are, put the meanest of us at our ease in
their presence, I see no reason why we should pay to any commentator a
servility not demanded by his master.

My next two principles may be more briefly stated.

(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largely
with style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said)
they cannot in their nature be readily brought to rule-of-thumb tests,
and may therefore so easily be suspected of evading all tests, of being
mere dilettantism; I propose (I say) that my pupils and I rebuke this
suspicion by constantly aiming at the concrete, at the study of such
definite beauties as we can see presented in print under our eyes; always
seeking the author's intention, but eschewing, for the present at any
rate, all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of which
the particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip. And having
excluded them at first in prudence, I make little doubt we shall go on to
exclude them in pride. Definitions, formulae (some would add, creeds) have
their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary
unintellectual man from making himself a public nuisance with his private
opinions. But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a real
sense of prose or verse. In other words, they are good discipline for
some thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use for them. As
Thomas a Kempis 'would rather feel compunction than understand the
definition thereof,' so the initiated man will say of the 'Grand Style,'
for example--'Why define it for me?' When Viola says simply:

I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too,

or Macbeth demands of the Doctor

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow..?

or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with

Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered!

or when Milton tells of his dead friend how

Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield,

or describes the battalions of Heaven

On they move
Indissolubly firm: nor obvious hill,
Nor strait'ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divide
Their perfect ranks,

or when Gray exalts the great commonplace

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike