always trying for-to make the thing ring true, to cast out or make whole the dead places and to harmonize all the variations. For a certain poet's intention, such a line as

"The weirdly wistful wailing of the melancholy flute"

suits perfectly. Supposing it had first been written, "the sad and wistful wailing," is not the tone of "wistful wailing” marked enough to have immediately suggested "weirdly" as the word to complete the sensuous meaning? "Veni, vidi, vici!" "I came, I saw, I conquered!" How much less of the original meaning would be preserved if we said, "I arrived, I saw, I was victorious!" and how little or nothing in, "I got there, I looked around, and I came out ahead." If you have written the last, which is all in the same (ragged) tone, there is no chance for improvement except by erasing the whole thing and beginning over. But if you have written the second, you will be guided by the tone of "I saw, I was victorious," to give it more uniformity by saying, "I saw, I conquered"; and you will hardly fail to realize that "I came " chimes in better than, "I arrived," in bluntness and brevity, for the whole effect.1

You improve upon yourself. You imitate your own better moments, and thus you enlarge your glimpses of your true meaning. You work up on either side of what strikes you as your true level of well-toned clearness, till all is in a graded relationship with that level. To know how to work skilfully and rapidly in this kind of revision is the final thing in learning to write. It requires taste; it requires ability to listen to your own style critically; and it

1 A good exercise toward an understanding of tone is to paraphrase a page of one of Stevenson's Essays in this volume, retaining in the paraphrase every now and then a sentence from the original. The tone of the original may be then, perhaps, more sharply discovered.

requires power to make every now and then a phrase or a paragraph worthy of being looked up to. If it were not for this last and fundamental necessity of thorough and original thought, the whole might be described as the way in which we may all become great writers. It is the method, so far as there is one, that all great writers have used; and that it is the natural method must be obvious from your own experience.

It is already your method. But perhaps you have not made the most of it. Perhaps you revise here and there, in much the same way that one usually begins to work at a picture-puzzle after the pieces are dumped on the table, putting together scatteringly any two pieces that fit. There is, however, little similarity between the mechanical fitness in a picture-puzzle and the idea of general suitability that one keeps in mind while revising a composition. Don't use picture-puzzle methods; there are no better and worse pieces in a picture-puzzle. But perhaps you do not clearly distinguish, in writing, your better tones and phrases from the mediocre. It is a very poor critic who cannot show them to you. Yet, better than any critic or teacher, who can, after all, be little more than a wide-awake audience for you, greeting with alternate applause and hisses your efforts, is some long, enthusiastic reading in an author who has a strong smack of language about him, like Carlyle, or Kipling, or Joseph Conrad, or Browning. You must discover your own book, just as you have ultimately to discover yourself; and "your own book," if it happens to be a true and great one, will be a sort of mirror to you and will hasten your understanding of many things. You will begin to hear your own words more distinctly and to recognize what is typical of your best moments of thought. For reading accustoms you to minds definitely engaged in these processes,

and in the intimacy of "your own book" you will at last understand them critically and thoroughly.

This is not the old doctrine of imitating the other man, nor yet the fallacy of trying to be original all by yourself. It is the doctrine of understanding the other man, and then of imitating, not him, but yourself. It is the doctrine of inheriting the past, not of dying with it. It is a description, I believe, of the way in which every great artist has individually learned his art. Sooner or later he has thought and expressed something thoroughly, finely, compactly; and listening to the tone of it, how well it suits its meaning, he has caught the trick of style from himself. So, it is not a trick, after all; it is simply himself at last coming out.

This is a fundamental idea; it is in every part of life. You learn to swim three strokes, and you are at once guessing about your possibilities for a mile. The picture in your father's house which you have looked at for years makes you suddenly aware of its real beauty-it is also something in yourself that you are conscious of. For the first time you play an old piece in the exercise book with an expression that is your own, and you are at the entrance of the whole realm of music. What is it you have heard in that piece-somebody else's notes? Return to your favorite book, a book like Middlemarch, after three years. It is all new, you say. What is new? Your own experiences and your latest thoughts, reflected in that mirror. Art is ever fresh, so long as you do not grow stale. It takes the measure of your increasing maturity and of your hopes. It cleanses your nature by showing you what you must outgrow, by developing the beautiful and enjoyable part of you, and by flashing before you vividly those things that you do not yet understand but may not remain indifferent to.

Once having recognized the truth of this, a general truth which applies to much in one's character besides the power to write, the man of character finds that it sets before him the sternest of ideals-the necessity of striving to enlarge and, at the same time, encompass his true possibilities, of not settling back into his adequate mediocrities. For the discovery of power, while it is an inspiration, does not insure success. Mediocrity is strong in all of us. It usually conquers. And because it often buries us so comfortably, we come to regard it as success instead of the other thing which is rarely comfortable at all-which is only romantic and moral, an unending effort.

It is in this light that the far-reaching comment with which we began, in the saying that the problem of improving a man's writing is usually the problem of improving his character, places the whole matter on a high plane. Most men have, at one time or another, glimpses of their possible powers; they see the truth they long to believe in, they hear the words they fain would utter. But only one man in a thousand has the patience, persistence, the energy for thoroughness, and the romantic egoism that enable him to enlarge that finest area in his nature, and to protect it inch by inch against the encroachments of his mediocrity and his self-satisfaction. Self-satisfaction is the story of most of us; self-realization only of the few. Nowhere is this more commonly to be seen than in writing. Yet we have all been given our little bit of magic, the open sesame both to our own minds and to the secrets of art.

II

THE QUESTION OF STYLE 1

ARNOLD BENNETT

In discussing the value of particular books, I have heard people say—people who were timid about expressing their views of literature in the presence of literary men: "It may be bad from a literary point of view, but there are very good things in it." Or: "I dare say the style is very bad, but really the book is very interesting and suggestive." Or: "I'm not an expert, and so I never bother my head about good style. All I ask for is good matter. And when I have got it, critics may say what they like about the book." And many other similar remarks, all showing that in the minds of the speakers there existed a notion that style is something supplementary to, and distinguishable from, matter; a sort of notion that a writer who wanted to be classical had first to find and arrange his matter, and then dress it up elegantly in a costume of style, in order to please beings called literary critics.

This is a misapprehension. Style cannot be distinguished from matter. When a writer conceives an idea he conceives it in a form of words. That form of words constitutes his style, and it is absolutely governed by the idea. The idea can only exist in words, and it can only exist in one form of words. You cannot say exactly the same thing in two dif

1 Chapter VI of Literary Taste, How to Form It. Reprinted through the courtesy of Arnold Bennett and of George H. Doran Company.