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Updated: June 20, 2025
Hughes as a stylist, a critic, and teacher. What he really shines in is invention. His story of the converted Atheist shoemaker displays a faculty which has no scope in a sermon on Tennyson. The pedants will be down upon us for speaking of Lord Bacon. It is true there never was such a personage. Francis Bacon was Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England.
The Professor makes his point luminous by a cryptogram he has invented and for which he has filed a caveat. It is a very useful cryptogram; no well-regulated family should be without it for by it you can prove any proposition you may make, even to establishing that Hopkinson Smith is America's only stylist.
Or, if he would be a mummer at all costs, how much more would he not have pleased me if he had been a better mummer one more able to ape the guileless genius and classical author! For it yet remains to be said that Strauss was not only an inferior actor but a very worthless stylist as well.
In this opinion he also gives evidence, in their highest form, of his other notable qualities as a judicial stylist: his "tiger instinct for the jugular vein"; his rigorous pursuit of logical consequences; his power of stating a case, wherein he is rivaled only by Mansfield; his scorn of the qualifying "buys," "if's," and "though's"; the pith and balance of his phrasing, a reminiscence of his early days with Pope; the developing momentum of his argument; above all, his audacious use of the obiter dictum.
None the less they are the life's breath of literature, and he is a poor stylist who cannot beg half- a-dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous revolt. The two main processes of change in words are Distinction and Assimilation.
A French writer has said "On ne bavarde pas sur la pierre," and for most inscriptions the saying holds good, but Asoka wrote on the rocks of India as if he were dictating to a stenographer. He was no stylist and he was somewhat vain although, considering his imperial position and the excellence of his motives, this obvious side of his character is excusable.
In this strong, plain setting the occasional happy word shines like a cut jewel. A really good stylist is like Beau Brummell's description of a well-dressed man so dressed that no one would ever observe him. The moment you begin to remark a man's style the odds are that there is something the matter with it.
In a literary point of view we have already noticed that he was the creator of the modern Latin prose; his importance rests on his mastery of style, and it is only as a stylist that he shows confidence in himself. In the character of an author, on the other hand, he stands quite as low as in that of a statesman.
Not a stylist, as measured by the highest Elizabethan standards of charm and mellifluence, he possessed a clearness and directness which win the modern reader. By his methods of analysis he displayed a quality of mind akin to and probably influenced by that of Calvin, while his intellectual attitude showed the stimulus of the Reformation. He was indeed in his own restricted field a reformer.
Every day for a week he had exercised himself in letter writing: he had practiced every style, from the jocular to the gravely interrogative, and had succeeded pretty well as a stylist, but the point, the point, the bank deposit, remained still insurmountable and unapproachable.
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