a full, rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist therefore will be well aware of physical science; science too attaining, in its turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the scholar is nothing without the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in use; ascertain, communi

of the manner of a true master we mean the ideas of science too, for after all the what is essential in his art. Pedantry chief stimulus of good style is to possess being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities of manner in a well bred person will still further illustrate good taste. The right vocabulary! Translators have not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of trans-cate, discover words like these it has lation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction; whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be with its elementary particles; Plato, for instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only each word or syllable be not of false color, to change my figure a little.

been part of our "business" to misuse. And still as language was made for man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed not to say "its," which ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his" and "hers," for inanimate things, being but a barbarous and really inexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like that. Racy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long, savorsome Latin words, rich in "second intention." In this late day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of such eclecticism we have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. How illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship throughout!

a

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would select if he read a dictionary, and still more of the words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, begets a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own spirit, and in the strictest sense original. That living authority which language needs lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognizing always that every A scholar writing for the scholarly, he language possesses a genius, a very fas. will of course leave something to the willtidious genius, of its own, expand at once ing intelligence of his reader. "To go and purify its very elements, which must preach to the first passer-by," says Monneeds change along with the changing taigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance thoughts of living people. Ninety years of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor; ago, for instance, great mental force, cer- thing, in fact, naturally distressing to the tainly, was needed by Wordsworth, to scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of break through the consecrated poetic offering uncomplimentary assistance to associations of a century, and speak the the reader's wit. To really strenuous language that was his, and was to become minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in in a measure the language of the next the challenge for a continuous effort on generation. But he did it with the tact their part, to be rewarded by securer and of a scholar also. English, for a quarter more intimate grasp of the author's sense. of a century past, has been assimilating Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means the phraseology of pictorial art; for half-ascêsis — that too has a beauty of its a century, the phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years ago; in part also the language of mystical theology; and none but pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For many years to come its enterprise may well lie in the natural ization of the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive scholarship; in a liberal naturalization of

own; and for the reader supposed there will be an æsthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to thought the logically filled space-connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome.

Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very various

last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.

demands upon literature. Still, scholars; assured of its congruity, he will still quesI suppose, and not only scholars but all tion its serviceableness: is it worth while, disinterested lovers of books, will always can we afford, to attend to just that, to look to it, as in all other fine art, for a just that figure, or literary reference, just refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a then? Surplusage! he will dread that, certain vulgarity in the actual world. A as the runner on his muscles. For in perfect poem like "Lycidas," a perfect truth all art does but consist in the refiction like "Transformation," the perfect moval of surplusage, from the last finish handling of a theory like Newman's "Idea of the gem-engraver blowing away the of a University," has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat." Here, then, with a view to the central need of a select few, those "men of a finer thread," who have formed and maintain the literary ideal everything, every com- And what applies to figure or flower ponent element, will have undergone exact must be understood of all other accidental trial, and, above all, there will be no un or removable ornaments of writing whatcharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar deco- ever; and not of specific ornament only, ration, permissible ornament being for the but of all that latent color and imagery most part structural or necessary. As the which language as such carries in it. A painter in his picture, so the artist in his lover of words for their own sake, to whom book, aims at the production by honorable nothing about them is unimportant, a artifice of a peculiar atmosphere. "The minute and constant observer of their artist,' says Schiller, "may be known physiognomy, he will be on the alert not rather by what he omits;" and in litera- only for obviously mixed metaphors, as ture, too, the true artist may be best rec- we know, but of the metaphor that is ognized by his tact of omission. For to mixed in all our speech, though a rapid the grave reader words too are grave; and use may involve no cognition of it. Curthe ornamental word, the figure, the acces-rently recognizing the incident, the color, sory form or color or reference, is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave " behind it of perhaps quite alien associa

tions.

Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of scholarly attentiveness I am recommending. But the true artist allows for it. He will remember that as the very word ornament indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," for instance, or in Stendhal's "Rouge et Noir," in a composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden, - he knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any diversion (literally) is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wandering away with him from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a ponderable something thereby. Even

the physical elements or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the resources of expression. The elementary particles of language will be turned into color and light and shade by his scholarly living in the sense of them. Still opposing the constant degradation of language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat colored glass as if it were clear, and while half the world is using figure unconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed personification - a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, because it has no really rhetorical motive - which plays so large a part there, and, as with more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value.

So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good taste respectively. They are both sub servient to a more intimate quality of good style; more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist himself. The otiose,

the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all other art, structure is all-important, felt or painfully missed everywhere? that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold and justify the first- a condition of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of mind in style.

can see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a highly qualified matter into compass at one view. For the literary architecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only foresight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growth of design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities, surprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary being subsumed under the unity of the whole. As truly, to the lack of such architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image, vigorously informing an entire, perhaps complex composition, which shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from first to last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses of conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, word, motive, or member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, an original structure in thought not organically complete. With such foresight the actual conclusion will most often get itself written, out of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With some strong and leading sense of the world, the tight hold of which secures composition and not mere loose accretion, the literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardor, retracing the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting mere assonances even that they may soothe the reader, or at least not interrupt

An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel-a writer whose works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and with obvious repression or economy of a fine rhetorical gift wrote a book of fascinating precision on a very obscure subject, to show that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with itself, of the apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, a song, or an essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself: style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital whole-him on his way; and then, somewhere ness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason—insight, foresight, retrospect, its simultaneous action true, most of all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence. Such logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines of composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long, contending, victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look closely, you

before the end comes, is burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it, leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end, but in all the freshness of volition. His work, now structurally complete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades of meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that antepenultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive. The house he has built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens to its greater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be recounted will often be in its second reading. And though there are instances of great writers who have been no artists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we may detect, very pleas urably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet one of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic

structure, and the pervading sense of it as | peculiar form, and working in all cases by we read. Yet of poetic literature too; for, an immediate sympathetic contact, on in truth, the kind of constructive intelli- which account it is that it may be called gence here supposed is one of the forms soul, as opposed to mind, in style. And of the imagination. this too is a faculty of choosing and rejecting what is congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity unity of atmo sphere here, as there of design-soul securing color (or perfume, might we say ?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, the former vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person is practically infinite. There are some to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and it is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition; yet, although they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, it is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed.

That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul: hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of preponderat ing mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a fact, in certain writers the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches people, through static and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul he reaches them, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognize it; soul may repel us, not because we misunderstand it. The way in which theological interests sometimes avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the force I mean generally in literature. Ardent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, without finding any equivalent heat in language; or, again, it may enkindle words to various degrees, and when it really takes hold on them doubles its force. Religious history presents many remarkable instances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious literary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway from soul to soul. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those lips!" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-book, the writings of Swedenborg, the "Tracts for the Times," there, we have instances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religious feeling in operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind acts with similar power in some writers of quite other than theological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar sense of theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature, this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At their best, these writers become, as people say, "prophets;" such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with,

If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence, a curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records what seems to have been his one other passion - a series of letters which with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, its tone of harmonious gray, and the sense of disillusion in which the whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he does display, by "taking thought " mainly, by constant and delicate pondering, as in his love for literature, a heart really moved, but still more, and as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his work. Madame X., too, is a literary artist, and the best gifts he can send her are precepts of perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that better love. In his loveletters it is the pains and pleasures of art he insists on, its solaces; he communicates secrets, reproves, encourages, with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such divided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees that on Flaubert's part, at least, a living person could be no rival of what was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary and exclusive one.

I must scold you [he writes] for one thing, which shocks, scandalizes me, the small con

cern, namely, you show for art just now, As problem of style! - the unique word, regards glory be it so: there, I approve. But phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or for art!-the one thing in life that is good song, absolutely proper to the single menand real, can you compare with it an earthly tal presentation or vision within. In that love?-prefer the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? perfect justice, over and above the many Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one contingent and removable beauties with thing good in me; the one thing I have, to me which beautiful style may charm us, but estimable. For yourself, you blend with the which it can exist without, independent of beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, them yet dexterously availing itself of the agreeable, what not? them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art.

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, it seems to me,

is clear.

I am reading over again the Æneid, certain verses of which I repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are forever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labor like a good working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his brow beats away at his anvil, never troubling himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will has counted for something in the matter. Those who write in good style are some times accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were something else than healing, of the painter than painting. -as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued with so much fervor, with so much self command? Let us hear a sympathetic commentator:

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labor for the discovery in every phrase of that word, that verb, that epithet. In this way he believed in some mysterious harmony in expression, and when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique word. A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit. Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one-one form, one mode- to express what I want to say.

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: there was the

One seems to detect the influence of a the idea of a philosophic idea there natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a relative somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative somewhere in the world of language both alike, rather, somewhere in the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, ininess of "soul and body reunited," in ventive, meeting each other with the readBlake's rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory philosophical expression.

There are no beautiful thoughts [he says] without beautiful forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body the qualities which really constitute itcolor, extension, and the like-without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.

All the recognized flowers, the removable ornaments of literature (including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actual value of what one says. But still, after all, with Flaubert the search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first condition of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your Own

says

sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an artist, he to the reader, I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind sensitive to