So much I have said of the manner in which Thackeray did his work,
endeavouring to represent human nature as he saw it, so that his readers
should learn to love what is good, and to hate what is evil. As to the
merits of his style, it will be necessary to insist on them the less,
because it has been generally admitted to be easy, lucid, and
grammatical. I call that style easy by which the writer has succeeded in
conveying to the reader that which the reader is intended to receive
with the least possible amount of trouble to him. I call that style
lucid which conveys to the reader most accurately all that the writer
wishes to convey on any subject. The two virtues will, I think, be seen
to be very different. An author may wish to give an idea that a certain
flavour is bitter. He shall leave a conviction that it is simply
disagreeable. Then he is not lucid. But he shall convey so much as that,
in such a manner as to give the reader no trouble in arriving at the
conclusion. Therefore he is easy. The subject here suggested is as
little complicated as possible; but in the intercourse which is going on
continually between writers and readers, affairs of all degrees of
complication are continually being discussed, of a nature so complicated
that the inexperienced writer is puzzled at every turn to express
himself, and the altogether inartistic writer fails to do so. Who among
writers has not to acknowledge that he is often unable to tell all that
he has to tell? Words refuse to do it for him. He struggles and stumbles
and alters and adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far
or not quite far enough. Then there comes upon him the necessity of
choosing between two evils. He must either give up the fulness of his
thought, and content himself with presenting some fragment of it in that
lucid arrangement of words which he affects; or he must bring out his
thought with ambages; he must mass his sentences inconsequentially; he
must struggle up hill almost hopelessly with his phrases,--so that at
the end the reader will have to labour as he himself has laboured, or
else to leave behind much of the fruit which it has been intended that
he should garner. It is the ill-fortune of some to be neither easy or
lucid; and there is nothing more wonderful in the history of letters
than the patience of readers when called upon to suffer under the double
calamity. It is as though a man were reading a dialogue of Plato,
understanding