François Fénelon, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The plain style is not poverty. That is the first confusion to clear away, because the men who resist it imagine they are defending richness, when what they are actually defending is clutter. Every brilliant thought that does not drive toward proving, portraying, or moving the hearer is a conceit — nothing more.1 A conceit is what happens when the speaker wishes to please and to display his wit rather than to carry his listener somewhere.2
Strip those away and you have not stripped the discourse bare; you have removed everything that was competing with the thing being said. What remains is not thin. It is clear. Homer and Virgil are rather pleasing writers — no one disputes this — yet you will not find in them what are properly called conceits.3 Nature shows herself throughout, and art carefully conceals herself; not a single word appears to have been put in to plume up the poet's wit.4
A painter aspires to set before your eyes forests, mountains, rivers, men and their passions, without your being able to take notice of the strokes of his brush, and the moment you can see the brush the painting has failed.5 The same law governs speech. Art is clumsy and contemptible whenever it makes itself visible.6 Now consider what Scripture does with this.
Christ's simplicity of style is entirely of the ancient taste — it corresponds to Moses and to the prophets — yet simple and familiar as it is, it is sublime in many places.7 We have no preacher of our time who has been as figurative in his best-wrought sermons as Christ was in his plainest discourses.8 He says what he pleases and says it without effort; every grandeur that strikes us with astonishment is natural to him, because he speaks what he sees.9
That is the test of the plain style: not that it avoids figures, but that every figure is load-bearing, nothing is there to be admired for itself, and the speaker has made himself forgotten in order to reveal only the things and the persons he wishes to set before the reader's eyes.10 So when a young preacher asks me what the plain style requires, I ask him a different question: after the sermon, what did the hearer do?
If the answer is that the hearer admired the sermon, the style has failed, whatever its surface texture — plain or ornate makes no difference. The three offices are to prove, to portray, and to move.11 Pleasure is a by-product that may attend any of them; it is the end of none. A discourse that produces only pleasure has succeeded as a performance and failed as a sermon.
The plain style, rightly understood, is simply the refusal to let anything in the speech compete with those three offices — and that refusal, faithfully observed, turns out to produce something far more moving than the most elaborate ornamentation ever managed.
Every brilliant thought which does not drive towards one of these three things is only a conceit.Dialogues on Eloquence
It is not every sort of affectation. It is the sort one has when he wishes to please and display wit.Dialogues on Eloquence
Don't you find that Virgil and Homer are rather pleasing writers?... Yet you will not find in them what are called conceits.Dialogues on Eloquence
Theirs are unpretentious things; nature shows herself throughout; and throughout art carefully conceals herself. You do not find there a single word which appears to be put in to plume up the poet's wit.Dialogues on Eloquence
He stakes his reputation upon not appearing at all, in order to engage you in the things which he paints, as a painter aspires to put before your eyes forests, mountains, rivers, distances, buildings, men, their adventures, their actions, their various passions, without your being able to take notice of the strokes of his brush.Dialogues on Eloquence
Art is clumsy and contemptible whenever it makes itself visible.Dialogues on Eloquence
His simplicity of style is completely to the ancient taste. It corresponds both to Moses and to the prophets... But simple and familiar as it is, it is sublime and symbolic in many places.Dialogues on Eloquence
It will be easy to prove in detail, with the texts in hand, that we have no preacher of our time who has been as figurative in his best-wrought sermons as Christ was in his preaching to the people.Dialogues on Eloquence
Christ, the master of his doctrine, preaches it in full serenity; he says what he pleases, and he says it without any effort... Every grandeur that strikes us with astonishment is natural to him. He is born to them, and he speaks what he sees.Dialogues on Eloquence
Plato... assures us that in writing one is obliged always to conceal himself, to make himself forgotten, and to reveal only the things and the persons whom he wishes to set before the reader's eyes.Dialogues on Eloquence
I believe that all eloquence can be reduced to proving, to portraying, and to striking.Dialogues on Eloquence