in {165} such a
way as to make them your own. To do so is one of the privileges of the
masters of style. Few people have had more of it than Johnson. His
prose, spoken or written, is altogether wanting in some of the greatest
elements of style: it has no music, no mystery, no gift of suggestion,
very little of the higher sort of imagination, nothing at all of what
we have been taught to call the Celtic side of the English mind. But
in this particular power of making the old new, and the commonplace
individual, Johnson is among the great masters. And he shows it in his
talk even more than in his writings. All that he says has that supreme
mark of style; it cannot be translated without loss. The only
indisputable proof of an author possessing style is his being
unquotable except in his own words. If a paraphrase will do he may
have learning, wisdom, profundity, what you will, but style he has not.
Style is the expression of an individual, appearing once and only once
in the world; it is Keats or Carlyle or Swinburne: it never has been
and never will be anybody else.

Its presence in Johnson is painfully brought home to any one who tries
to quote his good things without the assistance of a very accurate
verbal memory. Even when he says such a thing as "This is wretched
stuff, sir," the words manage to have style because {166} they express
his convictions in a way which is his, and no one else's. This is
taking it at its lowest, of course; when we go a little further and
take a sentence like the famous remark about Ossian, "Sir, a man might
write such stuff for ever if he would abandon his mind to it," the
sting in the word "abandon" is the sort of thing which other people
devise at their desks, but which Johnson has ready on his lips for
immediate use. So again, he seems to have been able not only to find
the most telling word in a moment, but to put his thought in the most
telling shape. Many people then and since disliked and disapproved of
Bolingbroke. But has there ever, then or at any other time, been a man
who could find such language for his disapproval as Johnson? "Sir, he
was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss
against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution
to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman
to draw the trigger after his death." It is at once as devastating as
a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a