Evidently he knew well the truth of the famous dictum: "Easy writing makes hard reading."

Then, too, a writer must make his phrases take hold. Emerson said: "It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence whether there be a man behind it or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some moneyed corporation, or some dangler who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of a right book I meet the eyes of the most determined of men; his force and terror inundate every word; the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble, can go far and live long." Indeed, beyond the mastery of the mechanics of language, which comes only with practice, the real secret of vigorous writing lies chiefly in the writer's attitude. If he feels strongly, he will inevitably strip off all unnecessary verbiage and dispense with mere ornament. If he is thoroughly aroused to the importance of what he has to say, he will hunt out telling words, words which flash an image across the mind, - real "cartridges of significance," - to drive his meaning home with the utmost force. So, too, with sentences. He will employ every device of form and position, -inversion, antithesis, suspense, climax, iteration, rhetorical questions, and the like, in order to gain power in the presentation of his thought. He will make frequent use of the short, incisive sentence. He may even clip the normal sentence construction, where the context makes the meaning unmistakable, in order to gain the advantage of compression or to concentrate attention on a few important words. Moreover, in both his use of words and in his handling of sentences he will scorn the flat and the commonplace. He will reach out boldly to make his language express himself as well as his message; and like Thoreau or Kipling he will find in this personal coloring not only the means of gaining the reader's interest, but also the foundation of a style. Yet in all these efforts to make his language effective he will remain complete master of himself.

He will never confuse variety with novelty, nor strength with violence.

III. THE WRITER AND GOOD FORM

A third test of effectiveness in composition remains. We have already noted that a writer must master his material and enlist his reader's interest, and it may seem that these two tests ought to be sufficient. Now it must be admitted that in much "practical" writing, where the sole aim is to get the facts to the reader in a way that will enable him to understand and remember them, a certain bare, hard effectiveness does come with the mere conveying of the material. And it seems to be peculiarly American to put practical considerations so far ahead of the aesthetic that the claims of beauty are forgotten. But after all, even from a utilitarian point of view, it is important for the writer to present his material in a way that will satisfy good taste. Just as an athlete runs farther or jumps higher if his "form" is good, so the writer finds a distinct practical advantage in skillful execution. As Quintilian reflects, "How can anything be firmer when it is in disorder than when it is bound fast together and well arranged? — As the flow of rivers is stronger in a sloping bed, which interposes no obstacle, than when the waters are broken by, and struggle with, obstacles of rock, so is style which is connected, and flows with full force; better than that which is broken and interrupted. Why then should men think that vigor is impaired by beauty, when nothing is ever at its full power without art, and beauty is art's constant companion? " 1 Thus the editor or the essayist, though he have the natural force of a Carlyle, may expect greater success in delivering his message when he increases the smoothness and elegance of his expression. And then, as soon as some less narrowly utilitarian point of view is taken, it is perfectly clear that no writing can be effective in the highest sense unless it has the beauty which is characteristic of all the best art. The overelegant and the inelegant alike can be acceptable only 1 Quoted by Professor George Saintsbury, Loci Critici, p. 64.

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to readers who lack taste or who will waive considerations of taste; and it cannot possibly endure the tests of time. Certain it is that all the great masters of our prose, even those who were essentially practical in their purpose, like Bacon and Bunyan in the past or Huxley and Lincoln in the literary generation just preceding our own, were consummate masters of good form. They were themselves gentlemen, with the gentleman's feeling for the best. They were possessed of a fine skill in shaping their pieces and a sure instinct for perfecting their diction. Indeed, the complete effectiveness of these writers appears in this, that in addition to being ready to write and able to win their reader's attention, they gave their writing a form really appropriate and beautiful.

A. THE ESTHETIC FITNESS OF THE WRITER

1. Sense of beauty. - If composition is to be more effective because of the way in which the material is presented, it is necessary that the writer shall himself be æsthetically fit. To begin with, he must have a sense of beauty. His taste must save him from admitting anything coarse, or ugly, or incongruous unless, of course, there is good reason for its introduction, and even then he must bring it in without offense to the reader. His taste must also save him from faults in form and expression. He must not deform or deface his product by neglecting proportion and symmetry or by violating harmony of tone and purity of diction. Nor is this enough. Inspired by the contemplation of the best specimens of the writer's art, he will take a positive pleasure in the beautiful and a worthy pride in making his own writing as perfect as possible. Just as habitual insistence on accurate self-expression is necessarily involved in clearness and interest, this personal delight in good workmanship must lie back of charm and elegance. The scrupulous carpenter will not permit rough edges or open joints; the painter with ideals of technique will not allow careless strokes; nor will the good literary craftsman tolerate stiff sentences or

abrupt transitions, harsh words or broken cadences. He is not satisfied simply with getting his idea expressed, nor with getting it expressed in a way that will make an agreeable impression; his soul craves beauty and his utterance must be perfect. Stevenson, himself uncompromising in workmanship, explains this ideal in writing to a young friend on the temptations which come to the artist as he works "entirely on his honor": "The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavors. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment, which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil' like a miner buried in a landslip,' for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects the gross mass of the public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; so, as is so probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal."

"1

2. Poise of literary good breeding. Along with this sense of beauty the effective writer possesses the poise which marks literary good breeding. There are people about us in life who seem always to do the right thing and say the right thing, who are everywhere at ease, who keep their composure through the most trying circumstances, who have a sure instinct for the best. These people of poise and fine sensibility we admiringly call well bred. Now literary good breeding is quite a parallel thing; it, too, shows itself in fine feeling and poise. When Dr. Johnson praised Addison's style as "familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious," he recognized that Addison

1 Letter to a young gentleman who proposes to embrace the career of art, in Across the Plains.

the writer was well poised. The same literary good breeding shows in Thackeray, and perhaps in Hawthorne. Certainly the Gettysburg Address, the Springfield Farewell Speech, and the Letter to Mrs. Bixby show that Lincoln, in spite of his crude environment and early hardships, had the instincts of a cultivated gentleman. In these writers, as in all writers with the finer æsthetic sensitiveness, there is an instinctive craving for elegance, grace, and beauty, an instinctive "abhorrence toward all manner of display." 1 Thus we find all such evidences of false taste as bombast, bookishness, and preciosity absent from their writing. Their style shows no excesses; there are no forced effects, no mannerisms, no phrases which are conspicuous rather than expressive. They strike a happy balance between delicacy and strength, between bare plainness and lavish ornamentation, between the slavishly conventional use of words and a bold freedom in bending language to suit individual purpose. In short, there can come from the writer of real literary good breeding nothing which is not done with elegance and beauty.

3. Respect for audience. - One other point is involved in the writer's fitness to realize this higher, fuller effectiveness, and that is his respect for his reader. Many times people write in bad taste who know better and who consciously compromise their own standards of elegance because they think they can reach their readers better by so doing. Probably this fault is most noticeable among newspaper writers, novelists, and others who try to reach large classes of people. They spread their material out thin, sometimes with little regard for its strict truth; they bring in boisterous humor or sickly pathos, and substitute sentimentality for genuine sentiment, just for the emotional thrills; they pile up high-sounding phrases with little real meaning and use the most fantastic words they can discover. Now the fundamental error with all of them is that they take their readers at their worst instead of their best. In reaching down they fail to take account of their readers'

1 See Charles Sears Baldwin, A College Manual of Rhetoric, p. 207.