reflecting, which I admit is with him a too self-conscious process, his countenance has that ancientest expression only to be seen on the face of a very young child. As he deliberates and I regard him, he is perfectly well aware that I know he is thinking as follows : "Some consecutions are so intimately and evidently connexed to, or found in the premisses, that the conclusion is attained quasi per saltum and, without anything of ratiocinative progression, as the eye sees his object immediately, and without any previous discourse." Being in some respects a young coxcomb, he is fond of advertising the professorial air. The total effect is occasionally curtailed by his inability to keep awake. He is not, I fear, unlike the sententious undergraduate whose conversation is a permanent inquiry of "What do you mean by so-and-so? " His curiosity in the parcels that come to the door is so avid that I have to let him open them. Still, if his abnormal inquisitiveness sometimes takes embarrassing forms (as when he is anxious to know why I do not dip a fountain pen into the ink), he is the least incurious of philosophers and psychologists. He will sit for a round hour at the window inventing satirical epigrams about the passers-by (pedestrians he would call them). Indeed, he is the most affected autobiographist I have even reviewed. Even in the precise matter of food there must be a preliminary exercise in positive masculine coquetry before he will touch it. Publicity is the sole motive of his recreations. Even his temperamental demureness and ingrained fastidiousness he artificially develops. He is an artist from waking hours to the obtrusively manœuvred attitudes of slumber, preferring, for sensation's sake, to sleep on his back, front legs folded, hind legs spread

eagled in the air. But if his recognition of his own parts is apt to be a little theatrical, he invariably saves himself from any disesteem by the masterly delicacy, the exquisite grace in which he conveys to you his complete awareness of his own affectations. Yes, if his disposition is angelic, his love disinterested, his innocence without knowledge of sin, his soul like a celestial butterfly, his cleverness is certainly diabolical.

I was literally in a tight corner. Having rashly castled without advancing any of the three pawns in the king's neighbourhood, so as to open a window of escape for him from the back-line, I had laid open my flank to the swift onset of a covered queen, bishop or castle. The nemesis of my careless strategy overtook me. A bishop, whirling his crozier and with a frowning queen (arms akimbo) behind him, whipped off the nearest pawn. The king was forced to retreat into the extreme corner with what dignity he might. But the end was in sight. With awful celerity a squat and lowering castle bore down upon the pawn placed manfully but vainly in front of his widowed sovereign. "Mate," yapped Sago.

XIII

MY DEAR X,

THE PSEUDO-PICTURESQUE

In spite of your protests I am tempted to develop the theme of the decline of good reading, to try and find out who is responsible for it, what is the remedy, and what are its more obvious characteristics. No, I shall not be able to do it, but at any rate I mean to take a Curtian jump from off this airy pinnacle of epistolary lightheadedness. I will even have the audacity to begin my headlong career on the hobby-horse of style.

"It is the highest degree unphilosophic," said de Quincey, defining an æsthetic canon of Wordsworth's, to call language or diction' the dress of thoughts.'

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He would call it the incarnation of thoughts." " That seems to me as pertinent a remark on style as you are likely to find among the myriad theories of the art of writing from the Elizabethan Puttenham to QuillerCouch. I take it the whole difficulty of the subject is that it is impossible ever to arrive at an absolute definition of style. Wordsworth, for instance, adopted a classical style to embody a romantic inspiration; Byron, on the other hand, wrote undiluted romance with a polemical ideal of the eighteenth century in his mind. The fact is that it is futile not only to isolate style and to identify

it with manner but to uphold an abstract formula to be adjusted to all conditions, all personalities and all periods of letters.

Now a specific disease demands a specific medicine, and you cannot prescribe the one without diagnosing the other. The danger to contemporary literature lies not in the neglect but in the exploitation of prose style to serve ulterior motives and interested ends. Style is not a derelict ship; on the contrary it has been seized, torn from its moorings, and navigated by a horde of corsairs, plundering at will. This misappropriation of style I will call (very clumsily) the cult of the pseudo-romantic or the pseudo-picturesque. It is a multiform epidemic, and imaginative literature has been no freer from it than the leading article; the essayist, the traveller, the novelist, the biographer, the orator and the critic are as much affected by it as the sensational reporter. There are of course plenty of exceptions. All I wish to say is that it is the particular vice of this age. Each age has its own darling vice of expression. Vagueness of a certain kind is not only the effect but actually the object of this abuse of the art of writing Precision of statement, unless the statement itself is susceptible to an equivocal meaning, is avoided at all costs and for the sake of a stimulus to a spurious emotional appeal. To that end this misuse of style employs every figure that will serve to keep the feelings divorced from the intellect. Pleonasm, the reduplication of selected epithets, hyperbole, exclamation, and the use of abstract generalization are some of the commoner expedients. It is curious to note what effect this sensuous treatment of style has upon the standardizing of language. The more lax and fluid, that

is to say, the sentiments embodied in expression, the more stereotyped the expression itself. For a varied choice of phrase is a delicate register of the multiple impressions of reality. But the glib, the picturesque appeal to the surface emotions perverts and artificially simplifies the nervous organism of style. The one method defines its meaning; the other, aiming at a decorative effect rather than a meaning, creates an appeal confused indeed, but uniform and insubstantial. Hence the most remarkable feature of the pseudo-romantic—that it tends to narrow expression down to a few standard phrases and to apply them indiscriminately to every phase of emotion. As Pope says:

"False eloquence like the prismatic glass
Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place;
The face of nature we no more survey,
All glares alike, without distinction gay.”

So much for a few of the attributes of what for want of a better definition I have called the pseudo-picturesque style.

What are its results upon readers and writers? The reader, his emotions disoriented and replaced by sensation through the lack of feeling's contact with the mind, will respond to the appeal only if expressed in the manner to which he has been accustomed.

A like course has conducted the impressionist to a like goal. For impressionism, by subordinating ideas to treatment, has adulterated the artistic canon that treatment must be not only an exact but a metaphysically exact interpretation of the material. Its mannerism, its facility, its cleverness and aptitude, its casual picturesque