I 2

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Give a man a girl he can love,

would beset him at the same moment, always As I, O my Love, love thee;

with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit : And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate, Among all the expressions in the world, all At home, on land, on sea.

forms and turns of expression, there is but one one form, one mode

- to express what I

want to say." ART

The one word for the one thing, the one

thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, II

that might just do: the problem of style was If you have a carrier-dove

there ! — the unique word, phrase, sentence, That can fly over land and sea;

paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper And a message for your Love,

to the single mental presentation or vision “Lady, I love but thee!”

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within. In that perfect justice, over and

above the many contingent and removable And this dove will never stir

beauties with which beautiful style may But straight from her to you,

charm us, but which it can exist without, And straight from you to her;

independent of them yet dexterously availing As you know an she knows too. 8 itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in

function at every point, from single epithets Will you first ensure, 0

sage,

to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the Your dove that never tires

specific, indispensable, very intellectual, With your message in a cage,

beauty of literature, the possibility of which Though a cage of golden wires ?

constitutes it a fine art.

One seems to detect the influence of a philoOr will you fling your dove:

sophic idea there, the idea of a natural econ"Fly, darling, without rest,

omy, of some preëxistent adaptation, between Over land and sea to my Love,

a relative, somewhere in the world of thought, And fold your wings in her breast ?" 16 and its correlative, somewhere in the world of

language — both alike, rather, somewhere in

the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, WALTER PATER (1839-1894) inventive--meeting each other with the readi

ness of “soul and body reunited,” in Blake's! FROM STYLE

rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory philosophical expression.

“There are no beautiful thoughts,” he What, then, did Flaubert' understand by would say, “without beautiful forms, and beauty, in the art he pursued with so much conversely. As it is impossible to extract fervour, with so much self-command? Let us

from a physical body the qualities which hear a sympathetic commentator :

really constitute it -- colour, extension, and “Possessed of an absolute belief that there the like without reducing it to a hollow exists but one

way of expressing one thing, one abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, just so it is impossible to detach the form one verb to animate it, he gave himself to from the idea, for the idea only exists by superhuman labour for the discovery, in every virtue of the form." phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. All the recognised flowers, the removable In this way, he believed in some mysterious ornaments of literature (including harmony harmony of expression, and when a true word and ease in reading aloud, very carefully conseemed to him to lack euphony still went on sidered by him) counted certainly; for these seeking another, with invincible patience, cer- too are part of the actual value of what one tain that he had not yet got hold of the unique says. But still, after all, with Flaubert, the word. ... A thousand preoccupations search, the unwearied research, was not for

the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word, as · Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), a French novelist, noted for his ideas on the art of writing.

1 William Blake, poet and engraver