It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad-
dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes.
Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic' things, of 'quaint' things and
'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy' Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-
painting' (is not that the way of it?), and it will serve the turn.
Especially did the Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of
language. It seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature
that if anything could convince him of his own success it must be the
energy of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives,
fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century. Literature doubtless
is made of words. What then is needful, he seems to ask, besides a knack
of beautiful words? Unluckily for him, he has achieved, not style, but
slang. Unluckily for him, words are not style, phrases are not style.
'The man is style.' O good French language, cunning and good, that lets
me read the sentence in obverse or converse as I will! And I read it as
declaring that the whole man, the very whole of him, is his style. The
literature of a man of letters worthy the name is rooted in all his
qualities, with little fibres running invisibly into the smallest
qualities he has.
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