And there
was everything in the nature and the training of Marius to make him a
full participator in the hopes of such a new literary school, with
Flavian for its leader. In the refinements of that curious spirit, in
its horror of profanities, its fastidious sense of a correctness in
external form, there was something which ministered to the old ritual
interest, still surviving in him; as if here indeed were involved a
kind of sacred service to the mother-tongue.

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in
which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties
towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it does
but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all
times. 'Tis art's function to conceal itself: ars est celare
artem:--is a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has
perhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have had
little literary or other art to conceal; and from the very beginning of
professional literature, the "labour of the file"--a labour in the case
of Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like [98] that of the oldest of
goldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the work by far more
than the weight of precious metal it removed--has always had its
function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples of it, this Roman
Euphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty in writing--es kallos
graphein+--might lapse into its characteristic fopperies or mannerisms,
into the "defects of its qualities," in truth, not wholly unpleasing
perhaps, or at least excusable, when looked at as but the toys (so
Cicero calls them), the strictly congenial and appropriate toys, of an
assiduously cultivated age, which could not help being polite,
critical, self-conscious. The mere love of novelty also had, of
course, its part there: as with the Euphuism of the Elizabethan age,
and of the modern French romanticists, its neologies were the ground of
one of the favourite charges against it; though indeed, as regards
these tricks of taste also, there is nothing new, but a quaint family
likeness rather, between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, as
elsewhere, the power of "fashion," as it is called, is but one minor
form, slight enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that
deeper yearning of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is a
continuous force in it; and since in this direction too human na