his eye on the
ball he is to strike, not on the racket with which he strikes. If the
writer sees vividly, and will say honestly what he sees, and how he
sees it, he may want something of the grace and felicity of other men,
but he will have all the strength and felicity with which nature has
endowed him. More than that he cannot attain, and he will fall very
short of it in snatching at the grace which is another's. Do what he
will, he cannot escape from the infirmities of his own mind: the
affectation, arrogance, ostentation, hesitation, native in the man will
taint his style, no matter how closely he may copy the manner of
another. For evil and for good, LE STYLE EST DE L'HOMME MEME.

The French critics, who are singularly servile to all established
reputations, and whose unreasoning idolatry of their own classics is
one of the reasons why their Literature is not richer, are fond of
declaring with magisterial emphasis that the rules of good taste and
the canons of style were fixed once and for ever by their great writers
in the seventeenth century. The true ambition of every modern is said
to be by careful study of these models to approach (though with no hope
of equalling) their chastity and elegance. That a writer of the
nineteenth century should express himself in the manner which was
admirable in the seventeenth is an absurdity which needs only to be
stated. It is not worth refuting. But it never presents itself thus to
the French. In their minds it is a lingering remnant of that older
superstition which believed the Ancients to have discovered all wisdom,
so that if we could only surprise the secret of Aristotle's thoughts
and clearly comprehend the drift of Plato's theories (which unhappily
was not clear) we should compass all knowledge. How long this
superstition lasted cannot accurately be settled; perhaps it is not
quite extinct even yet; but we know how little the most earnest
students succeeded in surprising the secrets of the universe by reading
Greek treatises, and how much by studying the universe itself.
Advancing Science daily discredits the superstition; yet the advance of
Criticism has not yet wholly discredited the parallel superstition in
Art. The earliest thinkers are no longer considered the wisest, but the
earliest artists are still proclaimed the finest. Even those who do not
believe in this superiority are, for the most part, overawed by
tradition and dare not openly question the supremacy of