you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the
most direct and exact manner possible, with no surplusage:--there, is
the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, "entire,
smooth, and round," that it needs no punctuation, and also [35] (that
is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its
elaboration. Here is the office of ornament: here also the purpose
of restraint in ornament. As the exponent of truth, that austerity
(the beauty, the function, of which in literature Flaubert understood
so well) becomes not the correctness or purism of the mere scholar,
but a security against the otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does
not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in
the portraiture of one's sense. License again, the making free with
rule, if it be indeed, as people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging
aside or transforming all that opposes the liberty of beautiful
production, will be but faith to one's own meaning. The seeming
baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild
ornament of Les Miserables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of
Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty--the
phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in
service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter.
Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of profit only so far as
they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative,
generative, sense in them.

In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the
man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of
what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions
regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to
the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of
things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: