Meredith Nicholson

“ The cumulative power of “The Scarlet Letter” is tremendous,—and it is a power of style not less than of intense moral earnestness. There is something awe-inspiring in the contemplation of that melancholy figure, in whose mind and heart the spirit of Puritanism dwelt as in a sanctuary; and yet he was always and above everything else an artist. He was as incapable of an inartistic idea as he was of a clumsy sentence. ”

“ The smoothness of the ordered thought, the pretty balances, the march and swing of the old cadences of our speech are either beyond him or beneath him, and in a man of so acute and full a mind and with a sophistication so complete in all that makes for beauty, we can not do less than subscribe to the theory that he knows [46] what he is about and that his style, in the curious phase to which he has brought it, is a true expression of the oddly oblique lines and strangely concentric circles of his matured mind. ”

“ The bulk of English is so enormous and [4] increases so rapidly that we have a right to pick and choose and to hang aloof from all that does not please us. The fashion changes in literary style as in clothes, and yet,—to shift the figure,—the snows of yesteryear linger on the far uplands and high peaks, and they are there forever. It is a common impression that popular taste in literature is bad and growing worse. ”

“ Eloquence is, I have sometimes thought, the rarest quality that may be embraced in the essentials of style. We need not quibble over definitions. “Eloquence,” said Dean Farrar, “is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely felt”; and it is sufficient for our purposes. The term is applied commonly and uncritically in oratory. I have not myself found the reading of the speeches of great orators profitable, charmed they never so marvelously in their own day. ”

“ Later on, when the fires of [32] youth have cooled somewhat, and we march beside the veterans in the grand army;—when proverbs have lost their potency and the haversacks hang empty on our lean and weary backs, we prefer, for the campfires, authors of more red blood, and pass our battered cups for literary applejack that is none the worse for us if it tear our throats a little as it gurgles down. Once he might throw up his windows and call to us: Virtue is the soul’s best aim; adjust your lives to truth ”

“ To grasp style much is inevitably presupposed,—grammar, sensibility, taste, a feeling for color and rhythm,—of such things as these is the kingdom of style. In children we often observe an individual and distinctive way of saying things; we all have correspondents whose letters are a joy because of their vivid revelation of the writer. In every community there are persons much quoted for their wit or wisdom, whose sayings have a raciness and tang. ”

“ Young writers, intent upon the best possibilities of our mother English, do well to leave all that the great Greeks, the great Latins, the great Italians and French have written until they have wrought,—into the very alphabet of memory,—the innumerable lessons and high examples of that imperishable text book of English style. ”

“ The criticism of literature is the only business in which the witness is not called upon to qualify as to his competency. Failures at any game naturally turn critic. In science we demand the critic’s credentials: in literature we all kick the sleeping lion and inadvertently twist his tail.
Lowell wrote with remarkable knowledge, skill and effectiveness on many subjects, and his political and literary essays are models [24] of form and diction. He was perhaps the most cultivated man we have produced ”

“ The power of the printed word has always been tremendous; the authority of type is often excessive and unjustified; yet this only makes more exacting the inevitable standard of truth. Style will forever be challenged by truth, that austere higher critic whose method is so searching and whose judgments are so inexorable. ”

“ The convenient methods of absent treatment advertised by correspondence schools of authorship are of no avail in the business of style; style can no more be taught than the shadows of clouds across June meadows, or the play of wind over wheat fields can be directed or influenced by the hand of man. ”

“ It is not enough to communicate to the eye the sense of form, the outward and visible outline of a man; the shop keeper can do that with a dummy in his show-window; but words must go further and produce bone and sinew; we must be able through the writer’s magic to clasp a hand that is quick with red blood; whose contact thrills us at a touch. ”

“ In the same whimsical fashion we recur to volumes that we knew in old times, impelled by some instinct that makes us long to experience the same emotion, the same thrill, the same peace that gladdened our souls in happier days. ”

“ So strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian during times of the most captivating military achievement; awkward, with no skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind him a fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere breeding. ”

“ As you roll over the road with the whip lash curling and cracking and the horn blowing blithely you submit yourself to his guidance with supreme faith that he will never spill you into the ditch or send you crashing into a fence corner. ”

“ He sees through and all around the things he writes about, whether it be a city, a bit of landscape, a character of fiction, or an author. When a subject takes hold of him the aroused thoughts tumble about in tumultuous fashion; he is not a little cistern easily emptied but a great flowing well. ”

“ His creative vision is so wide that his expression is often unequal to representing it in the familiar symbols of speech. It is at moments of this sort that he leaves us to stumble in a dark stair-case; then suddenly we are aware of his leading hand again, urging us on, and down the hall a brilliant [44] light flashes forth, and we are able to see things again with his eyes as his expression once more catches step with his ideas. His power of phrase is very great indeed. Certainly no other American writer equals him in the knack of flinging into a few words some positively illuminating idea. ”

“ A certain tendency to superficial cleverness,—the stinging ironies of a yawning professor with a dull class flash out of his pages disagreeably at times, in odd contrast with his true and always delightful humor. Style must proceed from something solider than mere cleverness. ”

“ There are in all our libraries, great or small, stern Gibraltars that rise gloomily before us on shelves to which we never turn with pleasure.
Great writers have rarely written of style, perhaps because it is so individual, so intimate a matter ”

“ Those cheerless souls who never heard a whip handle rattle a tavern shutter at midnight, who never prowled about old wharves and talked with tattooed sailormen; who are grim seekers after realities and have no eye for the light that never was on sea or land have no business with Stevenson and had better stick to tea, muffins and The Ladies’ Home Journal. ”

“ Lowell’s prose like his verse was enriched from the soil of many lands, but more and more as he grew older he wore his learning lightly. The self-consciousness of the young professor, ever anxious not to be tripped by the impertinence of some recalcitrant student, gave way toward the end to the easy discourse of a man sure of his ground. ”

“ He can turn his horses in the chancel of a cathedral without knocking out a single choir stall; he can drive under low arches without ruffling his hat; his knowledge of the road is complete; his confidence reassuring. ”

“ The great men of the ages slunk through Carlyle’s study like frightened steers through a slaughter house. Where he hid his own iniquities during his life time the genial Froude exposed them in a new chamber of horrors at his death.
Macaulay always reminds me of a gentleman whip driving a coach and four. He manages his horses with a sure hand. His speed is never too high; he knows the smooth roads and rumbles along at a comfortable gallop, swinging up to tavern doors with grand climaxes. He writes as a man writes who dines well and feels good ”

“ After Hawthorne, the prose of Lowell affords, I should say, the highest mark reached by any American writer. The main difference,—and it is a difference of height, breadth, depth,—the difference between them as prose writers lies in the fact that one was a creative artist and the other a critic. And criticism must always be secondary. The [23] enduring monuments of the literature of all the ages were built before criticism was born. The great originals in all literature have paid little heed to criticism. The creator must plow and sow and reap ”

“ STYLE AND THE MAN AT the word style the critics at once sit up and take notice. We are all sensitive to style; we either like to drift with an easy, lazy current, or we prefer to fight a turbulent, resisting tide ”

“ By virtue of his feeling for beauty and of his perception of the vital connection of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished so much in poetry, than in one of the two great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare. ‘The tongue of Kean,’ he says, in an admirable criticism of that great actor and his enchanting elocution ”

“ Here in America style was first greatly realized by Hawthorne. Changing tastes and fashions have not shaken his position. He was our first, and he remains our greatest creative artist in fiction, and it were idle to dispute his position. ”

“ James’ own attitude toward this trade of writing; every writer, he declares, who respects himself and his art cares greatly for his phrase; but Stevenson, he finds, cares more for life. Mr. James is no scorner of phrase for the phrase’s sake or of form for form’s sake. The essays collected in “Partial Portraits” and “English Hours” are written in a far directer and simpler manner than his later tales. ”

“ With twenty millions of people, you have about one thousand millions of acres of land, inviting settlement by every conceivable argument, bringing them down to a quarter of a dollar an acre and allowing every man to squat where he pleases. ”

“ He may not always convince, but he dare not be dull, and he now and then rises to the level of a Benjamin Harrison, who combined the cogent reasoning of the deeply philosophical lawyer with a rare art in marshaling his facts, and addressed himself to the conscience and the reason of his audiences. ”

“ This is as true in those characterizations that are the veritable creatures of realism as of those that are wrought in the mood of romance. The burden upon your romancer lies, in fact, more heavily, for in his work the spectator, the auditor, the reader, can assist him little. ”

“ Terror and horror are rarely evoked by our later orators. Even the slaughter of the innocents in the Philippines in the amiable Christian effort to extend our beneficent empire to Asia has brought forth no really striking protest worthy of the cause. ”

“ These are largely matters of temperament or of mood. The attitude of many of us changes from day to day, from book to book; but at heart we all have a preference, a prejudice in favor of certain methods of writing, while others awake our antagonism. ”

“ I remember hearing it said often in my youth that the newspaper was driving out the orator, but I do not believe that this is true, or that it will ever be true. The glow and passion of the spoken word must always hold a fascination for men that is not possible in the printed appeal. The general rise of popular intelligence raises the standard somewhat ”

“ The sentences that read well will as likely as not fall flat when spoken, even when uttered with force. The oration delivered on the field of Gettysburg by Edward Everett is commonly spoken of in contemptuous contrast with Lincoln’s utterance on the same occasion, but there can be no fair comparison between the two performances. ”