he did, he would become so self-conscious that he would be quite unable to write. He may—if I myself am normal he certainly does—consider specific problems of “style.” He may say, “That sentence hasn’t the right swing,” or “That speech is too highfalutin’ for a plain chap like this character,” or “That sentence is banal—got it from that idiotic editorial I was reading yesterday.” The generic concept of “style,” as something apart from, distinguishable from, the matter, the thought, the story, does not come to his mind.
He writes as God lets him. He writes—if he is good enough!—as Tilden plays tennis or as Dempsey fights, which is to say, he throws himself into it with never a moment of the dilettante’s sitting back and watching himself perform.
This whole question of style vs. matter, of elegant style vs. vulgar, of simplicity vs. embroidering, is as metaphysical and vain as the outmoded (and I suspect the word “outmoded” is a signal of “bad style”) discussions of Body and Soul and Mind. Of such metaphysics, we have had enough. Today, east and north of Kansas City, Kansas, we do not writhe in such fantasies. We cannot see that there is any distinction between Soul and Mind. And we believe that we know that with a sick Soul-Mind, we shall have a sick Body; and that with a sick Body, the Mind-Soul cannot be sane. And, still more, we are weary of even such a clarification of that metaphysics. We do not, mostly, talk of Body generically, but say, prosaically, “My liver’s bad and so I feel cross.”
So is it with that outworn conception called “style.”
“Style” is the manner in which a person expresses what he feels. It is dependent on two things: his ability to feel, and his possession, through reading or conversation, of a vocabulary adequate to express his feeling. Without adequate feeling, which is a quality not to be learned in schools, and without vocabulary, which is a treasure less to be derived from exterior instruction than from the inexplicable qualities of memory and good taste, he will have no style.
There is probably more nonsense written regarding the anatomy of “style” than even the anatomies of virtue, sound government, and love. Instruction in “style,” like instruction in every other aspect of education, cannot be given to anyone who does not instinctively know it at the beginning.
This is good style:
John Smith meets James Brown on Main Street, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and remarks, “Mornin’! Nice day!” It is not merely good style; it is perfect. Were he to say, “Hey, youse,” or were he to say, “My dear neighbor, it refreshes the soul to encounter you this daedal mom, when from yon hill the early sun its beams displays,” he would equally have bad style.
And this is good style: In The Principles and Practice of Medicine by Osler and McCrae, it stands:
“Apart from dysentery of the Shiga type, the amoebic and terminal forms, there is a variety of ulcerative colitis, sometimes of great severity, not uncommon in England and the United States.”
And this to come is also good style, no better than the preceding and no worse, since each of them completely expresses its thought:A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
That I should write ever as absolutely as Coleridge, as Osler and McCrae, or as Jack Smith at ease with Jim Brown, seems to me improbable. But at least I hope that, like them, I shall ever be so absorbed in what I have to say that I shall, like them, write without for one moment stopping to say, “Is this good style?”4
When Lewis says that no competent writer uses the word style in regard to his own work, he means that a writer cannot think of a style when he works. This is proper advice; you must not aim self-consciously at a style while you are expressing a thought. But it does not follow, as Lewis implies, that a writer cannot ever hold in his mind a concept of style—that he cannot ever think of style, or judge his own writing, or hold literary standards.
Lewis says that a writer may “consider specific problems of ‘style.’ ” He may say, “That sentence hasn’t the right swing,” or “That speech is too highfalutin’,” or “That sentence is banal.” Lewis knows that these concretes pertain to style. Why then does he refuse to recognize the general abstraction that unites them? He