so makes good hard hits
all the time. There is more character than intellect in every
sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." Criticism like
this carries the force and conviction of a scientific analysis.

The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits of criticism directed
to nearly all the more noted authors of English literature, past and
present. In science we do want an absolutely colorless, transparent
medium, but in literature the personality of the writer is everything.
The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as
a man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of
Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality--the savor of that
which acts over and above his will--and we have robbed them of their
distinctive quality. Literature is always truth of some sort, plus a
man. No one knew this better than Emerson himself. Another remark of
Emerson's, made when he was twenty-seven years old, has high literary
value:

"There is no beauty in words except in their collocation."

It is not beautiful words that make beautiful poetry, or beautiful
prose, but ordinary words beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes
by fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the tailor to turn him
out a fine man. First get your great idea, and you will find it is
already fitly clothed. The image of the clothes in this connection is,
of course, a very inadequate and misleading one, since language is the
thought or its vital integument, and not merely its garment. We often
praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in
the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write
well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always
a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the
best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness
to the idea. All painters use the same colors, all musicians use the
same notes, all sculptors use the same marble, all architects use the
same materials and all writers use essentially the same words, their
arrangement and combination alone making the difference in the various
products. Nature uses the same elements in her endless variety of
living things; their different arrangement and combinations, and some
interior necessity which we have to call the animating principle, is
the secret of the individuality of each.

Of course we think in words or images, and no man c