60 LITERARY VALUES 



relation of the man to his language by which he 

 makes the words his own, fills them with his own 

 quality, and gives the reader that lively sense of be- 

 ing in direct communication with a living, breathing, 

 mental and spiritual force. The writer who appears 

 to wield his language as an instrument or a tool, some- 

 thing exterior to himself, who makes you conscious 

 of his vocabulary, or whose words are the garments 

 and not the tissue of his thought, has not style in 

 this sense. " Style," says Schopenhauer, " is the 

 physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to char- 

 acter than the face." This definition is as good as 

 any, and better than most, because it implies that 

 identification of words with thoughts, of the man 

 with his subject, which is the secret of a living 

 style. Hence the man who imitates another wears 

 a mask, as does the man who writes in a language 

 to which he was not born. 



II 

 It has been said that novel-writing is a much 

 finer art in our day than it was in the time of Scott, 

 or of Dickens and Thackeray, — finer, I think, be- 

 cause it is in the hands of finer-strung, more dain- 

 tily equipped men ; but would one dare to say it is 

 a greater art ? One may admit all that is charged 

 about Scott's want of style, his diffuseness and cum- 

 brousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still justly 

 claim for him the highest literary honors. He was 

 a great nature, as Goethe said, and we come into 

 vital contact with that great nature in his romances. 



