and discoveries, is common property, but that the style, that is the order and movement which one puts into his thoughts, belongs to the author alone, is his personal property." That is obviously not an observation about style in general, since it is strictly confined to a style in particular. It does not assert that there is no such thing as style in general. It does not assert that the style is the writer's personal expression-merely that it is within his personal control in a sense in which data and discoveries are not. The style he is speaking of, moreover, is the style of the book, not the author's style in general, not his characteristic manner if he has one, instinctive and particular. Quite independently of the writer's temperament he goes on, in true eighteenth-century fashion, to prescribe the different kinds of style appropriate to different kinds of topics. The sentence glossed by the context, in fact, is as far as possible from meaning that style is nothing more than the idiosyncrasy of the writer manifested in his writing.

Architecture furnishes an illuminating, if approximate, illustration of the two different uses of the word "style." There is a not too fanciful analogy between its different "styles" and the personal manner of the individual artist in all the arts. The several styles express each the temperament of its time, as the artist's manner does his own. Yet they would certainly never have risen into existence as styles, would never have achieved their own centrality and coherence, if they had not been inspired, each individual style in its own degree, with that spirit of style conceived as a universal æsthetic element which, besides crystallizing each into its own unity, makes it architecture as well as a style. Indeed the weakness of Renaissance, for example, as architecture is what saps its strength as a style; just as the absence of style leaves the individual artist's manner structureless and, as an instrument, uncertain. Nothing could be more diverse to the eye than Greek and Gothic. The simplicity of one seems almost cellular; the complexity of the other, elaborately organic as far as the eye can trace the detail of the structure. Yet remark on the one hand the mere nomenclature of the trabeated style,

which is so elaborate as of itself to disclose the Greek simplicity as simplification, and, on the other, the fundamental interplay of majestic forces that constitutes the beauty as well as the grandeur of the loveliest as well as the most monumental Gothic. The difference between the two styles could not be greater, but it is not more marked than the identical element of style in both. As an individual artist conceives and executes his work in his own manner, each of them reflects the taste, the tone, the ideals, the character of its own age and clime, but, like the individual artist whose work as well as being personal is marked by the impersonal quality of style, both Greek and Gothic architecture do not merely embody the characteristic manner of thought and feeling of their respective periods and countries-one of philosophic calm, the other of energetic aspiration. In addition, both are interpenetrated with the spirit of order and movement, of abstract form vivifying concrete expression by pouring into it the universal elements of harmony and rhythm, and thus not alone rendering the Parthenon and Amiens-sayvibrant with the mutual relations of their structural parts, but carrying into the conformation of all these details some subtly formative sense of the whole which they compose, and by which in turn they themselves are consecrated with the chrism of style.

It would have much chagrined such a precisian as Buffon to have his incidental remark about a man's style being his own in contradistinction to the material that he shares with others, taken for a definition of style. He could hardly have comprehended such placid ignoring of the fact that he had already given and was expounding an altogether different theory and one quite insusceptible of being regarded as sanction for a go-as-you-please theory of literary composition-obviously ridiculous in any one of the rest of the seven arts. To have declared that a writer should put himself, rather than order and movement, into his thoughts would have been to cancel the Discourse. On the other hand a writer's manner, the personal strain in his style, is so important that, dealing with it at all, to have dealt with it only in an incidental inter

polation, would have been practically as absurd as to assert that a writer has only to express himself naturally to do so with style. He may have a natural aptitude for expressing himself with style. But this will be a natural aptitude for order and movement and not an aptitude for being natural. Buffon and his century before him dealt little with natural aptitudes, and presupposed intelligence, as evolution has since presupposed protoplasm. Even Rousseauism and the gospel of human perfectibility contemplated man's nature as plastic rather than as preestablished. The self-contradiction involved in associating nature, in which intention is absent, and art, in which it is vital, so closely as to deem their essence identical, is one of the paradoxes of more recent times.

The quality of naturalness indeed often shows as few traces of personality as of style. Since, for example, some of the wildest idiosyncrasies, so called, have been disclosed as due to "group consciousness" -not to say "mob psychology"-it has been more difficult to revere eccentricity as self-expression. The traits of a personality saturated with the mimetic may be better sought in the model than in the mimic. They lose their tang in transmission. The naturalness of the parrot and the mocking-bird is personality at one remove, and what Echo sighs to us from some distant isle is, alas, what we have already heard! Personality is minimized thus in naturalness of a certain orderthe naturalness of a natural born natural, for example; it needs acquisitions of its own to round out instinct into character. Of course there are other varieties. Mr. H. M. Tomlinson, of the London Nation and the author of charming books, was recently quoted as asserting in dogmatic, in fact, in Dogberry, vein that "a literary style is not, as some fond critics imagine, a deliberately acquired vice. A man just has it. When he is really a writer he does not know he has any style. He has something to say; and he says it in the only way that comes easy to him"-cruelly regardless of the hard reading thus made according to Sheridan's sadly true observation. "Only those. writers are concerned about their style," he sternly adds, "who should be employed at something

more useful." Mr. Tomlinson is "really a writer," and perhaps he "just has" his gift of style. But apparently he just doesn't have it always. Very likely he has it oftener when he has something to tell than when he has, as here, something to say; the two genres differ in difficulty. And he is so delightful when he does have it that from our point of view he could hardly be employed at anything more useful than in being concerned about it. Why in any case should he discourage others? If style be a vice, how should it be the only one that can't be acquired?

As to a man's not knowing he has any style when he does have it, we should hardly know what Mr. Tomlinson means if in so many quarters just now there were not observable such a light-hearted zest in playing the game of existence blindfold-consciousness, formerly defined as "the light of all our seeing," having fallen into such disrepute, if not "every day, in every way," still often and variously. Only blindly, one would say, can many of the self-styled temperamental players develop the confidence needed to sustain a morale to which mere presumption must prove a broken reed. The mood of the moment, perhaps more exactly than the spirit of the times, is so adventurous and irresponsible as to have given the abhorred name of "repression" to the old "archenemy of mankind" and exalted the subliminal self to the position of guardian angel. Accordingly philosophy of the unconscious, now under such full sail, seems also bound for such ports as may be discovered under a roving commission. Mr. Santayana is perhaps the last philosopher whom one should expect to remind us of Scott's remark to Lockhart: "I fear you have some very young ideas in your head." Yet where either art or woman is concerned, how forego the advantages of young ideas? His declaration, “Art is like a charming woman, who once had her age of innocence in the nursery, when she was beautiful without knowing it, being wholly intent on what she was making or telling or imagining," sounds, accordingly, less like a master, than like a bachelor, of arts-at any rate, the arts of design, whether plastic or feminine. cautionary words "nursery" and "when she was beautiful without knowing it"

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naturally imply an infancy fairly inarticulate, but one imagines that, in either case, articulate adolescence has more than a vague notion of what it is about, and that process as well as substance shared the intention of early art, as well as that of the youthful artist to whom Mr. Santayana refers. Consciousness of how and whether they were succeeding, and obvious inferences therefrom, must have attended effort where attainment is predicated on aim; and subsequent progress, at all events, could hardly have proceeded from aimless groping. The untrained and up-to-date boy who, occupied in drawing on his slate a figure which he said represented God, replied to an objection that no one knew how he looked, "Well, they will when I get this done," demanded too much credulity. The pleistocene mammoth outline is more authentic and doubtless more admirable and, particularly, more skilful than automatic improvisation. In any case, in all art, early or late, the element of style is of too universal substance and application to be identified with the individuality of whose intelligent expression it is clearly and consciously, even when instinctively, an instrumentwhen indeed it is not, as in some instances seemingly it is, an end in itself. And it had certainly much better be an end in itself, subordinating all personality and achieving at least an ordered and rhythmic result, than illustrate the kind of feeling and functioning to be associated with unconsciousness.

Personality in a work of art being, as has been aptly observed, not what you put in but what you can't leave out, style may, precisely, be taken as what on the other hand (as Buffon asserted) you put in. But, necessarily, what you can't leave out colors to a certain, or rather an uncertain, extent what you put in, and accordingly personality shows in, but is not, your style-any more than your clothes which you select are how you wear them. No more capital example of the distinction between manner and style need be sought than that furnished by the writings of Carlyle, rich in both elements. Everything is energy in Carlyle. Energy is as apparent in the restraint of the elegy on Edward Irving as in the extravagance of "Shooting Niagara." And energy im

plies emphasis and underlines whatever it expresses. Hence we can more distinctly in Carlyle's case than in most others recognize the several expressions of his genius; that is to say, his energy, genius being, as Arnold says, "mainly an affair of energy." Again we can more easily discriminate his manner from his style not only because both have so much relief, but because we can catch his manner almost in the act of invading his style. Partly this was chronological; in other words, exhibited a tendency that grew upon him. But partly also it was an infiltration of his conscious art by his personal whim, owing to his release of the latter by raising the flood-gates of his restraint, as he conceived occasion to call for it; the style of the "Sterling," for example, is simple, tranquil, and altogether on a more elevated plane than that of the earlier "Sartor." At the same time Fitzjames Stephen would not have chosen a passage from it, as he did from "Sartor," to set against a passage from Mill, illustrating, as he said, the genius of the greatest poet of his age contrasted with that of the greatest logician. And I think myself that perhaps we could better dispense with those works of Carlyle in which style predominates than those which his personality saturates. Still, one gets a little tired of this latter, and it was doubtless thinking of it that led Mr. W. B. Yeats to speak of some one's "harsh voice" giving, in reading it aloud, "almost a quality of style to Carlylian commonplace." There is nothing restful in tireless tumultuousness. The victim's personality wearies the reader. One would prefer a victorself-control, as spectacle, always outshining the loss of it; except with the "ecstasists!"

Thackeray's exclamation, "I wish he would hang up his d-d old fiddle," is a comprehensible cry of protest against too much personal expression, against the tune rather than the instrument. Taine's preference of "Esmond" over and almost to the exclusion of the rest of his work witnesses the same weariness in Thackeray's own case. In the case of genius-scarcely less rare than miracle-one can hardly decide. Here one hesitates to exalt style at the expense of manner, and may settle the difficulty by breathing a wish that the

manner of both Thackeray on occasion and Carlyle often had been less mannered. Personality is the irreducible element in the incomprehensible phenomenon of genius. Thackeray and Carlyle are, for us at any rate, of even greater interest than their style, than their art. At least Thackeray's style and art owe a large part of their charm to his own extraordinary personal appeal. But the vast field of literary and aesthetic interest rewards consideration of the rule rather than of the exception among its figures and their functioning, when we are dealing with principles, even though Kant's "universal norm" may here be unattainable. There is also this to be observed of the personality of genius: that its superior interest, its signal fascinations, being less comprehensible in all their fulness to other generations than they are to their own, must inevitably merge with their contemporaries of lesser eminence as both recede into the past, aside from the new competitions they must sustain when Bacon's "next ages" with a different succession of cloudcapped peaks and sunlit summits come into view. Then, indeed, manner may congratulate itself on having at whatever sacrifice clothed itself in style. Style will commend it to the posterity that its manner may conceivably chill and confuse. Its style will be the language of posterity also, however different its taste, its fashions. It was really Thackeray's manner, not his style, that Mr. Max Beerbohm meant when he said it was "getting a little eighteen-sixty." Of his style, the "perfection" of which Carlyle called unrivalled "in our day," Mr. Beerbohm says in exquisite style of his own: "He blew on his pipe and words came tripping around him, like children, like pretty little children who are perfectly drilled for the dance; or came, did he will it, treading in their precedence, like kings, gloomily." Order and movement could not be more specifically signalized-or exemplified.

On the other hand, when Thackeray remarked, "I may quarrel with Mr. Dickens's art a thousand and a thousand times; I delight and wonder at his genius," he undoubtedly meant, in large part, that Dickens's art was disfigured by mannerisms-that his manner, in other words, dominated and distorted his style, of

which facetiousness is as characteristic as caricature is of his characters. Both these defects of his qualities of vitality and imagination have been obstacles to Dickens's attaining rank as an artist commensurate with his fairly wonderful genius; and it is only since art has suffered its present eclipse in the shadow of genius, real or imagined, that lovers of paradox like Mr. Chesterton, and detached temperaments like Mr. Santayana, have found it piquant to minimize or ignore-or vaunt them. Also the current revival of interest in Dickens shown by our younger writers may be due, as well as to the attraction of novelty inherent in rehabilitations, to a fellow-feeling on the part of our own facetiousness-which has been called the curse of the country. One may doubt nevertheless if he is read as much as he is lauded. Temperamental similarity may warm in idea to what would bore it in fact-one of those phenomena which Carlyle, when too full for utterance, used to call "significant of much." Our time and our country, especially since our social development has reached its present flourishing phase, seem peculiarly sensitive to the satisfactions, than which we certainly find few more intimate, of what is too brutally known as "raising a laugh." The English, who savor these satisfactions less, we accuse, not altogether humorously, of lacking either humor or the sense of it. We have a slight feeling as if of injury at their refusal, or estrangement at what we fancy their inability, to play with us. Dickens, however, ought to be a bond between us. The facetiousness which, whether for good or ill, is one of our national traits and which, as one may say, has infiltrated our national style, certainly dictated the order and movement which he put into his thoughts, to an extent that makes his manner so markedly mannerism as practically to identify it with his style. The ideal in his case would be the converse procedure-style invading manner so as to minimize mannerism.

Absolutely to proscribe mannerism is, surely, pedantry. In the hands, or rather in the fibre, of an instinctive artist it is precisely the element needed to set the final touch on manner itself, to add the flavor to the confection, to endue the

manner that expresses the artist's individuality with the personal reminder of intimacy which endears-unless, as of course it may, it estranges. An instance is that which makes one of the most delightful traits of one of the most delightful of our actresses, undervalued by routine proscription of mannerism that is piquant along with that which is flat. If nothing is so flat as excess, on the other hand nothing is so engaging as quality, in fragrance that is faint but distinct. It is only of what is too little that we say we cannot have too much. Dickens gave us a surfeit of facetiousness. He was so much an actor-not being one-as to suffer his manner, become mannerism, to histrionize his style, the conscious field of his art by which he set great store, but which he so personalized with the manner of which he was still fonder as to rob it of the objective quality that, precisely, makes art of expression. He conceived his manner as style. He has passage after passage in what one might call the voluntarily stylistic vein that probably irritated Thackeray much more than Bulwer's "height of fine language" did Yellowplush. But taken at the flood, even these passages, perhaps they especially, were apt to turn into the channel of facetiousness, where the temptation to be funny becomes irresistible. Thereupon verbiage sostenuto, as in Mark Twain the idea da capo. If Mark Twain, however, had thought he was being "stylistic" in the process he would probably not have "got the laugh" that he rarely failed finally to get and that, I should suppose, Dickens gets now mainly through his matter. Mark Twain's method was sapiently direct. Yet the best, in the sense of the starkest, example of it that I remember was furnished by one of our "minstrels," in days when our humor of a certain grade was masked by burnt cork, when our humorous entertainments were explicit and professional, and not yet amateur and postprandial. This artist came to the front of the stage and in a sulky, then a shamefaced, then a resigned, and finally a savage manner remarked many times in an appalling crescendo ending in a shouting climax that his girl lived in Yonkers. The public, at first uninterested, ended in convulsions of glee.

The same effect I recall obtained by Mark Twain at a dinner given to Mr. Brander Matthews-by his friends and thus a large though an intimate occasion. In richly varied framework, Clemens used essentially the same means of repeating antiphonally in various tones, ranging from the sepulchral to the ferocious but all weirdly drawling, what he pretended, with obviously no warrant of either truth or caricature to constitute either wit or humor, was the singularly sinister name of the evening's guest. I remember no occasion of more prolonged and luxurious mirth than each of these. Meanwhile, naturally, the æsthetic faculties were more or less in abeyance. They will not, however, stay there; and, the glamour of the occasion vanished, we feel that this sort of thing, well worthy of being called genius (if that does it any real good), can't be kept up. The dosage can't be increaseda necessity for conserving its effect. Nor can one's appreciation of it be communicated to benighted consumers of a different brand of stimulant. For this there is too much personality and too little style about it. To secure permanence in the æsthetic product the preservative quality of the latter element is needed. Without it, art is as fleeting as fashion; which is no more than saying that language has a greater chance of survival than jargon. None the less, it cannot be gainsaid that personality is the most interesting thing in the world, and the proper study of mankind. Personality, therefore, expressing itself in style, achieves at once the most interesting and the most lasting æsthetic result.

It is, however, essential to remember that personality is an exceedingly complicated affair. Undoubtedly what in any work of art captivates or alienates, interests or wearies the critical spirit, the connoisseur or even the amateur, is, as SainteBeuve testified of himself, the mind of the artist-meaning by mind, of course, both intellect and feeling. Yes, and considered as a cause, the will also. Is the artist's mind in any given case crude or cultivated, is it common or distinguished, listless or energetic? What is its other furniture aside from the machinery concerned with the immediate matter in hand? These abstract qualities, as informing the con