For the doctrine, see Selection III.

215. "In art spontaneity is impossible until the technical method has been so perfectly mastered that the creative impulse is unhampered by inability to express itself." ARLO BATES: Talks on Writing English, page 211.

"Even the gift,' as it is called, is worth nothing, or very little and never for long, unless work, patience, time be added. No apprenticeship is longer than that of the art of writing, nor more laborious; and how many of us slave thirty or forty years only to die without having mastered it? Not only so, but the 'trade of letters ' is one of those rare trades, perhaps indeed the only trade, in which, as in the way of perfection, if you cease to advance, you do not stop, you fall back.” BRUNETIÈRE: Littérature (Littérature Contemporaine, page 339).

Newman on acquiring a Latin style, The Idea of a University, pages 366–371 (Elementary Studies).

216-217. On originality, Brunetière, Littérature Contemporaine (Apologie pour la Rhetorique), page 296, "Originality consists, not in being like no one else, but in charging one's writing with one's personal experience of the world and of life." Newman, Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics, § 6, "Originality may perhaps be defined as the power of abstracting for oneself, and is in thought what strength of mind is in action." Fromentin, Une Année dans le Sahel, page 33, "En fait d'art il n'y a pas de redites à craindre;" and again, at page 218, he says it is no part of art to be new, to present new facts. Compare John La Farge, Considerations on Painting, page 209; Hazlitt's essay on Originality (Criticisms of Art, Vol. ii, page 86). Poe's Philosophy of

Composition. Poe's doctrine of acquiring originality applies to the following sections.

On the relation of the artist to the language, see Pater, Style (Appreciations, pages 9-14. Compare 1617, 27, 31, on precision).

On the study of style by imitation, Stevenson, A College Magazine (Memories and Portraits), A. Albalat, La Formation du Style par l'Assimilation des Auteurs. Compare De Quincey's study of Browne, Ruskin's of the Bible, Lamb's and Lowell's of the elder dramatists. M. Albalat urges the especial value of those good authors whose processes can somewhat readily be analyzed. Indeed, the greatest writers are not for every part of technique the best masters. And conversely some minor authors, De Quincey for instance, are good masters precisely because their technique is obvious.

Il y a des auteurs qui sont assimilables et d'autres qui ne le sont pas. . . . Mais au point de vue du métier, pour l'assimilation technique et le profit urgent, il faut surtout lire les auteurs qui nous laissent voir leur procédés; chez lesquels on puisse discerner les moyens de travail, les artifices de structure, les détails de style. — A. ALBALAT : l'Art d'Écrire, pp. 22, 24.

See Edward Everett Hale, Jr., A Constructive Rhetoric, pages 211-232, on developing vocabulary.

218. See Brewster's notes on Stevenson's phrase, Studies in Structure and Style, pages 254-5.

The trite phrase empty space receives specific force in Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol by so slight a variation as the addition of the article:

He does not die a death of shame

On a day of dark disgrace,

Nor have a noose about his neck,

Nor a cloth upon his face,

Nor drop feet foremost through the floor

Into an empty space.

219. The good Latin proverb is nulla dies sine linea. See Barrett Wendell, English Composition, pages 268-9; and the quotation from Brunetière at § 215 of this Appendix.

220. Compare Herbert Spencer on the ideal style (Philosophy of Style, last two paragraphs) with T. H. Wright's objections to this idea (Style, Macmillan's Magazine, xxxvii, 78). The two essays are reprinted together, with many suggestive notes, by F. N. Scott. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon.)

For the full implication of accuracy, see Pater's essay on Style, and Maupassant's reminiscences, in the preface to Pierre et Jean, of the doctrine of Flaubert.

The best helps toward precision, alongside of constant reference to a large standard dictionary, are the classified lists of synonyms, such as Smith's Synonyms Discriminated, Soule's Synonyms, and Roget's Thesaurus of English Words.

222. For the distinction between denotation and connotation, see Barrett Wendell, English Composition, pages 74-75. How far the connotation of familiar words changes with time appears, for instance, in the striking difference between the effect of roar and naughty to-day and the effect intended and produced by them in the time of Elizabeth and James: "I have roared for the very disquietness of my heart"; "this miserable and naughty world."

227. Quintilian, Institutes, VIII, iii: "Menelaus [Odysseus. See Odyssey xi, 522] says that the Greeks

descended into the horse . . . by that one word he shows the vastness of the horse; and . . . in Virgil,

Demissum lapsi per funem

thus also the height of the horse is signified." (Watson's translation, 84. Quintilian calls this eμpaois. ἔμφασις. The context suggests that he had, imperfectly, the distinction between denotation and connotation.)

The precise suggestiveness of Homer in description makes him inexhaustibly profitable, even in translation, for the imitation of students. The same holds of Dante. It is decidedly worth while to read aloud typical pas sages, or to assign them for report.

M. Antoine Albalat has a lively diatribe, with many interesting examples, on the lack of the specific as the mark of the style banal: l'Art d'Écrire, pages 57 and following. He pursues the discussion, pages 195 and following, with many examples of recasting for conSee also pages 231, 262, La Formation du Style par l'Assimilation des Auteurs, Chapters vii and viii; and a suggestive quotation from Lemaître (Les Contemporains, 1st Series, page 168) in Chapter ix; e.g.:

creteness.

Or, le style pittoresque . . . me paraît consister essentiellement à saisir et à fixer la perception au moment où elle éclôt, avant qu'elle ne se décompose et qu'elle ne devienne sentiment.

228. For further classification of figures see almost any of the older manuals of rhetoric. The locus classicus is probably Quintilian, Institutes, VIII, vi. Compare IX, i and ii.

For the basis in psychology see Gertrude Buck, Figures of Rhetoric: a Psychological Study (“University of Michigan Contributions to Rhetorical Theory," I).

230. On testing style by reading aloud see Maupassant's reminiscence of the habit of Flaubert, Lettres de Flaubert à George Sand, Preface.

232. Aristotle's general doctrine as to prose rhythm is in Rhetoric, III, viii; his particular application to the period and the balance, in III, ix, which is largely quoted in § 37 of this Appendix. See also Cope's Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric, pages 303-6 and Appendix C.

Chapter viii runs as follows:

The system or rhythm of the diction (τὸ δὲ σχῆμα τῆς λéğews. Compare Stevenson's word "pattern") should be neither metrical nor unrhythmical (δεῖ μήτε ἔμμετρον εἶναι μήτε ἄρρυθμου). So soon as a definite measure is caught, the ear waits for it to recur. On the other hand, lack of rhythm is lack of completeness; and there should be a sense of completeness, though without metre (deî δὲ πεπεράνθαι μέν, μὴ μέτρῳ δέ). Number (ἄριθμος) "imparts definiteness" (Tepaίveral) to all things; and in the "pattern" of prose (oxñμa) the number is rhythm, of which the metres are the several varieties. Of definite rhythms:

(1) The heroic is solemn and deficient in conversational harmony (σεμνὸς καὶ λεκτικῆς ἁρμονίας δεόμενος). (2) the iambic is the very speech of the crowd; the trochaic, too tripping (TpoxЄpós).

(3) There is left the paan, which has been in use since Thrasymachus without being defined. The The pæan stands between the other two; for it is 3:2, whereas they are respectively II and 2: 1.

The heroic and the iambic-trochaic, then, are to be discarded, both for the reasons mentioned and because they are too metrical; but the pæan is to be chosen as