'The Whole Secret of a Living Style'

It’s hard to imagine Thomas Hardy reading Tristram Shandy or Essays of Elia, but we have it on his own authority that he did, and voluntarily. In fact, he reread them: “Read again Addison, Macaulay, Newman, Sterne, De Foe, Lamb, Gibbon, Burke, Times Leaders, &c. in a study of style.” How many writers today would undertake a comparable regimen of self-education? Few would encounter such a collection of prose masters in the curriculum of most schools, even the toniest, and it’s a truism that we learn to write by reading. Instinctively, we analyze a writer’s style, word by word, hearing the rhythm, assessing the tone. When we’re young, we ape it and judge the results. A professor once told me that the riskiest of writers to copy was Sterne, and she was probably right, but we can still learn from his conversational prose. Hardy continues:

“Am more and more confirmed in an idea I have long held, as a matter of commonsense, long before I thought of an old aphorism bearing on the subject:  ‘Ars est celare artem.’ The whole secret of a living style and the difference between it and a dead style, lies in not having too much style—being—in fact, a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there.”

The Latin tag, of disputed origin, may be translated “the art is to conceal the art.” The first writer this brings to mind is Swift, whose style is deceptively plain and simple, and charged with energy. Writers whose prose is neon – bright but casting little usable light -- include Emerson and William H. Gass. The carelessness Hardy describes is an artful balancing act, one beyond the means of most writers. He quotes the opening and closing lines of Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder”:

“A sweet disorder in the dress . . .

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility:

Do more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part.”

Then he adds: “Otherwise your style is like worn half-pence—all the fresh images rounded off by rubbing, and no crispness or movement at all.” All of the text quoted above is from The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, which originally was published in 1928 and 1930 under the name of Hardy’s widow, Florence Emily Hardy, but in fact was written by the novelist-poet himself. I find Hardy’s fiction almost unreadable. His poems are masterful. Some of the prose in his “biography” is nearly as good as his verse.