THE THEORY OF STYLE 77 



Now, as a matter of fact, the great literary artists have possessed 

 such a knowledge of the minds of their readers, such a skill in applying 

 it to common human nature, as to at least ensure the popularity and in 

 some cases the immortality of their works. The poet who feels that 

 his verse will stand " to times in hope " speaks with a certainty that 

 few formal doctrines can claim. Poets know by natural tact and 

 through experiment the esthetic probability of achieving desired emo- 

 tional effects by certain literary means. It is true that there are limita- 

 tions to their success. Eacine, Lamartine, La Fontaine, can never ap- 

 peal to the English mind as to the French. Many well-equipped Ger- 

 mans will continue to find their translations of Shakespeare — for us 

 grotesque — better — for them — than the original. The ultra-democrat 

 and the moujik philosopher may be blind to the charm of Elizabethan 

 art. Nevertheless, the greatest literary artists made their appeal not to 

 the adventitious, but to the permanent in human nature, and a psycho- 

 logical study of their masterpieces should enable us to make explicit 

 and doctrinal what with them was implicit and more or less intuitive. 



Criticism itself has developed from a consideration of oratory. It 

 was an attempt on the part of the rhetoricians to analyze the work of 

 the orator with the intention of profiting by his successes and of taking 

 warning from his failures. Some general theory of style is presup- 

 posed. The profundity to which this study was carried led to the clear 

 recognition among the Greeks and Romans of the psychological signifi- 

 cance involved in oratory and rhetoric. The orator is a philosopher 

 with something added. The rhetorician must know the true and the 

 false, he must understand the human mind even if his sole purpose be 

 to deceive. The artist who ventures to play upon us must have a just 

 appreciation of our tendencies and susceptibilities. 



That recent rhetoricians take a less serious view of their vocation 

 can be shown by a reference to their pages. One proclaims, for 

 example, that " every piece of style may be said to impress readers in 

 three ways — intellectually, emotionally, esthetically." This dictum 

 forms the basis of a theory of style that cost its author ten years of 

 study. A little further study along philosophical lines might have con- 

 vinced him that a distinction between the emotional and the esthetic 

 is not so radical as his classification implies. In fact, a glance at recent 

 rhetorics might indicate that as far as the rhetoricians are concerned 

 the same condition prevails now as Spencer complained of over half a 

 century ago : No general theory of expression seems yet to have been 

 enunciated. It was the desire to discover the psychological basis of the 

 heterogeneous rules of the rhetoricians that led him to formulate his 

 theory of the economy of mental energies and sensibilities. The little 

 essay that sets forth his theory, refused by one magazine and dubbed by 

 the editor of a second with the grandiose title Philosophy of Style, 



