that eats into the administrative body of our State like a cancer, without looking for my style in Figaro or Polichinel?
Style . . . yes! Before me lie documents in which there is style! Style which showed that there was, close at hand, a man in the true sense, a man to whom it would have been worth while to put out a helping hand! And what has that style availed poor Havelaar? He did not translate his tears into a grin, he jeered not, he did not seek to strike home by garish variety of colours, or by the jests of the crier in front of the booth at the fair . . . what has it availed him?
If I could write as he, I should write otherwise than he.
Style? Did you not hear how he spoke to the Chiefs? What has it availed him?
If I could speak as he, I should speak otherwise than he.
Away with kindly language, away with gentleness, frankness, simplicity, feeling! Away with all that savours of Horatius’s justum ac tenacem! Sound trumpets here, and the loud clatter of cymbals, and the sharp hiss of rockets, and the scraping of untuned strings, and now and then a word of truth, so that it may steal in like a forbidden article, under cover of so many drumming and piping sounds!
Style? He had style! He had too much soul to drown his thoughts in the “I have the honours” and the “noble-severities” and the “respectfully submitted for considerations,” which are the voluptuous joy of the little world in which he moved. When he wrote, something went through you who read it which made you realize that clouds accompanied the thunderstorm, and that it was not merely the rumble of a sheet-iron stage-thunder you heard. When he struck fire from his thought-conceptions, you felt the heat of that fire, unless you were a born office-man, or a Governor-General, or the writer of the most loathly Report on “peaceful peace.” And what has it availed him?
So if I wish to be heard—and above all understood!—I must write otherwise than he. But then, how?
