Style is the physiognomy of the mind,
and a safer index to character than the face.
To imitate another man’s style is like wearing
a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in
arousing disgust and abhorrence, because it is lifeless;
so that even the ugliest living face is better.
Hence those who write in Latin and copy the manner
of ancient authors, may be said to speak through a
mask; the reader, it is true, hears what they say,
but he cannot observe their physiognomy too; he cannot
see their style. With the Latin works of
writers who think for themselves, the case is different,
and their style is visible; writers, I mean, who have
not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as
Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza,
and many others. An affectation in style is like
making grimaces. Further, the language in which
a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which
he belongs; and here there are many hard and fast
differences, beginning from the language of the Greeks,
down to that of the Caribbean islanders.
To form a provincial estimate of the
value of a writer’s productions, it is not directly
necessary to know the subject on which he has thought,
or what it is that he has said about it; that would
imply a perusal of all his works. It will be
enough, in the main, to know how he has thought.
This, which means the essential temper or general
quality of his mind, may be precisely determined by
his style. A man’s style shows the formal
nature of all his thoughts the formal nature
which can never change, be the subject or the character
of his thoughts what it may: it is, as it were,
the dough out of which all the contents of his mind
are kneaded. When Eulenspiegel was asked
how long it would take to walk to the next village,
he gave the seemingly incongruous answer: Walk.
He wanted to find out by the man’s pace the
distance he would cover in a given time. In the
same way, when I have read a few pages of an author,
I know fairly well how far he can bring me.
Every mediocre writer tries to mask
his own natural style, because in his heart he knows
the truth of what I am saying. He is thus forced,
at the outset, to give up any attempt at being frank
or naïve a privilege which is thereby reserved
for superior minds, conscious of their own worth,
and therefore sure of themselves. What I mean
is that these everyday writers are absolutely unable
to resolve upon writing just as they think; because
they have a notion that, were they to do so, their
work might possibly look very childish and simple.
For all that, it would not be without its value.
If they would only go honestly to work, and say, quite
simply, the things they have really thought, and just
as they have thought them, these writers would be
readable and, within their own proper sphere, even
instructive.
But instead of that, they try to make
the reader believe that their thoughts have gone much
further and deeper than is really the case. They
say what they have to say in long sentences that wind
about in a forced and unnatural way; they coin new
words and write prolix periods which go round and
round the thought and wrap it up in a sort of disguise.
They tremble between the two separate aims of communicating
what they want to say and of concealing it. Their
object is to dress it up so that it may look learned
or deep, in order to give people the impression that
there is very much more in it than for the moment
meets the eye. They either jot down their thoughts
bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences,
which apparently mean much more than they say, of
this kind of writing Schelling’s treatises on
natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else
they hold forth with a deluge of words and the most
intolerable diffusiveness, as though no end of fuss
were necessary to make the reader understand the deep
meaning of their sentences, whereas it is some quite
simple if not actually trivial idea, examples
of which may be found in plenty in the popular works
of Fichte, and the philosophical manuals of a hundred
other miserable dunces not worth mentioning; or, again,
they try to write in some particular style which they
have been pleased to take up and think very grand,
a style, for example, par excellence profound
and scientific, where the reader is tormented to death
by the narcotic effect of longspun periods without
a single idea in them, such as are furnished
in a special measure by those most impudent of all
mortals, the Hegelians; or it may be that it is
an intellectual style they have striven after, where
it seems as though their object were to go crazy altogether;
and so on in many other cases. All these endeavors
to put off the nascetur ridiculus mus to
avoid showing the funny little creature that is born
after such mighty throes often make it
difficult to know what it is that they really mean.
And then, too, they write down words, nay, even whole
sentences, without attaching any meaning to them themselves,
but in the hope that someone else will get sense out
of them.
And what is at the bottom of all this?
Nothing but the untiring effort to sell words for
thoughts; a mode of merchandise that is always trying
to make fresh openings for itself, and by means of
odd expressions, turns of phrase, and combinations
of every sort, whether new or used in a new sense,
to produce the appearence of intellect in order to
make up for the very painfully felt lack of it.
It is amusing to see how writers with
this object in view will attempt first one mannerism
and then another, as though they were putting on the
mask of intellect! This mask may possibly deceive
the inexperienced for a while, until it is seen to
be a dead thing, with no life in it at all; it is
then laughed at and exchanged for another. Such
an author will at one moment write in a dithyrambic
vein, as though he were tipsy; at another, nay, on
the very next page, he will be pompous, severe, profoundly
learned and prolix, stumbling on in the most cumbrous
way and chopping up everything very small; like the
late Christian Wolf, only in a modern dress.
Longest of all lasts the mask of unintelligibility;
but this is only in Germany, whither it was introduced
by Fichte, perfected by Schelling, and carried to its
highest pitch in Hegel always with the best
results.
And yet nothing is easier than to
write so that no one can understand; just as contrarily,
nothing is more difficult than to express deep things
in such a way that every one must necessarily grasp
them. All the arts and tricks I have been mentioning
are rendered superfluous if the author really has
any brains; for that allows him to show himself as
he is, and confirms to all time Horace’s maxim
that good sense is the source and origin of good style:
Scribendi recte sapere est et principium
et fons.
But those authors I have named are
like certain workers in metal, who try a hundred different
compounds to take the place of gold the
only metal which can never have any substitute.
Rather than do that, there is nothing against which
a writer should be more upon his guard than the manifest
endeavor to exhibit more intellect than he really has;
because this makes the reader suspect that he possesses
very little; since it is always the case that if a
man affects anything, whatever it may be, it is just
there that he is deficient.
That is why it is praise to an author
to say that he is naïve; it means that he need
not shrink from showing himself as he is. Generally
speaking, to be naïve is to be attractive; while
lack of naturalness is everywhere repulsive.
As a matter of fact we find that every really great
writer tries to express his thoughts as purely, clearly,
definitely and shortly as possible. Simplicity
has always been held to be a mark of truth; it is
also a mark of genius. Style receives its beauty
from the thought it expresses; but with sham-thinkers
the thoughts are supposed to be fine because of the
style. Style is nothing but the mere silhouette
of thought; and an obscure or bad style means a dull
or confused brain.
The first rule, then, for a good style
is that the author should have something to say;
nay, this is in itself almost all that is necessary.
Ah, how much it means! The neglect of this rule
is a fundamental trait in the philosophical writing,
and, in fact, in all the reflective literature, of
my country, more especially since Fichte. These
writers all let it be seen that they want to appear
as though they had something to say; whereas they
have nothing to say. Writing of this kind was
brought in by the pseudo-philosophers at the Universities,
and now it is current everywhere, even among the first
literary notabilities of the age. It is the mother
of that strained and vague style, where there seem
to be two or even more meanings in the sentence; also
of that prolix and cumbrous manner of expression,
called lé stile empèse; again, of that mere
waste of words which consists in pouring them out
like a flood; finally, of that trick of concealing
the direst poverty of thought under a farrago
of never-ending chatter, which clacks away like a
windmill and quite stupefies one stuff
which a man may read for hours together without getting
hold of a single clearly expressed and definite idea.
However, people are easy-going, and they have formed
the habit of reading page upon page of all sorts of
such verbiage, without having any particular idea
of what the author really means. They fancy it
is all as it should be, and fail to discover that
he is writing simply for writing’s sake.
On the other hand, a good author,
fertile in ideas, soon wins his reader’s confidence
that, when he writes, he has really and truly something
to say; and this gives the intelligent reader patience
to follow him with attention. Such an author,
just because he really has something to say, will
never fail to express himself in the simplest and
most straightforward manner; because his object is
to awake the very same thought in the reader that
he has in himself, and no other. So he will be
able to affirm with Boileau that his thoughts are
everywhere open to the light of the day, and that his
verse always says something, whether it says it well
or ill:
Ma pensee au grand jour partout s’offre
et s’expose,
Et mon vers, bien où mal, dit toujours
quelque chose:
while of the writers previously described
it may be asserted, in the words of the same poet,
that they talk much and never say anything at all quiparlant
beaucoup ne disent jamais rien.
Another characteristic of such writers
is that they always avoid a positive assertion wherever
they can possibly do so, in order to leave a loophole
for escape in case of need. Hence they never fail
to choose the more abstract way of expressing
themselves; whereas intelligent people use the more
concrete; because the latter brings things more
within the range of actual demonstration, which is
the source of all evidence.
There are many examples proving this
preference for abstract expression; and a particularly
ridiculous one is afforded by the use of the verb
to condition in the sense of to cause
or to produce. People say to condition
something instead of to cause it, because
being abstract and indefinite it says less; it affirms
that A cannot happen without B, instead
of that A is caused by B. A back
door is always left open; and this suits people whose
secret knowledge of their own incapacity inspires
them with a perpetual terror of all positive assertion;
while with other people it is merely the effect of
that tendency by which everything that is stupid in
literature or bad in life is immediately imitated a
fact proved in either case by the rapid way in which
it spreads. The Englishman uses his own judgment
in what he writes as well as in what he does; but
there is no nation of which this eulogy is less true
than of the Germans. The consequence of this
state of things is that the word cause has of
late almost disappeared from the language of literature,
and people talk only of condition. The
fact is worth mentioning because it is so characteristically
ridiculous.
The very fact that these commonplace
authors are never more than half-conscious when they
write, would be enough to account for their dullness
of mind and the tedious things they produce. I
say they are only half-conscious, because they really
do not themselves understand the meaning of the words
they use: they take words ready-made and commit
them to memory. Hence when they write, it is not
so much words as whole phrases that they put together phrases
banales. This is the explanation of that
palpable lack of clearly-expressed thought in what
they say. The fact is that they do not possess
the die to give this stamp to their writing; clear
thought of their own is just what they have not got.
And what do we find in its place? a vague,
enigmatical intermixture of words, current phrases,
hackneyed terms, and fashionable expressions.
The result is that the foggy stuff they write is like
a page printed with very old type.
On the other hand, an intelligent
author really speaks to us when he writes, and that
is why he is able to rouse our interest and commune
with us. It is the intelligent author alone who
puts individual words together with a full consciousness
of their meaning, and chooses them with deliberate
design. Consequently, his discourse stands to
that of the writer described above, much as a picture
that has been really painted, to one that has been
produced by the use of a stencil. In the one
case, every word, every touch of the brush, has a special
purpose; in the other, all is done mechanically.
The same distinction may be observed in music.
For just as Lichtenberg says that Garrick’s soul
seemed to be in every muscle in his body, so it is
the omnipresence of intellect that always and everywhere
characterizes the work of genius.
I have alluded to the tediousness
which marks the works of these writers; and in this
connection it is to be observed, generally, that tediousness
is of two kinds; objective and subjective. A work
is objectively tedious when it contains the defect
in question; that is to say, when its author has no
perfectly clear thought or knowledge to communicate.
For if a man has any clear thought or knowledge in
him, his aim will be to communicate it, and he will
direct his energies to this end; so that the ideas
he furnishes are everywhere clearly expressed.
The result is that he is neither diffuse, nor unmeaning,
nor confused, and consequently not tedious. In
such a case, even though the author is at bottom in
error, the error is at any rate clearly worked out
and well thought over, so that it is at least formally
correct; and thus some value always attaches to the
work. But for the same reason a work that is
objectively tedious is at all times devoid of any
value whatever.
The other kind of tediousness is only
relative: a reader may find a work dull because
he has no interest in the question treated of in it,
and this means that his intellect is restricted.
The best work may, therefore, be tedious subjectively,
tedious, I mean, to this or that particular person;
just as, contrarity, the worst work may be subjectively
engrossing to this or that particular person who has
an interest in the question treated of, or in the
writer of the book.
It would generally serve writers in
good stead if they would see that, whilst a man should,
if possible, think like a great genius, he should
talk the same language as everyone else. Authors
should use common words to say uncommon things.
But they do just the opposite. We find them trying
to wrap up trivial ideas in grand words, and to clothe
their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary
phrases, the most far-fetched, unnatural, and out-of-the-way
expressions. Their sentences perpetually stalk
about on stilts. They take so much pleasure in
bombast, and write in such a high-flown, bloated,
affected, hyperbolical and acrobatic style that their
prototype is Ancient Pistol, whom his friend Falstaff
once impatiently told to say what he had to say like
a man of this world.
There is no expression in any other
language exactly answering to the French stile
empèse; but the thing itself exists all the more
often. When associated with affectation, it is
in literature what assumption of dignity, grand airs
and primeness are in society; and equally intolerable.
Dullness of mind is fond of donning this dress; just
as an ordinary life it is stupid people who like being
demure and formal.
An author who writes in the prim style
resembles a man who dresses himself up in order to
avoid being confounded or put on the same level with
a mob a risk never run by the gentleman,
even in his worst clothes. The plebeian may be
known by a certain showiness of attire and a wish
to have everything spick and span; and in the same
way, the commonplace person is betrayed by his style.
Nevertheless, an author follows a
false aim if he tries to write exactly as he speaks.
There is no style of writing but should have a certain
trace of kinship with the epigraphic or monumental
style, which is, indeed, the ancestor of all styles.
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible
as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for
this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at
the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
An obscure and vague manner of expression
is always and everywhere a very bad sign. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it comes from vagueness
of thought; and this again almost always means that
there is something radically wrong and incongruous
about the thought itself in a word, that
it is incorrect. When a right thought springs
up in the mind, it strives after expression and is
not long in reaching it; for clear thought easily
finds words to fit it. If a man is capable of
thinking anything at all, he is also always able to
express it in clear, intelligible, and unambiguous
terms. Those writers who construct difficult,
obscure, involved, and equivocal sentences, most certainly
do not know aright what it is that they want to say:
they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is
still in the stage of struggle to shape itself as
thought. Often, indeed, their desire is to conceal
from themselves and others that they really have nothing
at all to say. They wish to appear to know what
they do not know, to think what they do not think,
to say what they do not say. If a man has some
real communication to make, which will he choose an
indistinct or a clear way of expressing himself?
Even Quintilian remarks that things which are said
by a highly educated man are often easier to understand
and much clearer; and that the less educated a man
is, the more obscurely he will write plerumque
accidit ut faciliora sint ad intelligendum et lucidiora
multo que a doctissimo quoque dicuntur.... Erit
ergo etiam obscurior quo quisque deterior.
An author should avoid enigmatical
phrases; he should know whether he wants to say a
thing or does not want to say it. It is this indecision
of style that makes so many writers insipid. The
only case that offers an exception to this rule arises
when it is necessary to make a remark that is in some
way improper.
As exaggeration generally produces
an effect the opposite of that aimed at; so words,
it is true, serve to make thought intelligible but
only up to a certain point. If words are heaped
up beyond it, the thought becomes more and more obscure
again. To find where the point lies is the problem
of style, and the business of the critical faculty;
for a word too much always defeats its purpose.
This is what Voltaire means when he says that the
adjective is the enemy of the substantive.
But, as we have seen, many people try to conceal their
poverty of thought under a flood of verbiage.
Accordingly let all redundancy be
avoided, all stringing together of remarks which have
no meaning and are not worth perusal. A writer
must make a sparing use of the reader’s time,
patience and attention; so as to lead him to believe
that his author writes what is worth careful study,
and will reward the time spent upon it. It is
always better to omit something good than to add that
which is not worth saying at all. This is the
right application of Hesiod’s maxim, [Greek:
pleon aemisu pantos] the half is
more than the whole. Le secret pour être ennuyeux,
c’est de tout dire. Therefore, if possible,
the quintessence only! mere leading thoughts! nothing
that the reader would think for himself. To use
many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere
the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather
much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Truth is most beautiful undraped;
and the impression it makes is deep in proportion
as its expression has been simple. This is so,
partly because it then takes unobstructed possession
of the hearer’s whole soul, and leaves him no
by-thought to distract him; partly, also, because
he feels that here he is not being corrupted or cheated
by the arts of rhetoric, but that all the effect of
what is said comes from the thing itself. For
instance, what declamation on the vanity of human
existence could ever be more telling than the words
of Job? Man that is born of a woman hath but a
short time to live and is full of misery. He
cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth
as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
For the same reason Goethe’s
naïve poetry is incomparably greater than Schiller’s
rhetoric. It is this, again, that makes many popular
songs so affecting. As in architecture an excess
of decoration is to be avoided, so in the art of literature
a writer must guard against all rhetorical finery,
all useless amplification, and all superfluity of
expression in general; in a word, he must strive after
chastity of style. Every word that can
be spared is hurtful if it remains. The law of
simplicity and naïveté holds good of all fine art;
for it is quite possible to be at once simple and
sublime.
True brevity of expression consists
in everywhere saying only what is worth saying, and
in avoiding tedious detail about things which everyone
can supply for himself. This involves correct
discrimination between what it necessary and what
is superfluous. A writer should never be brief
at the expense of being clear, to say nothing of being
grammatical. It shows lamentable want of judgment
to weaken the expression of a thought, or to stunt
the meaning of a period for the sake of using a few
words less. But this is the precise endeavor
of that false brevity nowadays so much in vogue, which
proceeds by leaving out useful words and even by sacrificing
grammar and logic. It is not only that such writers
spare a word by making a single verb or adjective
do duty for several different periods, so that the
reader, as it were, has to grope his way through them
in the dark; they also practice, in many other respects,
an unseemingly economy of speech, in the effort to
effect what they foolishly take to be brevity of expression
and conciseness of style. By omitting something
that might have thrown a light over the whole sentence,
they turn it into a conundrum, which the reader tries
to solve by going over it again and again.
It is wealth and weight of thought,
and nothing else, that gives brevity to style, and
makes it concise and pregnant. If a writer’s
ideas are important, luminous, and generally worth
communicating, they will necessarily furnish matter
and substance enough to fill out the periods which
give them expression, and make these in all their parts
both grammatically and verbally complete; and so much
will this be the case that no one will ever find them
hollow, empty or feeble. The diction will everywhere
be brief and pregnant, and allow the thought to find
intelligible and easy expression, and even unfold and
move about with grace.
Therefore instead of contracting his
words and forms of speech, let a writer enlarge his
thoughts. If a man has been thinned by illness
and finds his clothes too big, it is not by cutting
them down, but by recovering his usual bodily condition,
that he ought to make them fit him again.
Let me here mention an error of style,
very prevalent nowadays, and, in the degraded state
of literature and the neglect of ancient languages,
always on the increase; I mean subjectivity.
A writer commits this error when he thinks it enough
if he himself knows what he means and wants to say,
and takes no thought for the reader, who is left to
get at the bottom of it as best he can. This is
as though the author were holding a monologue; whereas,
it ought to be a dialogue; and a dialogue, too, in
which he must express himself all the more clearly
inasmuch as he cannot hear the questions of his interlocutor.
Style should for this very reason
never be subjective, but objective; and it
will not be objective unless the words are so set
down that they directly force the reader to think precisely
the same thing as the author thought when he wrote
them. Nor will this result be obtained unless
the author has always been careful to remember that
thought so far follows the law of gravity that it travels
from head to paper much more easily than from paper
to head; so that he must assist the latter passage
by every means in his power. If he does this,
a writer’s words will have a purely objective
effect, like that of a finished picture in oils; whilst
the subjective style is not much more certain in its
working than spots on the wall, which look like figures
only to one whose phantasy has been accidentally aroused
by them; other people see nothing but spots and blurs.
The difference in question applies to literary method
as a whole; but it is often established also in particular
instances. For example, in a recently published
work I found the following sentence: I have
not written in order to increase the number of existing
books. This means just the opposite of what the
writer wanted to say, and is nonsense as well.
He who writes carelessly confesses
thereby at the very outset that he does not attach
much importance to his own thoughts. For it is
only where a man is convinced of the truth and importance
of his thoughts, that he feels the enthusiasm necessary
for an untiring and assiduous effort to find the clearest,
finest, and strongest expression for them, just
as for sacred relics or priceless works of art there
are provided silvern or golden receptacles. It
was this feeling that led ancient authors, whose thoughts,
expressed in their own words, have lived thousands
of years, and therefore bear the honored title of
classics, always to write with care. Plato,
indeed, is said to have written the introduction to
his Republic seven times over in different
ways.
As neglect of dress betrays want of
respect for the company a man meets, so a hasty, careless,
bad style shows an outrageous lack of regard for the
reader, who then rightly punishes it by refusing to
read the book. It is especially amusing to see
reviewers criticising the works of others in their
own most careless style the style of a
hireling. It is as though a judge were to come
into court in dressing-gown and slippers! If
I see a man badly and dirtily dressed, I feel some
hesitation, at first, in entering into conversation
with him: and when, on taking up a book, I am
struck at once by the negligence of its style, I put
it away.
Good writing should be governed by
the rule that a man can think only one thing clearly
at a time; and, therefore, that he should not be expected
to think two or even more things in one and the same
moment. But this is what is done when a writer
breaks up his principal sentence into little pieces,
for the purpose of pushing into the gaps thus made
two or three other thoughts by way of parenthesis;
thereby unnecessarily and wantonly confusing the reader.
And here it is again my own countrymen who are chiefly
in fault. That German lends itself to this way
of writing, makes the thing possible, but does not
justify it. No prose reads more easily or pleasantly
than French, because, as a rule, it is free from the
error in question. The Frenchman strings his
thoughts together, as far as he can, in the most logical
and natural order, and so lays them before his reader
one after the other for convenient deliberation, so
that every one of them may receive undivided attention.
The German, on the other hand, weaves them together
into a sentence which he twists and crosses, and crosses
and twists again; because he wants to say six things
all at once, instead of advancing them one by one.
His aim should be to attract and hold the reader’s
attention; but, above and beyond neglect of this aim,
he demands from the reader that he shall set the above
mentioned rule at defiance, and think three or four
different thoughts at one and the same time; or since
that is impossible, that his thoughts shall succeed
each other as quickly as the vibrations of a cord.
In this way an author lays the foundation of his stile
empèse, which is then carried to perfection by
the use of high-flown, pompous expressions to communicate
the simplest things, and other artifices of the same
kind.
In those long sentences rich in involved
parenthesis, like a box of boxes one within another,
and padded out like roast geese stuffed with apples,
it is really the memory that is chiefly taxed;
while it is the understanding and the judgment which
should be called into play, instead of having their
activity thereby actually hindered and weakened.
This kind of sentence furnishes the reader with mere
half-phrases, which he is then called upon to collect
carefully and store up in his memory, as though they
were the pieces of a torn letter, afterwards to be
completed and made sense of by the other halves to
which they respectively belong. He is expected
to go on reading for a little without exercising any
thought, nay, exerting only his memory, in the hope
that, when he comes to the end of the sentence, he
may see its meaning and so receive something to think
about; and he is thus given a great deal to learn by
heart before obtaining anything to understand.
This is manifestly wrong and an abuse of the reader’s
patience.
The ordinary writer has an unmistakable
preference for this style, because it causes the reader
to spend time and trouble in understanding that which
he would have understood in a moment without it; and
this makes it look as though the writer had more depth
and intelligence than the reader. This is, indeed,
one of those artifices referred to above, by means
of which mediocre authors unconsciously, and as it
were by instinct, strive to conceal their poverty of
thought and give an appearance of the opposite.
Their ingenuity in this respect is really astounding.
It is manifestly against all sound
reason to put one thought obliquely on top of another,
as though both together formed a wooden cross.
But this is what is done where a writer interrupts
what he has begun to say, for the purpose of inserting
some quite alien matter; thus depositing with the
reader a meaningless half-sentence, and bidding him
keep it until the completion comes. It is much
as though a man were to treat his guests by handing
them an empty plate, in the hope of something appearing
upon it. And commas used for a similar purpose
belong to the same family as notes at the foot of the
page and parenthesis in the middle of the text; nay,
all three differ only in degree. If Demosthenes
and Cicero occasionally inserted words by ways of
parenthesis, they would have done better to have refrained.
But this style of writing becomes
the height of absurdity when the parenthesis are not
even fitted into the frame of the sentence, but wedged
in so as directly to shatter it. If, for instance,
it is an impertinent thing to interrupt another person
when he is speaking, it is no less impertinent to
interrupt oneself. But all bad, careless, and
hasty authors, who scribble with the bread actually
before their eyes, use this style of writing six times
on a page, and rejoice in it. It consists in it
is advisable to give rule and example together, wherever
it is possible breaking up one phrase in
order to glue in another. Nor is it merely out
of laziness that they write thus. They do it
out of stupidity; they think there is a charming légèreté
about it; that it gives life to what they say.
No doubt there are a few rare cases where such a form
of sentence may be pardonable.
Few write in the way in which an architect
builds; who, before he sets to work, sketches out
his plan, and thinks it over down to its smallest
details. Nay, most people write only as though
they were playing dominoes; and, as in this game,
the pieces are arranged half by design, half by chance,
so it is with the sequence and connection of their
sentences. They only have an idea of what the
general shape of their work will be, and of the aim
they set before themselves. Many are ignorant
even of this, and write as the coral-insects build;
period joins to period, and the Lord only knows what
the author means.
Life now-a-days goes at a gallop;
and the way in which this affects literature is to
make it extremely superficial and slovenly.