"What custom wills in all things do you do it."

Individual style will come to you naturally as you become more conscious
of what it is you wish to express. There are two kinds of insincerity in
style, the employment of a ready-made conventional manner that is not
understood and that does not fit the matter; and the running after and
laboriously seeking an original manner when no original matter exists.
Good style depends on a clear idea of what it is you wish to do; it is
the shortest means to the end aimed at, the most apt manner of conveying
that personal "something" that is in all good work. "The style is the
man," as Flaubert says. The splendour and value of your style will
depend on the splendour and value of the mental vision inspired in you,
that you seek to convey; on the quality of the man, in other words. And
this is not a matter where direct teaching can help you, but rests
between your own consciousness and those higher powers that move it.

APPENDIX

If you add a line of 5 inches to one of 8 inches you produce one 13
inches long, and if you proceed by always adding the last two you arrive
at a series of lengths, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 inches, &c. Mr. William
Schooling tells me that any two of these lines adjoining one another are
practically in the same proportion to each other; that is to say, one 8
inches is 1.600 times the size of one 5 inches, and the 13-inch line is
1.625 the size of the 8-inch, and the 21-inch line being 1.615 times the
13-inch line, and so on. With the mathematician's love of accuracy, Mr.
Schooling has worked out the exact proportion that should exist between
a series of quantities for them to be in the same proportion to their
neighbours, and in which any two added together would produce the next.
There is only one proportion that will do this, and although very
formidable, stated exactly, for practical purposes, it is that between 5
and a fraction over 8. Stated accurately to eleven places of decimals it
is (1 + sqrt(5))/2 = 1.61803398875 (nearly).

We have evidently here a very unique proportion. Mr. Schooling has
called this the Phi proportion, and it will be convenient to refer to it
by this name.

[Illustration:

THE PHI PROPORTION

EC is 1.618033, &c., times size of AB,
CD " " " " BC,
DE " " " " CD, &c.,

AC=CD
BD=DE, &c.]

Testing this proportion on the reproductions of pictures in this book
in the