as much a part of his personality as his mental characteristics are. Indeed, style and thought are as intimately connected as body and soul.

Style is good when it is suitable to the thought it expresses; it is poor when it is unsuitable. We are not to imagine that a great writer says to himself, "I will put a simile here and a metaphor there." He works rather by instinct, his unerring good taste which is so important an element of his genius guiding him to the most appropriate expression of his thought. Because of this close connection between the thought and its expression, we cannot learn to appreciate literature properly without cultivating a feeling for style.

The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely related, and are in stedfast proportion one to the other. M. ARNOLD: The Study of Poetry.

And yet we should miss the most abiding and profitable

part of literary study if we should content ourselves with the study of style alone, without reference to the thought. Such a study could be nothing more than a mere mechanical listing of figures, words, sentences, and metrical devices a study not in the least worth while. Style is a means to an end, and should be studied as such. It exists for the expression of thought.

Epictetus had a happy figure for things like the play of the senses, or literary form and finish, or argumentative ingenuity, in comparison with 'the best and master thing' for us, as he called it, the concern, how to live. Some people were afraid of them, he said, or they disliked or undervalued them. Such people were wrong; they were unthankful or cowardly. But the things might also be overprized, and treated as final, when they are not. They bear to life the relation which inns bear to home. 'As if a man, journeying home, and finding a nice inn on the road, and liking it, were to stay forever at the inn! Man, thou hast forgotten thine object; thy journey was not to this but through this. "But this inn is taking." And how many other inns, too, are taking, and how many fields and meadows! but as places of passage merely. You have an object, which is this: to get home, to do your duty to your family, friends, and fellow-countrymen, to attain inward freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment. Style takes your fancy, arguing takes your fancy, and you forget your home and want to make your abode with them and stay with them, on the plea that they are taking. Who denies that they are taking? but as places of passage, as inns. And when I say this, you suppose me to be attacking the care for style, the care for argument. I am not; I attack the resting in them, the not looking to the end which is beyond them.'

M. ARNOLD: Wordsworth.

Though thought is the thing of ultimate importance in literature, it is not as easily classified as the elements and qualities of style, and there is less that can be said about it in a text-book. We may, however, ask the question, "What kind of thought is found in literature? What is it about?"

In the essay on Wordsworth, quoted above, the great critic, Matthew Arnold, answers our question thus:

Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. I said that a great poet receives his distinctive character of superiority from his application, under the conditions immutably fixed by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his application, I say, to his subject, whatever it may be, of the ideas

'On man, on nature and on human life,'

which he has acquired for himself It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life to the question: How to live.

This sounds very solemn indeed. It may seem to us that Arnold expects all literature to be profoundly serious. Perhaps we have not quite understood his phrase, "how to live," and the word "moral" as we have seen it used by other critics. If we study carefully such expressions as they are used in literary criticism, we shall find that the writers believe that the best literature touches or relates to some phase of life. Now, there are many phases of life, and each has, or may have, its literature. There is the serious phase, and its literature sets forth the profounder emotions. A poem in this class is Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, which expresses a feeling for nature both deep and exalted. Gray's Elegy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's Lear, Bryant's Forest Hymn all express the profounder emotions or depict the tragic side of life.

There is, however, another side of life. We need to be inspired to cheerfulness and gaiety as well as to serious thought. Recreation is as necessary as effort. It is right, then, that there should be a cheerful and gay type of