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Certain love letters also remain to us, but as these are written in rimed couplets and in narrative style, they can hardly be classified as lyric poetry. In conclusion, a word must be said concerning the dispute between two schools of stylists, which is one of the most interesting points in the literary history of the troubadours.
Among others, there is that absurd eagerness to save the striking of a second match, which occasions so many burned fingers, and such picturesque language. And again, there is the desire to compress a telegraphic message into the minimum sixpennyworth, and so send an ambiguous and cryptic sentence, when sevenpence would have made it as clear as light. We all tend to be stylists in our telegrams.
This every writer on things Himalayan contrives to drag into his composition. Some begin with the quotation, while others reserve it for the last, and make it do duty for the epigram which stylists assure us should terminate every essay. Some there are who quote the Indian sage only to mock him.
They walked up and down a little in silence, then Sir George asked her what she thought of some of the specimens of style and art in literature he had lent her to study. "I don't know yet," Beth said. "My mind is in a state of chaos on the subject. I seem to reject 'style' and 'art. I ask for something more or something else, and am never satisfied. But tell me what you think of the stylists."
Yet all the stylists and artists of the world stand in wonder before their unconscious effort and supreme achievement. No attempt at rhetoric disfigures their record, not a word is written for effect, but the simple facts are allowed to tell their own eloquent and marvelous tale.
I have tried to imitate, at least in manner and turns of phrase, your old favourite, Demosthenes, and Calvus, to whom I have recently taken a great fancy; for to catch the fire and power of such acknowledged stylists is only given to the heaven-inspired few.
I never learned grammar. . . . I believe the bailiff in 'The Goodnatured Man' is not far wrong when he says: 'One man has one way of expressing himself, and another another; and that is all the difference between them." The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered "stylists" among writers not so very good, is essential.
'Say, brandy. 'Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel? 'Colney may call it what he pleases. If I read fiction, let it be fiction; airier than hard fact. If I see a ballet, my troop of short skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen. I can't read dull analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action if I'm to give my mind to a story.
It is when he proceeds to estimate these great men, not as writers but as social forces, not as stylists but as apostles, that M. Taine discloses the characteristic weaknesses of the bookman in dealing with the facts of concrete sociology. He shows none of this weakness in what he says of the remote past.
After the fundamental scientific questions that engaged my attention, I was most interested in artistic style. There was, in modern Danish prose, no author who unreservedly appealed to me; in German Heinrich Kleist, and in French Merimee, were the stylists whom I esteemed most.
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