has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat." Here,
then, with a view to the central need of a select few, those "men of
a finer thread" who have formed and maintain the literary ideal,
everything, every component element, will have undergone exact trial,
and, above all, there will be no uncharacteristic or tarnished or
vulgar decoration, permissible ornament being for the most part
structural, or necessary. As the painter in his picture, so the
artist in his book, aims at the production by honourable artifice of
a peculiar atmosphere. "The artist," says Schiller, "may be known
rather by what he omits"; and in literature, too, the true artist may
be best recognised by his tact of omission. For to the grave reader
words too are grave; and the ornamental word, the figure, the
accessory form or colour or reference, is rarely content to die to
thought precisely at the right moment, but will inevitably linger
awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind it of perhaps quite alien
associations.

Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of
scholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the true
artist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word
ornament indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one
beauty" of all literary style is of its very essence, and
independent, in prose and verse alike, of all removable decoration;
that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame
Bovary, for instance, or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a
composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a single suggestion of
visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the allusive way
generally, the flowers in the garden:--he knows the narcotic force of
these upon the negligent intelligence to which any diversion,
literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go