limited, [15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne. Yet Mr.
Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style,
English literature has much to do. Well, the good quality of an age,
the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it
is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.
Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned
language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone
a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of
language towards their own. If there be a weakness in Mr.
Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a
little too independently of matter. And there are still some who
think that, after all, the style is the man; justified, in very great
varieties, by the simple consideration of what he himself has to say,
quite independently of any real or supposed connection with this or
that literary age or school. Let us close with the words of a most
[16] versatile master of English--happily not yet included in Mr.
Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the perturbing
influences of our century in a manner as classical, as idiomatic, as
easy and elegant, as Steele's:

"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer
in words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is
embellishing, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order;
whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich
visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks
or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and
appropriate to the speaker."