Mr. Herbert Spencer’s famous essay, entitled, “The Philosophy of Style”—by which is meant the Psychology of Style—propounds what we may term the economic theory of literary effect. The secret, he tells us, of the pleasing effect of diction, rhythm, figurative language, sentence structure, lies in this, that these are labour-saving devices to economize mental effort, that by their use we get with the least attention the greatest apprehension; and hence we receive pleasure as reflex of the facile and full cognition functioning. Literary pleasure is thus brought under the law of pleasure in general. Take the quotation from Shelley cited by Mr. Spencer:—
“Methought among the lawns together
We wandered, underneath the young grey dawn,
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains,
Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.”

You have read this with pleasure, and is not the source of this pleasure the ease and celerity with which the mind reaches the “desired conception”? Vividly and forcibly the mind is led by cunning use of phrase and rhythm and figure to realize the picture, and there is a glow of pleasure in the reaction from the facility. Language is a medium for the transfer of ideas, and when it accomplishes this office most effectively, as in the present case, and acts upon the mind so clearly and forcibly that nolens volens 311the reader at once apprehends and comprehends, he feels a thrill of pleasure therewith, just as there is pleasure connected with the rapid and easy assimilation of well cooked food. Before developing and criticising this theory I may remark in passing that Blair, the rhetorician, in treating of the structure of sentences foreshadows in a way the economic theory when he writes that “to have the relation of every word and member of a sentence marked in the most proper and distinct manner, gives, not clearness only, but grace and beauty to a sentence, making the mind pass smoothly and agreeably along the parts of it.” This surely implies that ?sthetical pleasure of style may be based in a psychological economy and facility. It is indeed a commonplace remark, “The book is so well written that you cannot mistake or miss its meaning”; wherein the identification of style with intelligibility becomes a truism. Certainly Mr. Spencer has not in the economic theory propounded anything radically new.

We note at the outset that while this pleasure of style may result from economy it is not the pleasure of the conscious economizer. The reader who is enjoying a very readable book has a distinct pleasure from him who views with satisfaction his finishing a book at a great and unexpected saving of mental energy. We have here the direct pleasure from economical exercise of the faculties contrasted with the indirect introspective-retrospective pleasure at economy effected. Many persons take as much pleasure in making mental energy go as far as possible, but this pleasure in economy is obviously not the pleasure of style, which is not reflective, but na?ve and direct impression.

Language, either spoken or written, by its more or less effective modes of accomplishing its office does then awaken a simple and direct pleasure, according to the general law that pleasure accompanies efficient acts as a sanction and stimulus. It is obvious that style for spoken 312language, oratorical style, is precedent in its formation to style for written language or literary style, and that it has greatly affected literary style throughout its whole history. Yet the distinctness of the two modes is affirmed by the common observation that a speech, impressively pleasing to listen to, often does not read well. While it may be true that in its origin literary style borrowed certain devices from oratorical, yet in its latest evolution the written page is far from being the speaking page. The book is not a substitute speaker addressing us, and modes of expression which are most fitting for conversation and oration, though sometimes used by writers, are alien to pure literary art. However, I cannot pursue this interesting subject, nor yet can I here treat of the origin of style more than to merely observe that it is considerably later than the origin of language itself. Neither the original uncouth speech, whether interjectional or onomatopoetic, nor the earliest rude inscriptions can be said to have style, oratorical or literary. Style is the offspring of specialization; it first appeared when men recognised some one as particularly gifted for fitting expression, and chose him as spokesman because of this ability to communicate what was desired to be said with special force and clearness. Thus arises the orator who achieves and invents oratorical style. Likewise the writer is one who is selected for his special abilities in expression by word of pen, and the scribe, clerk, and public letter writer arise and evolve literary style as a skilful way of effectively conveying ideas and impressions by written language. The reader is also evolved, and in the reciprocal relation of demand and supply and the competitive struggle to secure readers, the writer seeks ever more and more to please and interest by introducing and perfecting various inventions to make the reading of his work very easy and enjoyable. Thus it comes that readableness is the natural test for reading matter.

The economic theory of style in fine art plainly implies 313at bottom physiological economy, for all psychological economy can only be effected on this basis. The psychology of style must rest on a physiology of style. We know that the pleasures of form and colour in sculpture and painting are the reflex of physiological functions as easily and completely performed. The curve of beauty is such because the eye follows it more easily than other lines; the pleasing colour is such because the physiological stimulus is accomplished in a normal and facile way. And as visibility is the test for the arts which appeal to the eye, so audibility is for the fine art which appeals to the ear. Pleasure from music is the reflex of aural functioning accomplishing the most with least strain. Now the pleasure which comes from literary style must similarly be sought in some physiological mode. While plain print and good paper are incidental pleasures in reading, they are not primarily due to the stylist, who does, however, appeal to the eye by the due proportioning of long and short words, sentences and paragraphs. Though there is no conscious intent by the stylist, yet it may be believed that the use of certain letters and certain successions of letters as more or less easy for the eye is a matter of some importance. Some letters and some combinations are ocularly more pleasing than others, and this is clearly founded on economic physiological conditions. It is greatly to be desired that physiologists would invent new alphabetical forms which should be most adapted to the eye. It is scarcely to be supposed that our present A B C\'s are the simplest and easiest line-combinations for the eye. When the visual side of reading is made as easy as possible, the general reflex sense of facility and pleasure therewith is certainly increased. The artificial languages now being exploited, as Volapuk, ought and would effect a great physiological saving, as would also be accomplished by a phonetic spelling.

But the direct visible function of style is certainly far 314inferior to the indirect. The power of style is very largely in stimulating pleasing visual images. The main element in literature we are told is vision and imagination, which is but a restimulation and recombination of ocular experiences. Sensation is the source and strong basis for all those faint revivals which are so aptly and pleasantly called up by the literary artist, and hence when the poet speaks of “the light which never was on sea or land,” this is really meaningless, since all our light impressions are terrestrial in their nature. To the blind man the whole visual effect, direct and indirect, of style is lost; his imaging power must be in some other sense.

Literature is then, like sculpture and painting, largely a visual art, and its pleasure-giving quality is the reflex of visibility. Mere form and colour may in a sense constitute a picture; though in general we demand that it mean something, suggest something. A picture is such as depicting something, and so being more than a study in form or colour. The mere direct pleasure of ocular sensation plays a large part in graphic and glyptic art, yet it is commonly conceived that some measure of imagination, that is, some indirect visible function, is necessary even here. Sculpture and painting depend like literature on both direct and indirect vision as physiological and psychological basis of ?sthetic pleasure.

But in a secondary way literary style depends for its effect upon auditory sensations both direct and revival. We mentally, and often orally, pronounce as we read, and so appreciate sonorous quality and onomatopoetic force. Alliteration, rhyme, euphony, and rhythm play certainly a considerable part in the charm of style, and literature on this side approaches and passes gradually into music. Euphony answers to melody, and rhyme and rhythm to harmony. Literature may become for us merely a succession of pleasing sounds, as when we hum over some favourite lines of poetry, or when, ignorant of the Italian 315language, we listen to an opera. Some of Milton’s lists of names in such lines as these,—
“Of Cambalu, seat of Cathayan Can,
And Samarchand by Oxus, Temer’s throne”—

charm merely by the flow and fulness of sound. But the stylist aims, not merely at formal sensuous beauty in tone and cadence of language, he aims to suggest pleasing sounds, and to awaken the auditory imagination, and to harmonize sense with sound as is done so successfully by poets like Tennyson and prosaists like Sir Thomas Browne. All this auditory side of literary style is lost on the deaf, as the visual is lost on the blind. Literature as an art is neither blind like music nor deaf like painting, but it is a compound art, visual-auditory, and thus, by virtue of its range, is the greatest of the arts. It is true that indirectly and in a very limited way painting can suggest sounds, and music sights, but literature, both directly and indirectly, can freely and fully give both. Word-music and word-painting are both methods of literary style. In short, the explanation of the pleasure of style is pleasing sight or sound directly or indirectly given, and the explanation of the pleasing character of the sight or sound is as the reflex of easy economical physiological functioning as basis of easy economical psychic function.

But we have now to ask whether economy of attention is the sole psychological secret of style, and whether, indeed, it is always necessary to style. Is style, like grammar or orthography, merely a more or less conventionalized device to make intelligibility certain and easy? Is our reading always the more pleasurable as it is the more effortless? The pleasure of facility certainly bears a large part in much of our literary enjoyment, but there is another and opposite law of pleasure which, I think, often determines pleasure in style. To accomplish much with no exertion, to slide down a long hill, gives pleasure, but there is also a pleasure in exertion, in climbing hills 316as well as sliding down. The pleasures of strenuous activity of attention form a certain element in literary effect. The writer may do too much for the reader, may make everything so simple and easy that the reader has nothing to do, but is carried along without volition and curiosity, losing all joy of attainment and grasp. For my own part, I often find authors too fluent and facile, especially among the French, and sometimes among the English, as, for instance, in some of John Stuart Mill’s writings. These do not leave enough for me to do, and led skilfully along so smooth a road that I am not conscious of moving, I lose the pleasure of achievement, of the sense of enlargement of conscious powers. Easy got, easy goes, is the law here as elsewhere. The pleasure of acquirement is directly as the amount of attention exercised.

Mr. Spencer in discussing this matter remarks that, as “language is the vehicle of thought, we may say that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency, and that in composition the chief thing to be done is, to reduce the friction and inertia to the smallest amounts.” But it must be remembered that motion is not only against friction but by friction. The rail may be too smooth as well as too rough. Every locomotive, for a given piece of track with a given gradient, has a certain co-efficient of friction for its most effective working, above and below which there is alike decrease of efficiency; and in engineering it is equally a problem to keep friction up as to reduce it. So I say of style, that it may be too smooth and facile, and may reduce mental friction to so low a point that there is no grasp and no real progress. A sentence of Hooker or Milton, magnificent stylists though they are, can, as an affair of economy of attention, be greatly improved by breaking it up into a number of simple plain sentences after the primer fashion, The cat mews, The dog barks, etc.; but this process certainly is not an improvement of their style. But if 317economy of attention were the sole secret of style, certainly the more economy we introduce the greater and better should be the style. Professor Sherman, of the University of Nebraska, in a recent article shows that heaviness—that which requires “constant effort in reading”—is due to the number of words per sentence, which has been reduced in the course of the history of English prose from an average of fifty words a sentence in Chaucer and Spenser to five in the columns of a modern, low-grade, popular story-paper; but it obviously cannot be maintained that the style of the story-paper is ten times better than that of Spenser’s State of Ireland.

We might then set up with plausibility an exactly opposite theory to the economic, and maintain that the secret of style is in exciting us to the greatest attentive effort, and that the best style is that which rouses us to the severest mental exertion. However, I believe that these two opposite methods of style are complementary. The great stylist is he who strikes the exact mean between over facility and over difficulty, and touches the exact co-efficient of mental friction in the reader, at which his whole power of mind comes into highest and most harmonious and effective exercise. The accomplished stylist most cleverly throws in questions, suggests doubts, and defers answers. To read his book is not a toboggan slide, but an obstacle race. What is plot interest but a skilful putting of obstacles in the reader’s way, deferring and thwarting his expectations, putting him on the qui vive of attention? By the development of plot the novelist and dramatist plays hide and seek with the reader. No cunning artist reveals at once his whole thought in a blaze of light, but he mystifies and draws in half-tones, thus to stir you to reach out and grasp his meaning.

But we are as yet far from exhausting the psychological significance of pleasure in style when we trace it to a reflex from either decrease or increase of attentive effort. 318The pleasure we have so far considered is na?ve and direct; it is from literary art rather than in or at literary art as such. The child and the most ordinary reader derive from books a simple and natural pleasure which they do not reflect upon, and do not in any wise conceive the ways and means by which the effect is produced. Indeed, in the presence of the most lucid and perfect art these readers, like Partridge at the play, take everything as a matter of course, as just the way they would themselves express it. The dilettante alone tastes the pleasure in style as such; as an art, an adaptation of means to ends, he alone appreciates the delicate adjustment of expression to thought, the choice diction, the deft management of word and phrase. The quality of this technical pleasure in style is exemplified in its highest form in this note of a great artist-critic, Shelley, appended to his fine translation of the opening chorus in “Faust”:—

"Such is a literal translation of this astonishing chorus; it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation, and its reader is surprised to find a caput mortuum."

The psychological nature of this pleasure in style is obviously quite distinct from the direct pleasures from reading which have been previously discussed. Here is pleasure in literary art, not for what it brings, but for its own sake. The distinction between the pleasure the average tourist takes in travelling swiftly and smoothly in a de luxe train, and that taken by the professional engineer inspecting the high-speed locomotive, is analogous in quantity and quality to the distinctive pleasures of critical and uncritical appreciation of fine art. But we have as yet only cleared the ground toward ascertaining the psychological rationale of literary style. We have marked only general causes of literary pleasure, we have noticed in this pleasure only those elements which flow 319from the psychological and physiological basis of all pleasure as reflex of functioning. That we admire and take pleasure in nice adjustment of means to ends is also a general law of pleasure with all who act teleologically, and are capable of appreciating actions of this kind. But is there not a specific quality in the ?sthetic pleasure from or in literary art which has not yet been accounted for? Certainly the common expression, “more forcible than elegant,” as applied to spoken or written language, denotes that for the popular consciousness style is somewhat more than and different from mere force and consequent ease and largeness of apprehension. We hear a very loud sound with greater ease than smaller sounds, there is economy of attention, yet this does not bestow ?sthetic quality on the great sound. At the renderings of the finest music we are often called on to strain the ear, and the mental receptiveness as a whole to the utmost, in order to hear, note, and appreciate the delicate effects. So in literary art it is not that which speaks most loudly and strongly to the mind that thereby becomes the best style. In fact, the most forcible method of expression is often, as is generally acknowledged, slang, which is debarred from style. Literary style seems, then, more than a mental labour-saving machine. As a utilitarian device it certainly does save mental exertion, and gives rapidity, accuracy, and facility to psychic function. Like grammar, a mechanic rhetoric is useful, and we receive a pleasure from its use as from any other mechanism of man’s industry; and further, we may take a certain pride and pleasure in its consciously recognised effectiveness. However, we have not yet reached style in the higher sense, which may be clear and forcible, but must be dignified, graceful, and beautiful. For purposes of business, for conventional communication, for science, for philosophy, language fulfils its end in stating accurately, clearly, and forcibly; but style as literary art is more than instrument 320to intelligibility, it has an independent office of its own. Language in the lower service as a medium of communication is a lens which cannot be too transparent; but in the higher service to fine art, language is rather a mosaic window of stained glass which both absorbs and transmits light, which both conceals and reveals, which we look at as well as through. In literary art or style, language has a value of beauty for itself alone, as well as a value of use as a means of communication.

But the root of style is in emotion; it is as expression of emotion, and in the main of one kind of emotion, that language rises to style. All emotions influence language expression, and any one may, under certain conditions, lead towards literary art; there is an eloquence of wrath and of fear, of hate and of love, and these emotions may induce artistic creativeness in written language; but the main impulse to art is in the feeling for beauty per se. This is a certain mode of emotional delight which every one who has felt it knows at once in its quality as quite distinct as a psychic mode. How literary style rises and falls with ?sthetic emotion might be exemplified by a wide range of quotations, but an example or two must suffice. This, from one of Shelley’s letters, will, I trust, illustrate the point:—

“My dear P——, I wrote to you the day before our departure from Naples. We came by slow journeys, with our own horses, to Rome, resting one day at Mola di Gaeta, at the inn called Villa di Cicerone—from being built on the ruins of his villa, whose immense substructions overhang the sea, and are scattered among the orange groves. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene from the terraces of the inn. On one side precipitous mountains whose bases slope into an inclined plane of olive and orange copses, the latter forming, as it were, an emerald sky of leaves, starred with innumerable globes of 321their ripening fruit, whose rich splendour contrasted with the deep green foliage; on the other the sea, bounded on one side by the antique town of Gaeta, and the other by what appears to be an island, the promontory of Circe. From Gaeta to Terracina the whole scenery is of the most sublime character. At Terracina precipitous conical cra............