LITEKAKY VALUES 7 



matic power, is the weakest factor. In Mr. How- 

 ells we care very little for the people, but the art, 

 the style, is a perpetual delight. In Hawthorne our 

 pleasure, again, is more evenly distributed. In Poe 

 the plot and the style interest us. In Dickens it 

 is the character and the action. The novelist has 

 many strings to his bow, and he can get along very 

 well without style, but what can the poet, the his- 

 torian, the essayist, the critic, do without style — 

 that is, without that vital, intimate, personal rela- 

 tion between the man and his language which seems 

 to be the secret of style ? The true poet makes 

 the words his own ; he fills them with his own 

 quality, though they be the common property of all. 

 This is why language, in the hands of the bom 

 writer, is not the mere garment of thought, not even 

 a perfectly adjusted and transparent garment, as a 

 French writer puts it. It is a garment only as the 

 body is the garment of the soul. This is why a 

 writer with a style loses so much in a translation, 

 while with the ordinary eomposer translation is lit- 

 tle more than a change of garments. 



I should say that the literary value of the modem 

 French writers and critics resides more in their style 

 than in anything else, while with the German it re- 

 sides least in the style ; in the English it resides in 

 both thought and style. The French fall below the 

 English in lyric poetry, because, while the French- 

 man has more vanity, he has less egoism, and hence 

 less power to make the universe speak through him. 

 The solitude of the lyric is too much for his in- 



