84 STYLE AND THE MAN 



ft I preach half of every Sunday. When I attended 

 church on the other half of a Sunday, and the image 

 in the pulpit was all of clay, and not of tunable 

 metal, I said to myself that if men would avoid that 

 general language and general manner in which they 

 strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only 

 what is uppermost in their own minds, after their 

 own individual manner, every man would be inter- 

 esting. . . . But whatever properties a man of nar- 

 row intellect feels to be peculiar he studiously hides ; 

 he is ashamed or afraid of himself, and all his com- 

 munications to men are unskillful plagiarisms from 

 the common stock of thought and knowledge, and 

 he is of course flat and tiresome." 



The great mass of the writing and sermonizing of 

 any age is of the kind here indicated ; it is the result 

 of the machinery of culture and of books and the 

 schools put into successful operation. But now and 

 then a man appears whose writing is vital ; his page 

 may be homely, but it is alive; it is full of personal 

 magnetism. The writer does not merely give us 

 what he thinks or knows ; he gives us himself. There 

 is nothing secondary or artificial between himself 

 and his reader. It is books of this kind that man- 

 kind does not willingly let die. Some minds are like 

 an open fire, — how direct and instant our com- 

 munication with them ; how they interest us ; there 

 are no screens or disguises ; we see and feel the vital 

 play of their thought; we are face to face with their 



