Unicorns Part 5

He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as some of his fervent disciples have a.s.serted. He died of unromantic diabetes. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, A rare impersonality, I should say.

There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by propagandists of the New aesthetic. As if form had not always been significant. No one can deny Cezanne's preoccupation with form; nor Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, by the cra.s.sest realist among French painters (he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a solid structural sense. But Cezanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the ma.s.sive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of the skeleton.

Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise a master. The limitations of Paul Cezanne are patent to all. He is a profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far from the territory he called his own then we should not complain, for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, const.i.tutes the case of Cezanne. He arrived after the cla.s.sic, romantic, impressionistic, symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes recall the throb of a deep-ba.s.s organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music flows as if from a secret spring.

What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow more colours than one. Paul Cezanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.

CHAPTER IX

BRAHMSODY

After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,"

cried Von Bulow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of pa.s.sion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, pa.s.sion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars.

And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful harmonies. In his music the formulist finds perfect things.

Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.

The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anaemia, leaving the world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois.

Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of romanticism, were put in alb.u.ms where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short, stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But how symbolical of Brahms to fall asleep at the very onset of his career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There are pa.s.sages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in omphalic meditation.

Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings--wings of great, terrifying monsters; hippogriffs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compa.s.s of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry: "Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our thirsty eyelids!"

Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music--are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of ma.s.ses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Theophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, n.o.ble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flas.h.i.+ng style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway.

Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies--true soul-tragedies--how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer in himself, thus a believer in men and women.

He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic--yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric--modes of a.n.a.lysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants.

Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.

CHAPTER X

THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS

A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition, Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same cla.s.s, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not.

Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for doc.u.ments. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's natural repugnance to such vulgar material. They were aristocrats.

Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff.

Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable aesthetic of the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repelling misanthropy.

In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K.

Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an una.s.suming and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines!

"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking letters.

Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero; as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack--published in Zola's collection, Les Soirees de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules Lemaitre describes them collectively as: a young man with the dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness--the critic used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the s.a.d.i.s.tic Bluebeard--these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious faultfinder.

No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraits of certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in enamelled prose. Whistler, Cheret, p.i.s.sarro, Gauguin were praised by him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly enough. With the j.a.panese this erotic side of Rops is only for the connoisseur.

Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cezanne, who, he a.s.serts, contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early as 1877.) He found the Cezanne still-life brutally real; above all, a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot, Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cezanne millstone. The Provencal was a ruse, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber, ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientele in both professions.

American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the matter of the cla.s.sical painters and sculptors he manifested himself intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Grunewald's Crucifixion is his idol. Huysmans's opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a rigaudon at a Requiem ma.s.s! But as a descendant of Cornelis Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time.

Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same literary yoke. His opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them.

Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group, Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his famous preface to La Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called, the prost.i.tute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediaeval vileness of La Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Leon Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the eccentric company of Barbey d'Aurevilly, in whose apartment he said that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care for that "Cherubin of the d.u.c.h.esses of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."

Of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs."

His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist, left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Theophile Gautier did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans believed in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou, Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"), he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even theatrical.

Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical Parna.s.sus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling salesman--Balzac's Gaudissart--and would play his own Homais, being addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture.

Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde nationale."

From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux maitre," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepid water always flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y connait, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se defile!" The style and thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls Maurice Barres "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand Brunetiere as "constipe," a sound definition of a shrewd, unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed ideas as well as objects.

In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anaemic hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode; Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he wished. Brunetiere, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular vaudeville, Le Voyage a Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire by the Crepets (Eugene and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank whisky, read _Punch_, and also sought the company of English grooms in the Faubourg Saint-Honore. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as Brunetiere detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than loved.

CHAPTER XI

STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE

I

Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking; witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal man[oe]uvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its amber, and it is a brevet of immortality--that is, as immortality goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the s...o...b..ack part of the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for schoolmarms in male garb, and the s.h.i.+ning rhetoric, what remains?

The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is direct, plain, and simple. The writer's keyboard is that humble camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own individuality does not always const.i.tute style; for individual opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.

Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice.

Apes and peac.o.c.ks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes; as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid.

The American critic registers the variations in style and sensibility of the Scotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility is a.n.a.lytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boethius would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a pa.s.sage supposedly from Sir Thomas Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because, like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist, though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.

If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life, the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by the college professor--the Eternal Soph.o.m.ore--about fleeing "journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York, Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most succinct prose, prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose, "numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers,"

as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey, Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H.

Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Chateaubriand of Atala, without its hateful note of morbid egotism.

Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of Chateaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled concision of Merimee or the dry-sherry wit of Voltaire are surer guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the Boanerges.

Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh, "O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, s.h.i.+ne; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ...

utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85, hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury.

And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous "run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton and his majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a n.o.ble and puissant nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..."

and then fall down and wors.h.i.+p, for we are in the holy of holies.

Stevenson preferred the pa.s.sage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k"