Now
it is about literature that we are speaking.
In the matter of style, there is another excellent way. You need not
neglect it, but you may study it wrongly. You may be affectedly self-
conscious, you may imitate the ingenious persons who carefully avoid the
natural word, the spontaneous phrase, and employ some other set of terms
which can hardly be construed. You may use, like a young essayist whom I
have lovingly observed, a proportion of eighty adjectives to every sixty-
five other words of all denominations. You may hunt for odd words, and
thrust them into the wrong places, as where you say that a man's nose is
"beetling," that the sun sank in "a cauldron of daffodil chaos," and the
like. {2} You may use common words in an unwonted sense, keeping some
private interpretation clearly before you. Thus you may speak, if you
like to write partly in the tongue of Hellas, about "assimilating the
_ethos_" of a work of art, and so write that people shall think of the
processes of digestion. You may speak of "exhausting the beauty" of a
landscape, and, somehow, convey the notion of sucking an orange dry.
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