t; they must not stand
out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can
hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was
sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.

A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be
one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free
sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his
subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be
sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic,
attractive. You must love your work to do it well.

A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onward
actively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With some
writers a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not get
forward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. In
many minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in style
demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a
somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and
poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable
sequence.

Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routine
of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened
by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness,
even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most
liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to
set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,--a sad
condition for man or writer.

Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly. A
writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself
is soon found out. The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity;
it looks as though the very self--which will shine through the
style--lacked confidence in its own substance. And after all, in
writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be
himself in spite of himself. One cannot put on his neighbor's style
any more than he can put on his neighbor's limbs.

Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no
_style_ unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by
rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert,
drowsy. Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it. The best style will
have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought
in the deep ocean