ments of the
man. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style,
but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings
behind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined
by mental wants. Picking and polishing words and phrases is
ineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts: below
the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. And
then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive
faculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is a
purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that
wields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must be
fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing
instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.

Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or
feel, in such a way as to make the best of it--presupposed, that what
you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men
who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong
understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their
contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity,
will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in
most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a
style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey,
Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged
minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into
an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent,
illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer
insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when
most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by
imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by
freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius,
creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had
appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and
controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any
more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the
Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary
proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the
instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.

Not less than men of talent men