Words like “fictional” and “fictive” are distinctly to be recommended, and there are epithets such as “weird,” “strange,” “wild,” “intimate,” and the rest, which blend pleasantly with “all the time” for “always”; “back of” for “behind”; “belong with” for “belong to”; “live like I do” for “as I do.” The authors who combine those charms are rare, but we can strive to be among them.
In short, he who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef, and must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the
bizarre
, the slipshod or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or the sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in “Wardour-street English,” the sham archaic, a lingo never spoken by mortal man, and composed of patches borrowed from authors between Piers Plowman and Gabriel Harvey. A few literal translations of Icelandic phrases may be thrown in; the result, as furniture-dealers say, is a “made-up article.”
On the subject of style another hint may be offered. Style may be good in itself, but inappropriate to the subject. For example, style which may be excellently adapted to a theological essay, may be but ill-suited for a dialogue in a novel. There are subjects of which the poet says
Ornari res ipsa vetat, contenta doceri
.
The matter declines to be adorned, and is content with being clearly stated. I do not know what would occur if the writer of the Money Article in the
Times
treated his topic with reckless gaiety. Probably that number of the journal in which the essay appeared would have a large sale, but the author might achieve professional failure; in the office. On the whole it may not be the wiser plan to write about the Origins of Religion in the style which might suit a study of the life of ballet dancers; the two MM. Halévy, the learned and the popular, would make a blunder if they exchanged styles. Yet Gibbon never denies himself a jest, and Montesquieu’s
Esprit des Lois
was called
L’Esprit sur les
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