Following Buffon's idea of "order and movement," we may say, perhaps,
that style results from the preservation in every part of some sense of
the form of the whole. It implies a sense of relations as well as of
statement. It is not mere expression of a thought in a manner peculiar
to the artist (in words, color, marble, what not), but it is such
expression penetrated with both reminiscence and anticipation. It is,
indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of what we mean by
expression, which is mainly a matter of personal energy. Style means
correctness, precision, that feeling for the _ensemble_ on which an
inharmonious detail jars. Expression results from a sense of the value
of the detail. If Walt Whitman, for example, were what his admirers'
defective sense of style fancies him, he would be expressive. If French
academic art had as little expression as its censors assert, it would
still illustrate style--the quality which modifies the native and
apposite form of the concrete individual thing with reference to what
has preceded and what is to follow it; the quality, in a word, whose
effort is to harmonize the object with its environment.
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