Page 392 - The Story of My Lif

In his essay on style De Quincey says that the best English is to be found in the

letters of the cultivated gentlewoman, because she has read only a few good
books and has not been corrupted by the style of newspapers and the jargon of
street, market-place, and assembly hall.

Precisely these outward circumstances account for Helen Keller’s use of English.
In the early years of her education she had only good things to read; some were,

indeed, trivial and not excellent in style, but not one was positively bad in
manner or substance.

This happy condition has obtained throughout her life. She has been nurtured on

imaginative literature, and she has gathered from it into her vigorous and
tenacious memory the style of great writers. “A new word opens its heart to me,”
she writes in a letter; and when she uses the word its heart is still open. When
she was twelve years old, she was asked what book she would take on a long
railroad journey. “Paradise Lost,” she answered, and she read it on the train.

Until the last year or two she has not been master of her style, rather has her
style been master of her. It is only since she has made composition a more
conscious study that she has ceased to be the victim of the phrase; the lucky
victim, fortunately, of the good phrase.

When in 1892, she was encouraged to write a sketch of her life for the Youth’s
Companion, in the hope that it would reassure her and help her to recover from
the effect of “The Frost King,” she produced a piece of composition which is
much more remarkable and in itself more entertaining at some points than the
corresponding part of her story in this book. When she came to retell the story in
a fuller form, the echo was still in her mind of the phrases she had written nine
years before. Yet she had not seen her sketch in the Youth’s Companion since
she wrote it, except two passages which Miss Sullivan read to her to remind her
of things she should say in this autobiography, and to show her, when her
phrasing troubled her, how much better she did as a little girl.