STYLE AND THE MAN 73 



demand little and give all : with congenial souls they 

 are already in heaven ; with tincongenial they are 

 soon in their graves. Some give little and demand 

 little : they are the heartless, and they bring neither 

 the joy of life nor the peace of death." 



That is sound prose ; it is like a passage from a 

 great classic. 



When we advise the young writer to go honestly 

 to work to say in the simplest manner what he really 

 thinks and feels, one does not mean that by this 

 course he is likely to write like the great prose mas- 

 ters, but that by this means alone can his work have 

 the basic qualities of good literature, — directness, 

 veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of natural 

 things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence after- 

 wards. 



" The ugliest living face," says Schopenhauer, " is 

 better than a mask." It is real, it is alive. So the 

 simple, direct speech of a man in earnest is so much 

 better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so often 

 compelled to hear or to read. Keality, reality — 

 nothing can make up for a want of reality. 



Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that 

 the peasant always has style ; the French peasant 

 probably more often than any other. This is cer- 

 tainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc 

 as a typical peasant. What adroitness, and at times, 

 classic beauty in her answer to her judges ! When 

 they sought to entrap her with the question, "Do 

 you know if you are in the grace of God ? " she re- 

 plied, "If I am not, may God place me there ; if I am, 



