STYLE AND THE MAN 83 



inmost texture of the substance. Choice words, 

 faultless rhetoric, polished periods, are only the acci- 

 dents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one 

 thing ; style, as the great writers have it, is quite 

 another. It may, and often does, go with faulty 

 workmanship. It is the use of words in a fresh and 

 vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new 

 spiritual force and personality. In the best work the 

 style is found and hidden in the matter. 



If a writer does not bring a new thought, he must 

 at least bring a new quality, he must give a fresh, 

 new flavor to the old thoughts. Style or quality will 

 keep a man's work alive whose thought is essentially 

 commonplace, as is the case with Addison ; and Ar- 

 nold justly observes of the poet Gray that his gift 

 of style doubles his force and " raises him to a rank 

 beyond what his natural richness and power seem to 

 warrant." 



There is the correct, conventional, respectable and 

 scholarly use of language of the mass of writers, and 

 there is the fresh, stimulating, quickening use of 

 it of the man of genius. How apt and racy and tell- 

 ing is often the language of unlettered persons; the 

 born writer carries this same gift into a higher 

 sphere. There is a passage in one of Emerson's 

 early letters, written when he was but twenty-four, 

 and given by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, which shows 

 how clearly at that age Emerson discerned the secret 

 of good writing and good preaching. 



