CHAPTER IV - A NOTE ON REALISM (16)
STYLE is the invariable mark of any master; and for the
student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with
the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may
improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force,
the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of
birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the
just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the
proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the
elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important,
and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end -
these, which taken together constitute technical perfection,
are to some degree within the reach of industry and
intellectual courage. What to put in and what to leave out;
whether some particular fact be organically necessary or
purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it
may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally,
whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and
notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of
plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that
patrols the highways of executive art has no more
unanswerable riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great
change of the past century has been effected by the admission
of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at
length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the
novelist.
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