If a man has been thinned by illness and
finds his clothes too big, it is not by cutting them down, but by
recovering his usual bodily condition, that he ought to make them fit
him again.
Let me here mention an error of style, very prevalent nowadays,
and, in the degraded state of literature and the neglect of ancient
languages, always on the increase; I mean _subjectivity_. A writer
commits this error when he thinks it enough if he himself knows what
he means and wants to say, and takes no thought for the reader, who is
left to get at the bottom of it as best he can. This is as though the
author were holding a monologue; whereas, it ought to be a dialogue;
and a dialogue, too, in which he must express himself all the more
clearly inasmuch as he cannot hear the questions of his interlocutor.
Style should for this very reason never be subjective, but
_objective_; and it will not be objective unless the words are so set
down that they directly force the reader to think precisely the same
thing as the author thought when he wrote them. Nor will this result
be obtained unless the author has always been careful to remember that
thought so far follows the law of gravity that it travels from head to
paper much more easily than from paper to head; so that he must assist
the latter passage by every means in his power.
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