her, poor children, for she it is, and she alone, who can unfold to you the secret of your being, and the meaning of your destiny." Again, in the exquisite tale of martyrdom from which I have already quoted the account of the locusts, the destined martyr, whose thirst for God has been awakened by her intercourse with Christians, thus repels the Greek rhetorician who is trying to feed her on the husks of philosophic abstractions, as she expresses the yearnings of a heart weary of its desolation: “Oh that I could find Him!" Callista exclaimed passionately. "On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him not. Why dost thou fight against me, why dost thou scare and perplex me, O First and only fair?"

In another of these poems Dr. Newman has referred to the sea described in the book of Revelation :

"A sea before

The throne is spread; its pure still glass
Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass.
We on its shore

Share in the bosom of our rest,

God's knowledge, and are blest."

It has always seemed to me that Newman's style succeeds, so far as a human form of expression can, in picturing the feelings of earth in a medium as clear, as liquid, and as tranquil, as sensitive alike to the minutest ripples and the most potent tidal waves of providential impulse, as the sea spread before the throne itself.

WALTER PATER.

1839

[This extract from Mr. Pater's essay on Style, contained in his volume of literary studies entitled "Appreciations," puts in a noteworthy way the importance of perfect language for art's sake. A passage of similar import has already been given, but the subject is treated here with more detail, and the sense for expression is so essential to intelligent literary enjoyment that a second presentation of it is not superfluous. The faculty for recognizing and feeling the values of words on both the intellectual and artistic sides-nice discrimination in meaning, and æsthetic tact in verbal tone and sentence rhythm, is one of the later and more acquired literary refinements, and more than repays attention and study. The only danger in this connection is the possibility both for writers and for readers of a cold and cramping fastidiousness. When too much stress is thrown on exquisite verbal effect, there is danger of a cautiously critical, if not self-conscious tone. Perhaps Mr. Pater's own writings have occasionally a studied look, as if they had been polished with one file too many. The accidents of genius are often felicitous beyond studious correctness. The unexpected word, which formal theory might not always indorse, is sometimes the poetry of verbal selection that study can never attain. But the ordinary danger is in neglecting such admonitions as these upon the importance of finish and precision, whether in what we compose, or in attending to the work of others. Not a little of the cultivated reader's gratification in reading, is his perception of the beauties of artistic workmanship.]

From the Essay on Style, in "Appreciations."

Just in proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature also, truth-truth to bare fact, there is the essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.

The transcript of his sense of fact, rather than the fact, as being preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In literature as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding of a bell or a platter, for instance, wherever this sense asserts itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of course, in the first instance), there "fine" as opposed to merely serviceable art exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact-form, or color, or incident-is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.

-The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he professes to do will have in mind,

first of all, the scholar and the scholarly conscience -the male conscience in this matter, as we must think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent limits real scholarship to men. In his selfcriticism he supposes always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists. A writer full of a matter he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws, the limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a restriction, but if a real artist will find in them an opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility, of refined usage. Exclusiones debitæ naturæ-the exclusions, or rejections, which nature demands—we know how large a part these play, according to Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat changed sense, we might say that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those rejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he must use. Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds its utmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a

lover of words, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them to efface the distinction of language, the facility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of the vulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those affinities, avoidances, those mere preferences of his language, which through the associations of literary history have become a part of its nature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license, many a gypsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive. His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in literature, and will show no favor to short cuts, or hackneyed illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned. Hence a contention, a sense of self-restraint and renunciation, having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail, being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too, that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and therefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the science of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a freedom which in such case will be the freedom of the master.

-If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence a curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records what seems to have been his one other passion