ABSTRACT
Style, in the sense in which author planning to use the word, is, like most other things that are worth while, the result of a difficult mediation. It goes without saying that a man's style should have about it something highly individual; but it is at least equally important that it should have about it something structural. This structural quality can arise only from the subordination of the uniqueness that each one of us receives as a free gift of nature to some larger whole. A conflict between old and new had grown up, in language as elsewhere, that Sainte-Beuve sums up in two words: court and democracy. 'The spirit of rhetoric,' says Jowett, 'was soon to spread over all Hellas; and Plato with prophetic insight may have seen from afar, the great literary waste or dead level or interminable marsh into which Greek literature was soon to disappear.'.
