Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts),
not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one
with inharmonious or defective 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.
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