say Verse. He has
insisted that Literature is a living art, to be practised. But just what
we most needed he has not told. At the final doorway to the secret he
turned his back and left us. Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity--these we
may achieve. But where has he helped us to write with beauty, with charm,
with distinction? Where has he given us rules for what is called _Style_
in short?--having attained which an author may count himself set up in
business.'

Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind's ear I heard you reproaching me. I beg you
to accept what follows for my apology.

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things
which Style is _not_; which have little or nothing to do with Style,
though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is
not--can never be--extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian
lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he
sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged
with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of
jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation,
you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a
practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an
impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it
--whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.
_Murder your darlings._'

But let me plead further that you have not been left altogether without
clue to the secret of what Style is. That you must master the secret for
yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised that
a writer's training would be easy. Yet a clue was certainly put in your
hands when, having insisted that Literature is a living art, I added that
therefore it must be personal and of its essence personal.

This goes very deep: it conditions all our criticism of art. Yet it
conceals no mystery. You may see its meaning most easily and clearly,
perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes--say Pure
Mathematics with Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with
man's thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things are
rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther
away from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is not
ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon
keep the tally.