pital with just a flesh wound. You really should have a bone broken, or an eye put out, or a bullet through the skull before you went back of the lines to the hospital, he decided in mild amusement.

But it was not so amusing when he recalled that his platoon was up at the front and he was back in a hospital, lying in safety, warm, and fed as well as his condition would permit. He commenced to search his mind, to analyze his feelings when he had started to crawl back from the front. He could not decide whether he had been afraid; he did know that, possibly, he could have gone on until he reached the woods unless he had been struck again. The bullet had knocked him down, but he had not really felt pain until he began to see the blood showing through his breeches. It was a fine question: If he had not looked down at the blood, might he not have been able to go on, leading his men, his men who had spoken of him as a coward? That he could not answer, with a final and sweeping No, hurt him and caused him to wonder whether there was not some truth in what his men had said about him. But he could not hold that opinion for long. He was not a coward, he fiercely told himself, and he would prove it to them!

The days of June passed by while he lay in his narrow bed. Once in a while some man from his regiment would come back to the hospital, and Wilfred Bird would hobble over to him and ask him questions about the platoon: what they were doing, if they were still where they were when he left them for the hospital. He grew restless as he listened to the tales of hardship and heroism at the front. They were doing such splendid things, the reports came back, and so many of the men had been decorated. "Did Bird remember So and So?" one of the wounded who had recently returned would ask. "Well, he got his," the informant would continue, "trying to take a machine-gun nest single-handed." And then he heard that the regiment had been removed from the front lines for a short

rest.

One morning Wilfred Bird woke up with a fever. The nurse informed the doctor, and Bird was ordered to remain in his room without permission to see any

visitors. He accepted this command as long as he could, but that was for not many days, because of his anxiety over the movements of his men. Would he get well, he wondered, before the regiment was ordered back to the front? Great heavens, he had to. He began to plead that they stay back of the lines until he could rejoin them. Just a few days more, he thought, and his wound would be all right. This worry that his men might be in the next attack without him drove him out into the main ward whenever the nurse was absent, trying to discover if any of the new arrivals were from his regiment.

But the information of the movement of his troops was to be given him from another source. During the dressing of his wound, one morning, the doctor paused and said, by way of making talk:

"I hear your outfit's going back up to the front in about three days. You're lucky to be in the hospital."

Wilfred Bird said nothing; he just looked at the doctor dumbly, a trifle hurt. And after the doctor left he began to look around for his clothing, to get it together so that he would be able to put his hands on everything which he had brought to the hospital with him. All that day he remained quietly in bed, seeking in his thoughts the best means of leaving Paris and joining his regiment. In the morning he asked the nurse to make the bandage on his leg especially secure.

Late that evening he limped out of the hospital, fully dressed, and supporting himself by a stout walking-stick which he had picked up. Paris had darkened herself against the air raids, and it was confusing to be walking in the strange streets, weakly lighted by a moon which was climbing over the ragged edge of the buildings. A cab was passing. With many flourishes of his stick he caught the scurrying driver's attention barely in time to keep from being run down. "To Saint Denis," he directed the chauffeur, telling himself that among all of the machines at that supply base of the American army he was certain to find one which would be going near Soissons, where his regiment was soon to go into action.

When he arrived at Saint Denis, perhaps an hour later, an M. P. told him that

no American automobiles were to start for some time but that there were several French camions which were to take supplies to Mangin's army-the army to which his regiment had been assigned. "They say it's gonna be the big smash of the year," said the lanky M. P., "but I ain't hankerin' to be in it, sir." Bird dismissed him irritably, walking lamely to the French section.

As he explained to the driver of one of the camions that he wished to ride with him to the front to be in the attack, the driver gave his shoulders the inimitable Gallic shrug, and said: "Of course, it is beyond my comprehension why a man who can hardly walk should wish to return to the front; but if you are so mad, jump in." He climbed into the car beside the Frenchman. The motor commenced its angry chugging and the trip began. Through the night Bird sat rigidly in the front seat, both hands clasped over the crook of his stick. The camions passed along the smooth white country roads, rumbled through the towns, as Bird sat there thinking of the morning, wondering whether he would arrive in time to go over with his regiment. Already his mind saw the men advancing toward the enemy, their bayonets slanting skyward, and he smiled proudly as he saw himself abreast of them. They would never think him a coward again, he thought hotly. The sky was growing lighter as the camions left the outskirts of Châlons sur Marne, and from off ahead came the ominous rumble of exploding shells.

Now it was daylight, and from the seat on the camion Bird could see the huge, camouflaged ammunition dumps at intervals along the road, covered by a mottled

green and yellow. At one place, a battalion of men were resting on the grass beside the road, their rifles and combat packs sprawling about them. Farther on, a battery of long, black-mounted sixinch guns, poking their noses toward the German lines, were unlimbered close to the roadside; and beside them the sweating artillerymen were leading off the horses and arranging the shells. A short distance ahead the seventy-fives had gone into position. That a first-aid station had just been established was evident from the fresh red-cross sign tacked conspicuously to a tree. Yes, Bird decided, they were getting near the front and he would be in time.

Farther on he saw a cross-roads, and as the camion neared it a shell hurtled over and struck squarely where the two roads met. Warily the driver slowed up the car. Bird grasped the man's arm, calling: "Non! Non! Vite!" The driver pressed harder on the accelerator and the camion spurted ahead. Another shell struck close to the place where the first shell had exploded. But Bird did not seem to mind the shells which were bursting in front of him. He was like a man in a dream, living solely in the picture of himself in the first wave of the attack, at the head of his men, limping along toward the German lines.

Now they were almost at the crossroads. From somewhere along the farther fringe of the enemy lines a long-distance gun emitted a huge black shell which speared its way through the quiet air. It struck and exploded; an immense cloud of black smoke spread above the blue camion on whose shattered floor lay Wilfred Bird.

ROBABLY from the earliest and certainly down to the latest days of its practice hitherto, critical analysis has been occupied with the subject of style, and, as usual with perennial subjects, style has been found particularly difficult to define. But without altogether agreeing with Erasmus that every definition is a misfortune we may, to a certain extent, circumvent this difficulty by essaying to describe rather than define it. Defining it is so difficult, perhaps, because it may be described as strictly indefinable, as a universal element, an ultimate that enters into combination and characterizes compounds without itself having any organization particular enough to particularize one that may be tested for and identified, but not delimited nor detached; moreover, one that enters into the various activities of the mind not only in the field of art and letters, but in the discipline of thought and the conduct of life. When Henry James remarks of Lowell that his career was in the last analysis "a tribute to the dominion of style," that this is the idea that to his sense Lowell's name "most promptly evokes," and that "he carried style, the style of literature, into regions in which we rarely look for it," no one is in any doubt as to what he means. Mr. Stuart Sherman finds substantially the same quality in Henry James himself. At least, of what he calls James's "æsthetic idealism" it is quite possible, I think, to contend that, ideally speaking, style is the informing constituent. For that matter, style lies more or less latent in any constituent that informs anything.

"Listening in" at one of those family exchanges of literary and social gossip conducted by our "columnists" and now

so popular, I recently started at the mention of a poetess known in her day as "The Sweet Singer of Michigan." I recall the rollicking chorus of a poem by this lady, chanting what now might be viewed as the forerunner of a then new gospel, in the adjuring words: "Leave off the agony, leave off style!" She may have had in mind the cakewalk and its stylistic congeners, in which we get the raw article and observe an informing spirit in its excess rather than at its best, but she was clearly an inspirationist and a partisan of the bald despatch now regnant, and what she resented was the taking of thought involved in "putting on" (as it used to be called) the style which she implored us to leave off. Her plea has triumphed in this fulness of time. We have, quite generally, left it off. Undoubtedly a realist, she but anticipated the current impatience of the artificial, even in the good sense of the word, style being undeniably in this sense as artificial a force in the day of realism as when, in periods less inhospitable to it (whether classic, academic, or romantic), it has exercised the nevertheless not valueless function of bringing order out of chaos.

That, at any rate, is in part what style does. No wiser point of departure for its consideration could be chosen than Buffon's statement: "Style is nothing other than the order and movement which we put into our thoughts." It does not reside in the thoughts themselves, and it is lacking in their expression in proportion as this is either disorderly or static. Although, as Fénelon observed, it is the rarest of qualities in the works of the mind, order is understood to be Heaven's first law. Movement, in any case, is essentially life itself. The two combined constitute the formative element of an æsthetic composition and in a real sense, thus, the art of art. It may most profita

bly, I think, be considered as that factor of a work of art which preserves in every part some sense of the form of the whole; so that one may say a work of art possesses style when the detail both counts as detail and also contributes to the general effect. In consequence, coherence and interdependence, continuity and harmony become salient traits of the ensemble, whatever it be, a sentence or a treatise, a sonnet or a symphony, a still-life or a landscape, a coin or a monument. The spirit of style which remembers and anticipates in the act of expression (thus automatically enriching expression with added values) is silenced oftenest in the presence of what is, in excess, independent and idiosyncratic, even eccentric by contrast. The two are as distinct as our old friends objective and subjective-whose labels, respectively, in point of fact they bear-but should accord as complements.

For how the artist subjectively handles -or neglects the objective element of style is his style. Obviously we use the word in two senses, and it has thus a certain ambiguity which, in discussion of the general subject, it is useful to avoid. Ambiguity of language is perhaps the subtlest among the foes of clearness, and in this case it is an especial source of error, because the same word is used not only for two different, but for two antithetical, ideas—at least, for one of general and the other of particular application. A number of years ago, accordingly, in writing of French art in which the objective and impersonal element is so prominent, and having necessarily to distinguish between the two, I ventured, with a sense of tentativeness and temerity combined, and solely for the purpose of analysis, to substitute for "style" used in the subjective and personal sense the word "manner." One always suspects the value of an invention of one's own, however; the chances are so enormously in favor either of its having long before been tried and found wanting, or of the need of it being less real than fancied. So that it may easily be understood how agreeable it was quite recently to come across Sainte-Beuve's use of the word in substantially the same sense; one had so much rather be right than original! having incidentally rather a better chance,

in so wishing, of being original into the bargain. Of course one reserves the word "manner" largely for purposes of analysis, and to designate one of the two elements of which an individual's style is composedthat is, if it repays analysis-the other being the objective and exterior element of style which his manner modifies into what we call his style. Only, in speaking of his style it should be borne in mind that it is thus composite. The matter is important for this reason, that dwelling exclusively on the purely individual factor in any work of art obscures the universal element. In the long run the universal element is subordinated, and inevitably styleless style-that is, pure manner, merely native, untaught, uninspired, destitute of any not-ourselves ideal-usurps its place. This, in fact, is what to-day has largely taken place.

One reason for it, singularly enough, is the wide-spread popularity enjoyed by an incidental remark of Buffon himself. His "style is the man" has made the tour of the world and altogether eclipsed his forgotten definition. Epigrams sometimes turn out thankless children, and Buffon would have thought this one sharper than a serpent's tooth. It was pure fioritura. The famous Discourse as at first written did not contain it. It is an instance of the literary infirmity of adding a sententious truism, ambiguous as well as superfluous in this case, to an already adequately presented thesis. The result has been not a little ironical. The misconception of Buffon's idea is so easy, the correct interpretation so hard to state precisely enough to exclude the false; the context-which no one knows-is so necessary to gloss the axiom, which itself is familiar to every one. He is speaking of the learning, the data and discoveries (faits et découvertes) of a work-apparently having in mind a scientific work; "these things," he interjects, "are outside of a man," whereas the way in which they are arranged and presented is, of course, personal to the author. The style of the book, as distinct from the substance, is his. He doesn't mean that the writer's personal temperament leaves a deep impression on his style. "This is true," says one of his editors, M. Nollet, "but it is not Buffon's thought. He meant that the substance of a work, facts