Important are its morphological peculiarities. It makes a great deal of

difference for the development of style if the language can or cannot

create compound words, if its structure is synthetic or analytic, if the

words of its sentences have considerable freedom of position or are

compelled to fall into a rigidly determined sequence. The major

characteristics of style, in so far as style is a technical matter of

the building and placing of words, are given by the language itself,

quite as inescapably, indeed, as the general acoustic effect of verse is

given by the sounds and natural accents of the language. These necessary

fundamentals of style are hardly felt by the artist to constrain his

individuality of expression. They rather point the way to those

stylistic developments that most suit the natural bent of the language.

It is not in the least likely that a truly great style can seriously

oppose itself to the basic form patterns of the language. It not only

incorporates them, it builds on them. The merit of such a style as W.H.

Hudson's or George Moore's[199] is that it does with ease and economy

what the language is always trying to do. Carlylese, though individual

and vigorous, is yet not style; it is a Teutonic mannerism. Nor is the

prose of Milton and his contemporaries strictly English; it is

semi-Latin done into magnificent English words.

[Footnote 199: Aside from individual peculiarities of diction, the

selection and evaluation of particular words as such.]

It is strange how long it has taken the European literatures to learn

that style is not an absolute, a something that is to be imposed on the

language from Greek or Latin models, but merely the language itself,

running in its natural grooves, and with enough of an individual accent

to allow the artist's personality to be felt as a presence, not as an

acrobat. We understand more clearly now that what is effective and

beautiful in one language is a vice in another. Latin and Eskimo, with

their highly inflected forms, lend themselves to an elaborately periodic

structure that would be boring in English. English allows, even demands,

a looseness that would be insipid in Chinese. And Chinese, with its

unmodified words and rigid sequences, has a compactness of phrase, a

terse parallelism, and a silent suggestiveness that would be too tart,

too mathematical, for the English genius. While we cannot assimilate the

luxurious periods of Latin nor the pointilliste style of the Chinese

classics, we can enter sympathetically into the spirit of these alien

techniques.

I believe that any English poet of to-day would be thankful for the

concision that a Chinese poetaster attains without effort. Here is an

example:[200]

[Footnote 200: Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional

verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai

for Canada.]

Wu-river[201] stream mouth evening sun sink,

North look Liao-Tung,[202] not see home.

Steam whistle several noise, sky-earth boundless,

Float float one reed out Middle-Kingdom.

[Footnote 201: The old name of the country about the mouth of the

Yangtsze.]

[Footnote 202: A province of Manchuria.]

These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted: "At the mouth

of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is about to sink, I look north toward

Liao-Tung but do not see my home. The steam-whistle shrills several

times on the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth. The steamer,

floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of the Middle

Kingdom."[203] But we must not envy Chinese its terseness unduly. Our

more sprawling mode of expression is capable of its own beauties, and

the more compact luxuriance of Latin style has its loveliness too.

There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style as there are

languages. Most of these are merely potential, awaiting the hand of

artists who will never come. And yet in the recorded texts of primitive

tradition and song there are many passages of unique vigor and beauty.

The structure of the language often forces an assemblage of concepts

that impresses us as a stylistic discovery. Single Algonkin words are

like tiny imagist poems. We must be careful not to exaggerate a

freshness of content that is at least half due to our freshness of

approach, but the possibility is indicated none the less of utterly

alien literary styles, each distinctive with its disclosure of the

search of the human spirit for beautiful form.

[Footnote 203: I.e., China.]

Probably nothing better illustrates the formal dependence of literature

on language than the prosodic aspect of poetry. Quantitative verse was

entirely natural to the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in

connection with the chant and the dance,[204] but because alternations

of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy

of the language. The tonal accents, which were only secondarily stress

phenomena, helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality.

When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin verse, there was

comparatively little strain, for Latin too was characterized by an acute

awareness of quantitative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was

more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, therefore, the

purely quantitative meters modeled after the Greek were felt as a shade

more artificial than in the language of their origin. The attempt to

cast English verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been successful.

The dynamic basis of English is not quantity,[205] but stress, the

alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. This fact gives

English verse an entirely different slant and has determined the

development of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the evolution

of new forms. Neither stress nor syllabic weight is a very keen

psychologic factor in the dynamics of French. The syllable has great