Words , as we have already seen , have no meanings in themselves ; all the meanings they have are imparted to them by living people .sx There are certain steadying forces , such as the nation's literature , and the close social intercourse between the coming generation and the passing generation - forces which tend to give stability and continuity to those meanings ; but they can give no permanence to what is so largely dependent on the vagaries of human nature and human society .sx Each generation passes on its heritage of language with something of its own image and superscription left upon it .sx It thus happens that changes which seem slight and slow at close view , become large and startling when looked at from a wider angle .sx Much of the language of Shakespeare's day is almost unintelligble to the mass of people to-day ; and many of the words in common use to-day bore a very different significance a hundred years ago .sx It is only by assuming these large secular changes that we can account for the wide differences in the languages that belong to one and the same group .sx The Indo-European tongues , for instance , are all supposed to have sprung from one common stock .sx And as each has moved further and further away from its source , so has it also drifted further and further away from its kith and kin .sx So that languages which , like the Rhine and the Rhone , began close together have , like the Rhine and the Rhone , ended by being hundreds of miles apart .sx Certain natural forces must have been at work to produce these profound changes ; and to believe that these natural forces have ceased to operate , or ever will cease to operate , is to believe that the moon .sx will cease to draw the tides , and the winds to mould the surface of the sea .sx We must , in fact , accept the plain truth that the bond between word and meaning ( and by word I mean a group of words as well ) is frail and precarious .sx It was neither forged nor kept constant by any physical forces .sx Indeed , the only forces that count in this regard - the forces that act through human nature-tend to keep it elastic and variable .sx Against these natural forces , pedants and purists fight in vain .sx They are but glorified Mrs. Partingtons trying to mop up the Atlantic .sx This being so , the theory of le mot juste falls to the ground .sx The cult of le mot juste , or the inevitable word , arose in France in the nineteenth century , with Gustave Flaubert as its high priest , and many young writers on both sides of the Channel as his ardent disciples .sx It taught that there was one , and only one , perfect way of expressing an idea , and that it was the duty of the elect to seek it diligently till they found it .sx And many partisans of this creed would spend hours and even days searching for the right adjective , or the right phrase , or the right turn of expression .sx And false as the doctrine is as a universal law , it has quite enough truth in it to keep it alive .sx And in practice it is harmless enough ; nay , even fruitful and beneficent .sx For by inciting the writer to self-criticism , to constant vigilance and re-vision , and to a persistent effort towards lucidity and order , it relieves the reader of all unnecessary trouble and fatigue in following the sense .sx The bigger share of the burden of transmission the writer takes upon his own shoulders ; which is of course where it should be .sx He takes Schopenhauer's advice in remembering " that thought so far follows the law of gravity that it travels from head to paper much more easily than from paper to head .sx " If the doctrine of le mot juste does nothing else , it at least fosters the salutary truth that the first words that present themselves to the mind are not necessarily the best words ; nor is the first order of the words the best order .sx It thus leads to experiment with words and their sequence ; to the pondering of alternative modes of expression ; and to the rejection of the worse in favour of the better .sx The principles of selection and organisation will vary with the writer ; but the fact that he selects and organises at all is enough to distinguish him from the rank and file .sx It is enough to give his writings " style .sx " That , at any rate , is the only meaning I can attach to the vague assertion , " Mr. So-and-so has style .sx " He has style if he takes trouble with his prose .sx It does not mean , or at least it should not mean , that his style is good .sx It may be a very vicious and detestable style .sx As an example of a styleless writer I may mention Dr. Stanley Hall .sx He had learning , he had influence , he had a facile pen ; but he had no style .sx Open any one of his voluminous works at any page and you are as likely as not to come across sentences of this kind :sx In nothing does the unwritten tradition , custom , spirit , moral tone of one college differ quite so much from that of another .sx These are as diverse , indeed , as the professional rules of medicine , which has its own ethical code , of labour organisations which have another , of lawyers , journalists and teachers , which are more unformulated , and of the army and military schools , which are .sx most highly evolved of all ( witness the stories of Nathan Hale , Samuel Davis , Major Wirz , the Dreyfus case and many a noble tale from regulars down , and of those who have preferred death to treason) ?sx Ideas were poured out from Stanley Hall's fertile mind like bricks tipped from a cart .sx He was far too impatient to spend time in arranging and rearranging them .sx He was content if they held together grammatically .sx Our own Professor Saintsbury had a similar type of mind .sx Now for an example of a man who has style but would be better without it .sx We are assured that he has style , for he is described in the preface to his book as " an author and journalist of a high order .sx " He took over the results of experiments and researches made by an American psychologist and " wrote them up " for the public in this fashion :sx The classification of individuals relative to one another and with reference to the possession of a particular mental ability or group of abilities is , therefore , necessarily based upon their relative ability to express in some intelligible and unmistakable fashion their mental power and qualities .sx This appears to be his stylistic way of saying that if we wish to arrange people in order of merit in respect of any mental quality , we must ask them questions and .sx judge their answers .sx We are now better able to consider in what sense it is true that a writer's style is the writer's self .sx The aphorism is one of those vague and oracular statements which may be given many different interpretations,some of which are obviously true , and others flagrantly false .sx It is obviously true that a man's education and experience influence his style .sx A Frenchman writes French rather than German ; a scholarly person will not write illiterate prose .sx It is obviously true that the core of a man's personality - his inner self , his innate impulses and interests - influences his style .sx For this inner and deeper self is not wholly the passive victim of experience :sx in a certain measure it makes its own experience ; and in the same measure it makes its own style .sx On the other hand , it is flagrantly false that a man's literary style is a mirror of himself .sx If it is , it is a very bad mirror , sometimes blurred and often cracked .sx From Rousseau's Confessions we can , apart from its contents , discover much about Rousseau him-self .sx But there is one thing we cannot discover ; and that is whether he is a truth-teller or a liar .sx We cannot , in fact , argue from the man to the style ; nor yet back again from the style to the man .sx Those who take refuge in the phrase Le style est l'homme meme are often merely throwing up the sponge .sx They confess that style is as mysterious as personality , and equally unique and inexplicable .sx To the extent that a man's likes and dislikes reflect his personality , his style is a rough index of himself .sx For style always implies choice .sx Rarely is a man so simple or so illiterate that he has no choice of styles at his disposal .sx Either consciously or unconsciously he accepts some modes of expression and rejects others .sx Even an affected style marks a striving towards some sort of ideal .sx Much has already been said about soliloquy or inner speech ; and much more remains .sx to be said .sx For that is the important stage at which thought is conceived in the mind ; and the stage at which style really begins .sx For if an idea is not conceived in the form of words , it is at least conceived in the presence of words .sx And the idea and the words are , for some reason or other , inextricably tangled up together .sx And the words and phrases which have welled up from the unconscious are largely determined by what the mind has previously loved and pondered .sx And when elaboration begins ; when the thinker chooses and marshals his words in order to render them fit for utterance through his lips or his pen , he is again influenced by certain standards of right and wrong , of good and bad , of shapely and unshapely .sx In fact he gives his prose a pattern that pleases him .sx And he gives it a rhythm that pleases him too .sx Everybody's head is full of those irregular rhythms which occur in prose .sx He cannot escape them .sx He cannot speak without them ; he cannot write without them .sx He cannot even say good morning without giving it one or other of these two rhythms :sx , .sx .sx The sentence I am writing at this moment , and indeed every sentence in the book , has a definite rhythm which I distinctly hear in my head before I commit the words to paper .sx And , unless his imagination of sounds is inordinately weak , the reader as he reads in silence will hear it too .sx This is so obvious that it seems superfluous to mention it .sx What is not so obvious is that out of the infinite number of possible rhythms there are some which specially appeal to the speaker or writer , and some which specially repel him .sx And , whether he isaware of it or not , his choice of words is partly determined by this secret predilection ; a predilection which first shows itself in the words that spontaneously occur to his mind , and subsequently in any revision he may happen to make .sx In some people this predilection is very strong ; but in the majority it is so weak that it manifests itself in a negative form only .sx There are certain rhythms which they dislike ; to the rest they are indifferent .sx A writer often feels that at a certain point his sentence does not flow easily - does not yield what seems to him an agreeable rhythm .sx And he may find that by some such simple trick as substituting a word of two syllables for a word of one syllable he can remove the obstruction ; or he may find it necessary to run his sentence into an entirely new channel .sx No one can , however , inexorably fix the rhythm of a piece of prose by merely getting it printed .sx He has the reader to reckon with .sx And the reader , though he is tied down by the accepted accents of the longer words , can do almost what he likes with monosyllables .sx One expects to hear from the reading-desk in church but one rendering of the passage All is vanity and vexation of spirit ; but how about this one ?sx And God said , Let there be light :sx and there was light .sx Where should the stresses come ?sx In the days of my youth the main emphasis was laid on the three words , God , light , and was ; nowadays it is given to the words , God , light , and light .sx In fact rhythm is inextricably mixed up with intonation and emphasis , and , to a certain extent , shares their variability .sx