LE STYLE C'EST L'HOMME.

A CAUSERIE.

I HOPE it may be understood from this selection of a French title for an English essay that the essayist makes no pretension to be regarded as an authority upon style, since he thus acknowledges that on that subject his own language fails him at the outset. Words are as easily exchanged as coins; but, like coins, they bear a national stamp, and generally lose some fraction of their value in the course of the exchange. Twenty pieces of silver may be equivalent to one piece of gold, but they are not the same thing; and, rather than dissipate the individuality of an original saying by divesting it of its original form, I am content to leave untranslated the definition of style which I have borrowed from Buffon only as a text for some desultory observations on the truth it asserts and illustrates-that style is untranslatable.

Free Thought is regarded as a precious boon, even by those who are incapable of thinking. But the freest thinker cannot emancipate Thought from the restrictions of Language; and, in the pursuit of its fallacious freedom, Thought stumbles at every turn, like a blind man, against barriers unperceived by it till they have hindered its way or forcibly altered its direction. What then becomes of its freedom? As soon as it has felt these barriers its self-confidence deserts it, and it moves between them with awkward gait and hesitating step. The soaring spirit of Faust aspired to be a ruler of spirits; yet his mind faltered and fell into confusion at the first sentence, when he tried to translate the Fourth Gospel into his own language. The ideal world, no doubt, is unconfined by geographical boundaries, and to Thought no sentinel cries "Who goes there?" but ideas cannot go about naked. When long settled in a foreign country they sometimes adopt its fashions of speech, but on the whole they are tenacious of their national costume, which is certainly the one that best becomes them. Generally, therefore, they carry with them, wherever they go, the whole of their apparel; for ideas are privileged travellers whose equipage pays no toll at any custom-house, and in their service many a contraband word has safely crossed the most vigilantly guarded frontiers. Thus, the dissolute German Lansquenet has for centuries been a naturalised Frenchman, and the French Caporal a trusty German soldier. Even when the two nations quarrelled with each other, their hostile camps gave reciprocal hospitality to emigrants of this sort. Throughout the last Franco-German war, Teutonic havresacs were carried upon Gallic backs; the French Veguemestre occasionally shot his German cousin,

the Wachmeister; the French word marche set German regiments in movement, and the German word halte was obeyed by French troops who received it as a command from the lips of their own officers.

Επεα πτερόεντα! What wonder that words have been called winged? For they flit from land to land, and build their nests now here, now there, yet everywhere make themselves at home in spite of their foreign feathers. The swallow is not an English bird; there is no English bird that resembles him; and yet not one of our English birds is more at home in England. We do not treat him as an alien, not even as a distinguished guest, but as a countryman of our own who happens to be fond of travel. In the same way we treat, without reference to its national origin, any foreign word that has long frequented our language. But with the individual origin of universal sayings the case is rather different, because it is mainly to their individual character that such sayings owe their universal currency. What we relish in them is not so much their veracity, which is general, as their expression of a certain personal quality which is particular; a quality which renders their veracity more startling, or more persuasive, than it would otherwise be, and without which many of these sayings would probably be platitudes. The world, therefore, is interested in the authenticity of any saying that embodies a common truth in an uncommon form; for truth itself stands in need of attestation. We only receive a truth without mistrust when it is offered us by some one whose character already commands our confidence; and were a multitude of rogues to assure us that it is more blessed to give than to receive, we should not believe it on their testimony. Such a saying as l'état c'est moi derives its chief significance from our knowledge that it is the saying of Louis Quatorze, who, when he said it, was exceptionally well qualified to know what he was saying. And so was Buffon when he said le style c'est l'homme; a saying invested with a special personal authority by the personal dignity which specially characterises the style of its author. Its original form, therefore, should not be lost sight of, although it is not precisely in that form that it has become proverbial.

Buffon was not only a great naturalist, he was also a great writer; and this celebrated sentence belongs to the address which, in both capacities, he delivered to the French Academy on the occasion of its reception of him. He was speaking about books, and his argument was that those which are well written are the only ones it is worth while to preserve in the interest of posterity. For there is a common care of common property, and all communicable knowledge becomes common property as soon as it has been communicated; so that, if the matter of a book be useful to the world, its preservation is ensured by the world's use of it, even though the book itself may perish; but there can be no such common property in the manner of a book, which belongs only to its author. "Facts

Buloz

and inventions," said Buffon, " can be appropriated and utilised by others, but style is the man himself, Le style c'est l'homme même.”

Regarded as a definition, the saying is not quite accurate. What definition is ? "All transitory things are similes," sings the Chorus Mysticus in Faust, and "all phenomena," saith Philosophy, "are forms." To us transitory beings, who live in a world of phenomena, absolute truth is so inaccessible that even absolute authority must make shift to do without it. But this is at least one of those happy sayings which, instead of rudely flinging in our faces the little particle of truth that gives them impetus, touch us therewith caressingly at a nicely calculated tangent; as one billiard ball adroitly struck by a skilful player touches another so as to make the second ball unresistingly co-operate with the player's intention as it follows the inclination imparted to it by the first.

What a man's physiognomy is to the man, an author's style is to the author. It is that part of him which regulates his intercourse with others, and whereby he is best known to those he addresses. But the whole man it can hardly be. For in his style, and by means of his style, an author decently conceals what it does not suit him to display. We do not say, "The dress-coat is the man," although we know that the cut of the coat is determined by the figure of its wearer, and from his way of wearing it we draw conclusions. Such conclusions, moreover, are particularly just when they apply to an intellectual individuality whose literary clothing is a gift of nature which may perhaps be improved, but cannot be produced, by art.

There is, however, an important distinction to be observed between the style of a writer, which is always individual, and the manner of writing, which is sometimes common to a school, a system, or a literary association. Literature nowadays produces many groups of good writers who co-operate, in a common circle of ideas, round a common literary centre; as in the case of reviews or journals devoted to the propagation of particular opinions or the promotion of particular intellectual tendencies. Such periodicals have a curious collective individuality of their own, which imparts to the productions of their several writers a certain manner more or less common to the whole group. These writers do not lose their own individuality, which we often detect without difficulty under the anonymous veil that impartially covers them all; but they acquire, in addition to it, the manner of the school that unites them, and write as members of the same family talk-not all exactly alike, but all with a more or less noticeable family likeness. Bertin the elder (of the Journal des Debats) and Beloz (of the Revue des Deux Mondes) were remarkable instances of men who have in their way exercised a powerful influence upon literature and opinion without being writers themselves; for though neither of them, I believe, ever contributed a line to his own organ, each of them not only grouped around him some of the ablest

writers in France, but also guided the pens of those writers with an undisputed and unerring dictatorship. In literary organisations of this kind we generally find a certain uniform measure of expression, which a clever editor adjusts with great nicety from careful study, or instinctive knowledge, of the particular public whose wants and humours keep his oracle in request.

"Never say die," croaked Grip, the raven of Barnaby Rudge, in the churchyard; as if he thought it indelicate to speak of dying in presence of the dead. And from the same point of view, I suppose, "Il ne faut jamais dire haissable," said M. Beloz to a friend of mine, who had used that objectionably sincere expression in his first contribution to the Revue des Deux Mondes. The great editor was right. "Hateful" is a word which cannot be too carefully avoided by those who venture to address the public; for every public is a despot, and every despotism is hateful. One should not speak of hemp in the hangman's presence. "On ne peut guère parler aux tyrans qu'en paraboles," says Voltaire, and he characteristically adds, "encore ce détour est-il dangéreux." Truth, like dynamite and other explosive and destructive forces, is not to be employed without special precautions. An old French poet has sung

"Verité est la massue

Qui tout le monde occit et tue."

And this is a truth about truth which, being a fabulist, I think I may safely employ in the form of a fable. Fable is generally the safest form of truth, and, as an additional "special precaution," my fable shall be in verse.

EST MODUS IN REBUS.

Once, in a state of old renown
Where freedom had been overthrown,
An honest patriotic youth,
Who worship'd liberty and truth,
Indignant at the upstart power
Of the dictator of the hour,
Stood forth upon the public place
To beard the tyrant to his face.

But "Hold!" exclaim'd in wise alarm

A friend who seized his lifted arm,

"What is thy weapon?" "Truth," he said.

The friend that stopp'd him shook his head;
"Rash boy, beware of Truth, whose course,
Like that of an unmaster'd horse,

Distresses every soul it meets

Along the panic-stricken streets.

Unloose her, and each frighten'd slave

(Who dreads her worse than yonder knave)

Will need no nod from his dictator

To fall on her emancipator."

"What," cried the brave young citizen,
"And would'st thou leave unpunish'd then
The enslaver of our country ?" "Nay,"

To make a tyrant wince I know,
And thou shalt witness every blow
I deal him. Leave the wretch to me."
Then from a neighbouring temple he
A golden censer fetch'd, and smiled
As in its glowing cup he piled
The costly powder'd perfumes, whence
Rich streams of rolling frankincense
Around its fragrant furnace swarm'd.
With this insidious weapon arm'd,
He stole among the shouting crowd
Of sycophants who throng'd and bow'd
About the throne; where, like a god
Engirt with golden clouds, whose nod
Thrills waiting worlds, the despot stoop'd
Above the slaves that round him troop'd,
Smiling approval of their praise

That traitor, with admiring gaze
Fix't on his destin'd victim, clung
Close to the royal chair, and swung
His censer with a sly address
That simulated awkwardness.
For, at each swing, the spice-pot hit
(So furiously he flourish'd it)
The august incumbent of the throne
Its incense circled. Bone by bone
The poor usurper's shrinking frame
Was bruised, as fast that censer came
In contact with its suffering shin;
Here grazed an arm, and there a skin,
Now struck the tibia, now the knee;
Wherever mortal clay may be
Most sensitive to pain, in short,
That clumsy pot, as if in sport,

Hit hard and hot. And all the while
The acolyte, with crafty smile
And flattering voice, in turn bestows
Praises on praises, blows on blows.

The object of these strange caresses,
Tho' wincing from their warmth, represses
As best he can, the ignoble pain

Which, if reveal'd, might shame the strain
Of adulation loud and long

They still elicit from the throng;

Nay, even the hatred whose mask'd batteries

Deal injuries disguised as flatteries

The pride it bids its victim feel
Attributes to excess of zeal.

The sufferer, with convulsed grimace,

On his tormentor's smiling face

Contrives to smile, tho' wincing sore:

And when the ceremony's o'er

The day's account well balanced stands,
One rubs his shins and one his hands.

After all, we are not bound to give any reason (which is fortunate,