beating with life. No fisher's net ever took such glancing fishes, nor
did the net of a constellation's shape ever enclose more vibrating
Pleiades.




WELLS


The world at present is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive
secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of
life. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber
sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, they
are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their
voices are released at last in the London scullery, why, it can hardly be
said that the song is eloquent of the natural source of waters, whether
earthly or heavenly. There is not one of the circumstances of this
capture of streams--the company, the water-rate, and the rest--that is
not a sign of the ill-luck of modern devices in regard to style. For
style implies a candour and simplicity of means, an action, a gesture, as
it were, in the doing of small things; it is the ignorance of secret
ways; whereas the finish of modern life and its neatness seem to be
secured by a system of little shufflings and surprises.

Dress, among other things, is furnished throughout with such fittings;
they form its very construction. Style does not exist in modern
arrayings, for all their prettiness and precision, and for all the
successes--which are not to be denied--of their outer part; the happy
little swagger that simulates style is but another sign of its absence,