168 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 



Yet all judgments in such matters, however divergent they 

 may be, imply the belief that there is a right and wrong in 

 the arts of expression. Criticism aims at ascertaining what 

 constitutes excellence of style apart from changes of fashion, 

 scholastic prejudices, and personal partialities. It seeks to 

 discern and to interpret the goodness or the badness of each 

 particular manifestation, according to the principles by which 

 the artist has been governed, and not by the application of 

 canons irrelevant to his age, race, and aims. 



II 



Style, in literature, may be roughly described as the 

 adequate investiture of thought with language. The best 

 style is that in which no other verbal form could be imagined 

 more appropriate for the utterance of thought than the one 

 which has been given by the writer. ' Proper words in proper 

 places make the true definition of a style,' said Swift. To 

 seize le mot propre is the aim of those French authors who 

 are our masters in literary expression regarded as a fine art. 

 Between the thing thought, and the thing uttered, there ought 

 to be no rift for the insertion of the finest edge of disjunctive 

 analysis. 



But here we are met with a preliminary problem. Is thought 

 separable from language ? Can language be said to have an 

 existence apart from thought, or thought from language ? 



Scientific students, at the present day, will hardly dispute 

 the priority of thought to language. The rudiments of 

 thought exist in animals who have no articulate speech. 

 In certain states of the human consciousness in dreams, for 

 instance, and in those moods of the mind when images are 

 brought suddenly into new and luminous relations mental 

 operations of the highest importance may be carried on with- 

 out the intervention of language. We awake to ourselves 

 and become aware of having reached conclusions, although 

 we cannot recall the syllogistic process, and have, perhaps, 

 some difficulty in finding words for what we know to be the 

 real result of cerebration. 



