to put sentences together according to relation of clauses, how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has to give out.  Even in these superficial lessons success imports something more than a superficial capacity.  These lessons learnt, and you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within you. Le style c’est l’homme meme (a man’s style is his very self), is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon.  Style comes out of the interior:  beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give to the surface its movement and sparkle.  Mostly when people talk of style ’t is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath.  In popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs beneath; in Tom Moore’s, for example, or Southey’s.

Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style.  Tact and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent, and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the presence of these qualities.  This superiority of skill in form is illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with the literature of Germany, and even with that of England.  The French follow a precept thus embodied by Beranger:  “Perfection of style should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse useful thoughts.  Style, which is only the form appropriated to a subject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thought has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people’s brains.  To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideas one wishes to make others adopt.”  And so effective is the following of such a precept that, through careful devices and manipulating cleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by some writers who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping no deeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which it keeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact, until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more.

The possession of certain mental gifts constitutes a talent for writing, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers of the mind, are secondary.  Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbe Gerbet that he “had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm of phrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language, what, in short, makes a talent for writing.”  The possessor of these qualifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity.  Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets a clear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, that she always played well, never better.