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The Audience

65

The Relation of the Author to his Audience

71

The Poet and his Audience

71

Public Caterers

77

The Cautelous Man

78

Sentimentalism and Jocularity

81

The Tripe-Seller

83

The Wag

85

Social and Rhetorical Corruptions

87

Sincerity

88

Insincerity

93

Austerity

94

The Figurative Style

98

Decoration

100

Allusiveness

102

Simplicity and Strength

104

The Paradox of Letters

107

Drama

108

Implicit Drama

111

Words Again

115

Quotation

116

Appropriation

119

The World of Words

123

The Teaching of Style

124

The Conclusion

127

STYLE

Style, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech.  By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an epitome of literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instruments has lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts.  Thence the application of the word has been extended to arts other than literature, to the whole range of the activities of man.  The fact that we use the word “style” in speaking of architecture and sculpture, painting and music, dancing, play-acting, and cricket, that we can apply it to the careful achievements of the housebreaker and the poisoner, and to the spontaneous animal movements of the limbs of man or beast, is the noblest of unconscious tributes to the faculty of letters.  The pen, scratching on