phrase. First, for the large store. The plainest mark of commonplace expression is poverty of vocabulary. Be it admitted at once that poverty of vocabulary may be due simply and solely to poverty of ideas. A man's vocabulary is the accumulation of his experience. He will have no more words than he has found necessary. But it is also true, both that the acquisition of new words. and the acquisition of new ideas and facts go on together, the former clarifying and classifying the latter, and also, since words have a further value than the scientific, that any man may, in a very real sense, have something to say for which he has not the words. The study of words, then, the pursuit of vocabulary, has the scientific use of defining knowledge, the artistic use of enabling one to approach more and more nearly to the ideal of expressing himself.

For in implying escape from the commonplace any degree of style implies scholarship. Range of vocabulary comes from wide reading, but not merely from reading many kinds of books. The reader must always be alert for a fitness, a modification, an extension; and this alertness implies in turn some knowledge of the history and genius of the language. See Rufus Choate practising at translation, Browning and Chatham grubbing in the dictionary. The "feeling for words " is an acquirement as well as a gift. It is not by a leap that one's expression escapes, on the one hand the random, the loose, the cheap, and on the other hand the pompous or pedantic. That simplicity which the ignorant credit to untamed nature comes from much reading and writing. Such scholarship is not in the science of language, though it may well learn from that, but in the art. That is, its method is not classification, but imitation.

Imitation, the

artistic study of models, applies more to composition than to diction; but it has its use for phrase, too, as well as for form. To borrow phrase, indeed, is as futile as it is dishonest, but to note phrase effects is a direct and natural means to the broadening of one's own range.

218. Thus range of vocabulary is indirectly a means to the expression of personality. The application of this, the general mode of personal expression, is originality in phrase combination. Commonplace expression is

marked, quite as much as by poverty of vocabulary, by stereotyped combinations. Forms of words like a delightful evening, a long-felt want, not much in evidence, an uneventful career, popular demonstration, a motley crowd, a good fellow, pass from lip to lip until they are conventionally fixed. Everybody finds these conventional locutions sufficient except the man that desires to express himself. He cannot invent new words for his view of these ideas, and he is properly unwilling to supplant even a trite, colourless, and feeble expression by bombast or pedantry. What he can do is apparent from what he is made to do in fiction. Even realism of the school is usually unwilling to bore readers by literal reproduction of what often bores them in actual life. That dialogue may be original without being either eccentric or stilted is exhibited in the quotation at § 172.

If it be objected that this is to talk book, the rejoinder is ready that most men would better talk book than talk shop. Even the most conventional society finds relief in the conventional phrases of another society, because these have for a time the charm of novelty. Thus inexpressive Britons and Canadians have been surprised to find their speech piquant in the United States; and all Americans are credited with raciness in England.

But if by book-talk be meant either pedantry or the artificial compression of literary dialogue, the objection holds no better; for neither of these is implied in originality of phrase. All that is necessary is discontent with the vulgar, some sense of the apt turn, and a willingness to study. The best general opportunity is in letters; and patient effort to inform one's letters with character will surely react on speech.

219. The crudest result of this effort is mannerism. Mannerism is indeed personal expression; but it merely substitutes for the general conventions personal conventions. It is style, but fixed style; and style, to have any considerable worth, must be flexible. Mannerism is style in a state of arrested development. To go on is to widen the scope; and to widen the scope is on the one hand to widen and define observation, and on the other hand always to be strenuous for the phrase that is personally right and always to be enlarging and sharpening one's armory by reading. All this implies unremitting practice. A very little idleness may bring stiffness, and no art demands more strictly the keeping of one's hand in than the art of literature.

b. Elegance

220. The qualities that generally ensue from the pursuit, to whatever extent, of personal expression may be called the marks of good style. Of course the very definition of style as personal expression shows that there cannot be any one best style. The best style, if we admit the phrase at all, can mean only the style best for a particular conception. The estimate of style being relative, no style can be absolutely best. It will not do to look toward some ideal use of language

as the acme of all expression. Every man must be looking toward what is relatively best, best for him, nearest to his meaning and mood. This point of view might lead to the rejection even of the phrase good style. And indeed style is good relatively, not absolutely. But first, all worthy style is precise, honest with the meaning, and faithfully patient in finding the right word; and secondly, through the infinite variations of personality in literature run certain qualities, not in fixed proportions, but almost always in some proportion, as if inevitably. The persistence of these qualities suggests that everybody's style needs them.

221. In other words, that heightening of language which results from personal use of it, and which we call style, has usually three traits, has always at least one of these three: elegance, emotional directness, harmony. Elegance, taken etymologically, is almost implied in personal selection. It starts from discontent with the vulgar. But elegance means more than choice; it means choiceness. That is, it means both habitual selection of phrases nicely apt to the conception, and also an habitual preference of phrases that shall be evidently select.

222. The selection of words for purposes of logic, that is for the uses of science and business, is determined simply by their dictionary meanings, by their denotation. Whether, for instance, I use libel or slander in an argument, accessory or contributory, benevolent or beneficent, is absolutely determined by authority, is purely a matter of accepted meaning, of denotation. But whether I use motherly or maternal, daybreak or sunrise, decorous or seemly, is also matter of connotation, of what the word suggests as well as what it denotes. I choose

one rather than the other because I find its suggestion nearer to the mood of my conception, or less trite in the connection, or larger in emotion, or more harmonious. Most words have thus a twofold meaning, a denotation and a connotation; and the degree of connotation, as well as the kind, varies immensely from word to word in a group of what for purposes of denotation we call synonyms. The artistic or personal selection of words, then, which produces style is on the basis of their connotation; and elegance is the effect of words whose connotation is delicate and reserved.

223. Elegance thus implies a shunning of the cheap and tawdry, of careless glibness and second-hand pathetic fallacy (§ 199). It expresses a gentleman's abhorrence toward all manner of display, especially display of feeling. Instead of being hail, fellow, well met with any reader, the elegant writer keeps a gentlemanly reserve. This is the most obvious difference between Thackeray and Dickens. In general, elegance is good taste in style. In particular, elegance expresses a conservative attitude toward language, not merely insisting on correctness, but rather finding its account in old approved connotations than venturing new ones, an attitude chary of figures, relying habitually on the force of mere aptness. A writer for whom elegance is the main virtue of style will often tacitly insist on scholarship in his readers, by indulgence in the recondite and reliance on the suggestions of etymology; and this habit is too allusive for the patience of most readers.

True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, had understood it, was essentially of the nature of a service. If so be, you can discover a mode of life more desirable than the