Conduct of life; English essays -- 20th century; Ethics; Philosophy
In the end, it will be seen we return at last to the point from which we
start. We have completed the cycle of an art’s evolution,—and it might,
indeed, be any other art as much as writing,—reaching in the final sweep
of ever wider flights the fact from which we started, but seeing it
anew, with a fresh universal significance. Writing is an arduous
spiritual and intellectual task, only to be achieved by patient and
deliberate labour and much daring. Yet therewith we are only at the
beginning. Writing is also the expression of individual personality,
which springs up spontaneously, or is slowly drawn up from within, out
of a well of inner emotions which none may command. But even with these
two opposite factors we have not attained the complete synthesis. For
style in the full sense is more than the deliberate and designed
creation, more even than the unconscious and involuntary creation, of
the individual man who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus
expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came the man himself
can never entirely know whence. It is by the instinctive stress of a
highly sensitive, or slightly abnormal constitution, that he is impelled
to instil these tendencies into the alien magic of words. The stylum
wherewith he strives to write himself on the yet blank pages of the
world may have the obstinate vigour of the metal rod or the wild and
quavering waywardness of an insect’s wing, but behind it lie forces that
extend into infinity. It moves us because it is itself moved by pulses
which in varying measure we also have inherited, and because its primary
source is in the heart of a cosmos from which we ourselves spring.
Footnote 55:
It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian
and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of
the expert (as in C. T. Onions, _Advanced English Syntax_) is entirely
reasonable.
Footnote 56:
It is interesting to note that another aristocratic master of speech
had also made just the same observation. Landor puts into the mouth of
Horne Tooke the words: “No expression can become a vulgarism which has
not a broad foundation. The language of the vulgar hath its source in
physics: in known, comprehended, and operative things.” At the same
time Landor was as stern a judge as Baudelaire of the random use of
_clichés_.
Footnote 57:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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