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.
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