PERSONAL STYLE 219 



II 



Certain broad distinctions of moral and emotional tempera- 

 ment may undoubtedly be detected in literary style. A 

 tendency toward exaggeration, toward self-revelation, toward 

 emphasis upon the one side; a tendency to reserve, to 

 diminished tone in colouring, to parsimony of rhetorical 

 resource upon the other : these indicate expansiveness or 

 reticence in the writer. Victor Hugo differs by the breadth 

 of the whole heavens from Leopardi. One man is ironical 

 by nature, another sentimental. Sterne and Heine have a 

 common gift of humour ; but the quality of humour in each 

 case is conditioned by sympathetic or by caustic under- 

 currents of emotion. Sincerity and affectation, gaiety and 

 melancholy, piety and scepticism, austerity and sensuality 

 penetrate style so subtly and unmistakably that a candid 

 person cannot pose as the mere slave of convention, a boon 

 companion cannot pass muster for an anchorite, the founder 

 of a religious sect cannot play the part of an agnostic. In 

 dramatic work the artist creates characters alien from his own 

 personality, and exhibits people widely different from himself 

 acting and talking as they ought to do. This he achieves by 

 sympathy and intuition. Yet all except the very greatest fail 

 to render adequately what they have not felt and been. In 

 playwrights of the second order, like our Fletcher, or of the 

 third order, like our Byron, the indiviflual who writes the 

 tragedy and shapes the characters is always apparent under 

 every mask he chooses to assume. And even the style of the 

 greatest, their manner of presenting the varieties of human 

 nature, betrays individual peculiarities. ^Eschylus sees men 

 and women differently from Sophocles, Corneille from Eacine, 

 Shakespeare from Goethe. 



In like manner the broad distinctions of mental tempera- 

 ment may be traced in style. The abstract thinker differs from 

 the concrete thinker in his choice of terms ; the analytical 

 from the synthetic ; the ratiocinative from the intuitive ; the 

 logical from the imaginative ; the scientific from the poetical. 

 One man thinks in images, another in formal propositions. 



