Style

Style is a classic long essay on prose style and the art of writing by the British scholar and literary critic Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861–1922), published in London by Edward Arnold at the turn of the century and long included in various public-domain lists of English classics. The book opens with the Latin origin of the word "style": it first meant the most rigid, simplest writing instrument, yet later became the name for the most fluid, most elusive of linguistic arts. From there Raleigh considers style through analogies with other arts—architecture, painting, music, drama, cricket—and then returns to the three elements of literature itself: the tool (language), the reader (audience), and the author. In the author's view, style is ultimately the posture of the mind and the posture of the soul: what is clear and orderly can be taught, even corrected; what lies deeper in style is the natural expression of character and taste, and therefore cannot be reduced to rules. The essay discusses meaning and sound, image and melody, metaphor and abstraction, elegance and slang, archaism and imitation of the antique, romantic and classical, the constraints of definition upon thought, synonyms and variation of expression, le mot propre, sincerity and affectation, simplicity and force, the dramatic and the suggestive, quotation and allusion, and finally whether style can be taught. The book is short but richly branched and dense with metaphor, its tone unhurried and humorous—a work of style theory and critical essay for experienced readers.