Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the
brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we
judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a
peg to plait about, takes up at once two or more elements or
two or more views of the subject in hand; combines,
implicates, and contrasts them; and while, in one sense, he
was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary knot, he
will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the
meaning, or to have transacted the work of two sentences in
the space of one. In the change from the successive shallow
statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous
flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast
amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly
see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and
stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the
generation and affinity of events. The wit we might imagine
to be lost; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these
perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties overcome,
this double purpose attained, these two oranges kept
simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not,
afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little
recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which
we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect,
not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most
natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which
attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the
greatest gain to sense and vigour.
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