splendid seriousness that underlies them all, the solidity of thought and the vast amount of information that pervades them, makes the perusal of them more fruitful than that of other Spanish novelists, with the exception of Valera.

NOTE-The final chapter of these studies of Blasco Ibáñez will appear in the October number.-Editor Texas Review.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE INFORMAL STYLE

BY CLYDE MURLEY

It must have been writers like Walt Whitman and Gilbert Chesterton who popularized egotism in literature. When the former, celebrated himself, standing cool and collected before ten thousand universes, said, "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch," he started the Egotistical Movement in literature. When Chesterton began in his charming and friendly way to set forth himself, his convictions, opinions, prejudices, as the proper study of mankind, even his unfailing cleverness and sanity did not obscure the fact that in all he was making varied contributions to a boisterous autobiography. So far no objection is involved. Literature cannot deserve the name without being sincere and cannot be so without incessant self-revelation. The Apology of Socrates, the sermons of Christ, and the whole literature of "Confessions" are ego-centric. The Egotistical School, however, has gone much farther than this and distinguished itself from the general class of sincere writers by avowedly featuring self-consciousness as to its egotism, so much so that its adherents let pass before us the entire panoramas of their streams of consciousness for the periods of literary composition involved. With such a marked stress on individuality and even idiosyncrasy, it becomes to the reader a matter of interest amounting to acute anxiety to know who are to be given license so to reveal themselves and what literary style the revelators are to affect.

Poetry has been defined as "the expression of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." One has only to conceive the complete opposite of this to realize to what, at worst, he might be exposed by the Egotistical School. May it not be that, when some men attempt to sound their barbaric yawp, too, over the roofs of the

world, those beneath the roofs are justified in regarding them as ordinary disturbers of the peace? There are personalities rich enough to justify their exploitation in the manner under discussion, but it is when the less successful of their imitators and the imitators of these unbosom themselves that readers are driven to question the morality of the whole procedure. For that matter, even the men who know how in this School, who are at their best-convincing and delightful, if read in quantity with their exaggerations, contradictions and obscure suggestions (like the allusions, illusions and delusions of the columniator in the American daily), so affect one that it is a relief to turn to something explicit and consecutive in which the purpose of language is not to conceal thought, to open Bacon's essays and read:

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office.

But it would be quite unjust to complain because others besides the most favored few attempt so humble a literary genre as the informal essay: it is enough to hope that they, and the great as well, will bear in mind that this style of composition puts a severe strain on the writer's taste and requires, for all its license, restraint in some directions. For the subject matter is frequently commonplace and unpromising, so that the style must justify both itself and the topic; our whims, petty dishonesties, mean economies-those intimate traits which keep us from being heroes to our (fictitious) valets but which some disclose in these essaysdo not of themselves give much verve to style. This being the case, desperate expedients are sometimes resorted to by the essayist who is determined to retain, if not the respect, at any rate the attention of his readers.

Among these expedients is the introduction of minor crudities (like those in the encores of lady readers), little impieties and anarchies, or any other slight evidences that

the writer dares do more than may become a man. I think this sort of thing must be a weakness of the usually decorous who take a scared and breathless pleasure in an occasional lapse from good form. I recall a middle-aged lady connected with a university in the capacity of an ensample to the flock, though that was not her precise title, a lady of fine manners and unimpeachable decorum, who, asked to speak at an athletic rally and having a heroic desire to be a good sport (as she would not have said), ended her short speech with a story which culminated in and turned upon a very substantial oath. She did this in a particularly blunt and hair-raising manner (to the immense surprise and satisfaction of the students), not because she was not a lady, but because she was.

But this incidental vice of the subject matter is quite overshadowed by the ominous form of the other expedient for engaging the reader's attention. I refer to the extreme negligée of styles, rather to a nakedness of style in concealment of which we should be grateful even for negligée. When one faces, for example, an informal essay beginning thus (and the beginnings of the bad ones are the worst part):

PINK STOCKINGS

Do you know, I haven't the faintest idea why I wrote that heading. Whose stockings? Not mine certainly, for I don't look well in pink. And yet, now I think of it, these same gay garments tempt me to lofty eloquence, and I am suddenly inspired to raise them jauntily as a flag of freedom against the onset of the Newer Puritanism.

one is impelled that there are those who cannot be thoroughly at their ease without making others about them uneasy, and that the great egotists of my opening sentence may have much to answer for in the Judgment. To save his respect for the informal style after this, one must turn hastily, for instance, to the letters of William James which readers of the Atlantic Monthly have recently enjoyed,-bear

ing in mind, however, that he was created unequal. A maiden lady who would not, in ordinary intercourse, be guilty of using such an awful word as 'stomach' can, on occasion, under the unnatural stimulus of a session of a classical association, develop an awkward gaiety, in a paper, say, on the erotic poets, which is something less than spontaneous. I refer here not to any moral impropriety in trying to get the point of view of Lesbia or Cynthia or to pink stockings or Coan silks as contributory thereto, but to a literary style suffering from more of the subjective than the subject can manipulate. To be downright rude, there are effeminate writers (and I think a woman can be every bit as effeminate as a man) who, when once they begin to exercise their wits in unaccustomed frivolity, are apt to perpetrate genteel but frigid vulgarities, to exhibit in the radically different material of their dispositions something roughly analogous to the insolent vacuity of the vaudeville monologist or 'intimate comedian', who assures you baldly (like the essayist above) that he has nothing to say and then says what makes you wish he really had not. The journalist who has bound himself to write at stated intervals has that excuse, at least, for being driven at times to make copy by violating the dramatic illusion and poking fun at his art. The occasional essayist, on the contrary, has had full leisure to consider whether or not to write at a given time and frankly to face the fact that he has nothing to say; little excuse for him, then, to fall into the sang froid of the comedian or the merely reportorial smartness of the journalist.

The laboratory method of the more effeminate informal essayist seems to be as follows: A specific, usually frivolous, thought comes to him, capable of issuing in a good, honest, riotous, foolish remark of immediate practical value. Instead of turning it loose in this beneficent way, the subject broods over it. It has not that potentiality of life which might enable it to develop from the germ into a handsome and