while half the world is using figure unconsciously, will be fully
aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but
of the vague, lazy, half-formed personification--a rhetoric,
depressing, and worse than nothing, [21] because it has no really
rhetorical motive--which plays so large a part there, and, as in the
case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from
syllable to syllable, its precise value.

So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art
arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the
essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent
ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good
taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate
quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist
himself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent
to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all
other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,
everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees
the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every
part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but,
with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition
of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of
the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity
of mind in style.

An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose
works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and
with obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)
wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to
show that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing,