natural powers, you might as well
attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be
sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it
requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most,
as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from
others--whether through study of the best masters or through direct
rhetorical instruction--is in the mechanical portion of the art; that
is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses,
how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and
awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has
to give out. Even in these superficial lessons success imports
something more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, and
you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within
you. _Le style c'est l'homme meme_ (a man's style is his very self),
is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of the
interior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give
to the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk of
style 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In
popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs
beneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's.

Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others
in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping
their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic
faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact
and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other
writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by
means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent,
and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the
presence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in form
is illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with the
literature of Germany, and even with that of England. The French
follow a precept thus embodied by Beranger: "Perfection of style
should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse
useful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to a
subject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thought
has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people's
brains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the idea