STYLE AND THE MAN 98 



about her style, and fell to imitating Dr. Johnson; 

 how she lost the "charming vivacity" and "per- 

 fectly natural unconsciousness of manner" of her 

 youthful writings, and became modish and affected. 

 She threw away her own style, which was a " toler- 

 ably good one," and which might " have been im- 

 proved into a very good one," and adopted " a style 

 in which she could attain excellence only by achiev- 

 ing an almost miraculous victory over nature and 

 over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney; 

 it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson." 



It is giving too much thought to style in the more 

 external and verbal aspects of it, which I am here 

 considering, that leads to the confounding of style 

 with diction, and that gives rise to the "stylist." 

 The stylist shows you what can be done with mere 

 Words. He is the foliage plant of the literary flower 

 garden. An English college professor has recently 

 exploited him in a highly wrought essay on Style. 

 Says our professor, " The business of letters is two- 

 fold, to find words for meaning and to find meaning 

 for words." It strikes me that the last half of this 

 proposition is not true of the serious writer, of the 

 man who has something to say, but is true only of 

 what is called the stylist, the man who has been so 

 often described as one having nothing to say, which 

 he says extremely well. The stylist's main effort 

 is a verbal one, to find meaning for words ; he does 

 not wrestle with ideas, but with terms and phrases; 



