which we have hitherto discussed. If, instead of
writing, "Presently the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of
a hymn," Stevenson had written, "Soon a piano began to play a hymn,"
he would have suggested to the ear a jangle like the banging of tin
pans, instead of the measured melody he had in mind. And let it be
particularly noted that the phrase suggested for comparison is, _in
intellectual content alone_, scarcely distinct from the original. How
little is the difference in denotation, how great the difference in
suggestion! The brief phrase, "Kite-fliers in the windy and
cloud-navigated sky," seems to blow us bodily upward into the
air:--here is mastery of rhythm. "The somnolence of summer Sundays,"
is whispery and murmurous with s's, m's, and n's:--here (more
obviously) is mastery of literation. In the second paragraph, notice
how the rhythm suddenly hurries when Markheim is startled to his feet;
and in the last sentence, consider the monotonous and measured
slowness of the movement, ominous with pauses.

=The Heresy of the Accidental.=--Every now and then a critic steps
forward with the statement that style in fiction is not a deliberate
and conscious conquest, that the sound of sentences is accidental and
may therefore not be marshaled to contribute to the sense, and that
preoccupation with details of rhythm and of literation is an evidence
of a finical and narrow mind. To such a statement no answer is
necessary but the wholesome advice to re-read, aloud and carefully,
several passages on a par with that from "Markheim" which we have just
examined. Very evidently Stevenson knew intuitively what he was about
when he planned his rhythmic patterns and his literate orchestral
harmonies.

=Style An Intuitive Quality.=--I say "intuitively," because, as I
admitted at the outset, style is, with the author, a matter of feeling
rather than of intellect. But matters may be planned with sensibility
as well as with intelligence. The writer with the gift of style
forehears a rhythmic pattern into which he weaves such words as may be
denotative of his thought; and all the while that he is striving to be
definite and clear, he carries in his mind a subtle sense of the
harmonic accompaniment of consonants, the melodious eloquence of
vowels.

By what means a writer may attain to mastery of style is a question
not to be answered by the intellect. Matters of sensibility are
personal, and every man must solve them for him