170 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 



man to acquire the faculty of bringing the subtlest, obscurest, 

 most complicated thoughts to light. What is called command 

 of language is indispensable to a writer ; and this, though 

 it implies natural endowment, may be largely improved by 

 study. 



Attention to thought enables a man possessed with a fair 

 command of language to seize the words required for its 

 expression. Clear thinking is the first requisite of a good 

 style ; for if the thought be vague or feebly grasped, not all 

 the powers of rhetoric will hide its poverty. Better precise 

 and bald lucidity than nebulous magnificence of diction. 

 But when the thought is clear, art may legitimately be exer- 

 cised, not merely for the purpose of attaining veracity of 

 expression, but also for clothing it with beauty, and decking 

 it with ornament. 



m 



This intimate connection of thought with language is the 

 main reason why style differs in the hands of different writers. 

 As a man habitually thinks and feels, so will he express him- 

 self. No one can divest himself of inborn personality ; and 

 personality is bound to qualify diction. The colour-blind 

 cannot describe landscape in the same way as those who are 

 acutely sensitive to tints. The deaf to music move in a 

 region apart from that in which tone-lovers dwell. These are 

 coarse and obvious instances. Vocabulary, and not vocabulary 

 alone, but rhythm, cadence, structure of sentence, composition 

 of paragraph, rhetoric, are all conditioned by the artist's 

 individuality. 



In like manner the languages of nations are formed by 

 hereditary modes of thought and feeling, by ethnological and 

 climatic conditions, by moral habits and religious ideals. 

 These influences, continued through successive generations, 

 mould the mother speech, and give it what we call its genius.- 

 The genius of a language is the genius of the race which made 

 it. This becomes the common property of all the individuals 

 who use it, and communicates a common quality to their 

 style. Vary as men may do among themselves, they exhibit 



