this passage is enhanced by the masterly employment of
every phase of style 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.

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.

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 web of rhythm 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 f