234 NOTES ON STYLE 



fiction, since it appeals to the sense of veracity, and does 

 not seek to create illusion ; from history, since it discards 

 details which will not throw the central figure into high 

 relief. 



Within the sphere of dramatic poetry, it is clear that tragedy, 

 comedy, melodrama, farce, owing to their different tone and 

 subject-matter, require different arts of rhetoric. You cannot 

 write an idyll in the same manner as a satire, or pronounce 

 the panegyric of a deceased emperor in the style appropriate 

 to a discourse on bees. The choice of vehicle in each of these 

 cases may be the same. Prose may be used for every species 

 of the drama. Idylls, satires, panegyrics, didactic poems, 

 may be composed in the same metre hexameters, or heroic 

 couplets, or blank verse. Yet the matter to be handled 

 and the mental attitude of the writer while handling it, 

 necessitate unmistakable differences of literary mood and 

 form. 



These are truisms with which every student is familiar. 

 The excuse for repeating them is twofold. In the first place 

 we have to insist upon the indissoluble nexus between thought 

 and language, whereby a change in the writer's mental atti- 

 tude, a change in his mental material, induces a correspond- 

 ing quality of differentiated style. In the second place they 

 enable us to point out a further sense in which style may 

 be regarded as an art to be acquired by practice through the 

 study of acknowledged masterpieces in each of the branches 

 of literature. 



A man's own style will to a large extent be made or marred 

 by the masters under whose influence he falls, or by the 

 impress of a prevalent ideal. If this were not so, we should 

 be unable to trace the tradition of Virgilian style in Latin 

 literature, or to define the predominance of Boccaccio in the 

 literature of the Italian Renaissance. We could not discuss 

 the characteristics of a given epoch or the manner of a well- 

 marked school : by which terms we are wont to indicate the 

 co-operative action of gregarious writers and their liability to 

 imitation. A deeper meaning might be given to these aspects 

 of transmitted style. But this is not the place to entertain 



