the triviality and the surprising
freshness of the author's fancy; there you shall find him outstripped
in ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible
before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to
be made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the prints
examined.

*****

And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself
funds of entertainment: to take an admired friend of mine (whom the
reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of
all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave
him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and
his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the
culture of a raw tarpaulin, such physical surgery is, I think, a common
way of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can
put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday
by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend with his infinite variety
and flexibility, we know-but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must
engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from
the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless
arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that
remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

*****

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with
the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of
continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

*****

The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms;
the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain,
in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher power of insignificance;
and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw
the null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.

*****

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare
and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of
men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

*****

Style is