THE QUESTION OF STYLE
nouns! Bad writers cannot be made to comprehend this. They think divorce is not permitted to words. There are people who write without blushing: venerable trees, melodious accents. Venerable is not an ugly word; put it with another substantive—"your venerable burden," "most venerable worth," etc.,—you see the union is good. In short, the epithet should be the mistress of the substantive, never its lawful wife. Between words there must be passing liaisons, but no eternal marriages. It is that which distinguishes the original writer from others.
It is that, an Anglo-Saxon critic finds himself instinctively adding, that distinguishes just a few of the more prominent British writers of the young school; writers otherwise very wide apart indeed—Rudyard Kipling and Maurice Hewlett, Joseph Conrad and Alfred Ollivant and J. C. Snaith—to mention only a few striking examples. Each of these has a
[232]
