STYLE AND THE MAN 95 



dividual scope, — bringing with them, if they be 

 torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments 

 of their recent association." Does not the stylist 

 stand fully confessed here? That he may avoid 

 these " cumbrous fragments " that will stick to words 

 when you suddenly pull them up by the roots, "a 

 sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, 

 if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of 

 his encumbrance." The lust of expression, the con- 

 juring with mere words, is evident. " He is a poor 

 stylist," says our professor, "who cannot beg half a 

 dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the con- 

 clusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the 

 senses into clamorous revolt." 



What it is in one that starts into " clamorous re- 

 volt" at such verbal gymnastics as are shown in 

 the following sentences I shall not try to define, but 

 it seems to me it is something real and legitimate. 

 "A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of 

 archaism in the common turn of speech that you em- 

 ploy, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob 

 that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a 

 select audience of ticket holders with closed doors. 

 A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct 

 physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance 

 authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense, 

 and at a touch you have blown the roof off the draw- 

 ing-room of the villa and have set its obscure inhab- 

 itants wriggling in the unaccustomed sunshine." 



