, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair.

A relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to the
subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon
transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the
conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament
of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word,
recognisable by the sensitive, by others "who have intelligence" in the
matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and
delicate region of human language. The style, the manner, would be the
man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices,
involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what
is most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again.--

Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37] peculiar
moulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is to
pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his
theory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain
absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its intensity
and colour. For him the form was the work itself. As in living
creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour
and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a
work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the
measure, the rhythm--the form in all its characteristics.

If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable
apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal."

I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, that prose
literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as
others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned
that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the
opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the
imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free
and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And
certainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bring
literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music
takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all
art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to
distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the
expression, then, literature, by findin