the universe; and this is the reality that style must express.

And style, we remember, must express this reality in written words; and written words are things as tangible, as material, as the thought and emotion behind them is immaterial, evanescent, elusive. The task of the writer, then, is a far more subtile and wonderful thing than we are apt to think it: nothing less than to create a material body, that all men may see, for an eternally immaterial reality that only through this imperfect symbol can ever reveal itself to any but the one human being who knows it he knows not how.

When a piece of style a poem, a book, an essay, a letter is once in existence, it may perhaps best be considered for the moment from the point of view of readers, of those to whom it is addressed. Any piece of style, we all know, impresses us in a fairly distinct way, which we rarely take the trouble to define. Most readers never know more about it than that it interests or pleases them, or bores or annoys. A little consideration, however, will show, I think, that the undefined impression which any piece of style makes may always be resolved into three parts. Present in widely different degrees in different pieces of style, no one of these factors can ever, I believe, be asserted quite absent. In the first place, you either understand the piece of style before you, or do not understand it, or feel more or less in doubt whether you understand it or not. In the second place, you are either inter

ested, or bored, or left indifferent. Finally, you are either pleased, or displeased, or doubtful whether you are pleased or not. And the more you analyze your impressions of style the more you will find, unless your experience differs surprisingly from most, that the third state of things I suggest - indifference or doubt is the rarest. In short, every piece of style may be said to impress readers in three ways,-intellectually, emotionally, æsthetically; to appeal to their understanding, their feelings, their taste. Every quality of style that I know of may be reduced to one of these three classes; and these three-and these three only —are different enough to deserve distinct and careful consideration. Briefly, then, I may say that the qualities of style are three,-intellectual, emotional, and æsthetic. It is convenient to name these qualities; the terms I choose are on the whole the best I have found, those which Professor Hill, of Harvard College, uses in the most sensible treatment of the art of composition I have yet found in print. To the intellectual quality of style he gives the name "Clearness;" to the emotional, "Force;" to the aesthetic, "Elegance."

To define this generalization, a concrete example is perhaps worth while. In choosing one from personal experience, I commit what many may call a positive sin of egotism. My defence must rest on what I have said already. Style is the expression in words of thought and emotion; each man's thought and emetion differs from every other man's. I confess to a

growing belief that the best thing any one can do, when occasion serves, is to tell us what he himself knows. It may be of small value, but at worst it is not second-hand. When Robert Browning died, then, I found running in my head two lines from a poem of his I had read some years before - the "Grammarian's Funeral,"

"This is our master, famous, calm, and dead,
Borne on our shoulders."

I remembered of the poem only that it was a long funeral chorus, if I may use the term, put into the mouths of the pupils of an old Italian professor. At daybreak, one fifteenth-century morning, they are bearing him up to his grave in one of the hill-cities of Central Italy. I turned to the poem and read it through; I was deeply interested from beginning to end. I thought the poem, as I think it still, profoundly characteristic of the writer in that it is among the permanently forcible pieces of our literature. On the other hand, when I had finished the reading, I had very little more notion of what the poem meant in detail than I had had before; again I found it profoundly characteristic of the writer, in that on a single reading it was about as far from clear as human perversity could make it. Finally, in spite of the undoubted fact that there was in it something which not only interested but fascinated me, I found only one passage that at first reading thoroughly pleased

me:

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Sleep, crop and herd. Sleep, darkling thorp and croft,
Safe from the weather!

He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft,

Singing together,

He was a man born with thy face and throat,
Lyric Apollo!"

And even the pleasure I found in the full-throated melody of this refreshingly simple passage was marred by the thought that before I could be sure of what a thorp is or a croft, I should have to consult a dictionary. Elegance, then, save for the splendidly sustained funereal rhythm, I found as notable for its absence as clearness; herein, again, the poem was profoundly characteristic of the writer. But for all its lack of clearness and elegance, the poem had a force I could not resist; I read it over again and again. Each reading made it clearer; each gain in clearness diminished in some degree the annoyance I felt in its apparently deliberate perversity of diction; and now, after some dozens of readings, I think I can understand at least nine lines out of every ten, and I am sure that I find in the poem both an emotional stimulus that constantly strengthens, and a constantly growing if permanently incomplete delight.

In all pieces of style as truly as in this "Grammarian's Funeral," clearness, force, and elegance or their absence may readily be detected. The question that naturally presents itself now is how they are produced. To answer this we must approach the subject afresh, and ask ourselves not what

we have experienced, but what we have seen. Clearly, we have seen nothing but written or printed words, - black marks on white paper. It is something inherent in these black marks which has produced the knowledge or the ignorance or the puzzle, the interest or the tedium, the pleasure or the annoyance, of which we are conscious. For the moment, then, we must turn our attention to these written words, these curious black marks, and satisfy ourselves, if we can, what there is in them to produce such notable results.

In themselves, these black marks are nothing but black marks more or less regular in appearance. Modern English type and script are rather simple to the eye. Old English and German are less so; less so still, Hebrew and Chinese. But all alphabets present to the eye pretty obvious traces of regularity; in a written or printed page the same mark will occur over and over again. This is positively all we see,a number of marks grouped together and occasionally repeated. A glance at a mummy-case, an old-fashioned tea-chest, a Hebrew Bible, will show us all that any eye can ever see in any written or printed document. The outward and visible body of style consists of a limited number of marks which, for all any reader is apt to know, are purely arbitrary.

Whoever knows an alphabet, however, as all of us know the twenty-six letters that compose written English, sees in these black marks, not the marks themselves, but the ideas they stand for. In a rough