There can be no doubt that in the much greater matter of style we have paid heavily for the attainment of our slavish adherence to mechanical rules, however convenient, however inevitable. The beautiful incorrection, as we are now compelled to regard it, that so often marked the great and even the small writers of the seventeenth century, has been lost, for all can now write what any find it easy to read, what none have any consuming desire to read. But when Sir Thomas Browne wrote his “Religio Medici” it was with an art made up of obedience to personal law and abandonment to free inspiration which still ravishes us. It is extraordinary how far indifference or incorrection of style may be carried and yet remain completely adequate even to complex and subtle ends. Pepys wrote his “Diary,” at the outset of a life full of strenuous work and not a little pleasure, with a rare devotion indeed, but with a concision and carelessness, a single eye on the fact itself, and an extraordinary absence of self-consciousness which rob it of all claim to possess what we conventionally term style. Yet in this vehicle he has perfectly conveyed not merely the most vividly realised and delightfully detailed picture of a past age ever achieved in any language, but he has, moreover, painted a psychological portrait of himself which for its serenely impartial justice, its subtle gradations, its bold juxtapositions of colours, has all the qualities of the finest Velasquez. There is no style here, we say, merely the diarist, writing with careless poignant vitality for his own eye, and yet no style that we could conceive would be better fitted, or so well fitted, for the miracle that has here been effected.
The personal freedom of Browne led up to splendour, and that of Pepys to clarity. But while splendour is not the whole of writing, neither, although one returns to it again and again, is clarity. Here we come from another side on to a point we had already reached. Bergson, in reply to the question: “Comment doivent écrire les Philosophes?” lets fall some observations, which, as he himself remarks, concern other writers beside philosophers. A technical word, he remarks, even a word invented for the occasion or used in a special sense, is always in its place provided the instructed reader—though the difficulty, as he fails to point out, is to be sure of possessing this instructed reader—accepts it so easily as not even to notice it, and he proceeds to say that in philosophic prose, and in all prose, and indeed in all the arts, “the perfect expression is that which has come so naturally, or rather so necessarily, by virtue of so imperious a predestination, that we do not pause before it, but go straight on to what it seeks to express, as though it were blended with the idea; it became invisible by force of being transparent.”[67] That is well said. Bergson also is on the side of clarity. Yet I do not feel that that is all there is to say. Style is not a sheet of glass in which the only thing that matters is the absence of flaws. Bergson’s own style is not so diaphanous that one never pauses to admire its quality, nor, as a hostile critic (Edouard Dujardin) has shown, is it always so clear as to be transparent. The dancer in prose as well as in verse—philosopher or whatever he may be—must reveal all his limbs through the garment he wears; yet the garment must have its own proper beauty, and there is a failure of art, a failure of revelation, if it possesses no beauty. Style indeed is not really a mere invisible transparent medium, it is not really a garment, but, as Gourmont said, the very thought itself. It is the miraculous transubstantiation of a spiritual body, given to us in the only form in which we may receive and absorb that body, and unless its clarity is balanced by its beauty it is not adequate to sustain that most high function. No doubt, if we lean on one side more than the other, it is clarity rather than beauty which we should choose, for on the other side we may have, indeed, a Sir Thomas Browne, and there we are conscious not so much of a transubstantiation as of a garment, with thick embroidery, indeed, and glistening jewels, but we are not always sure that much is hidden beneath. A step further and we reach D’Annunzio, a splendid mask with nothing beneath, just as in the streets of Rome one may sometimes meet a Franciscan friar with a head superb as a Roman Emperor’s and yet, one divines, it means nothing. The Italian writer, it is significant to note, chose so ostentatiously magnificent a name as Gabriele D’Annunzio to conceal a real name which was nothing. The great angels of annunciation create the beauty of their own real names. Who now finds Shakespeare ridiculous? And how lovely a name is Keats!