Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have
made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious
supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes
cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de
Guerin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants:
"Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression of
yourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making it
your care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of
style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the
works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it
each in our own fashion."
One of the first constituents of a good style is what Coleridge calls
"progressive transition," which implies a dynamic force, a propulsive
movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this
force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary
flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate
splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous
scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of
Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in
liveliest action.
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