which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties
towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it
does but modify a little the principles of all effective expression
at all times. 'Tis art's function to conceal itself: ars est celare
artem:--is a saying, which, exaggerated by inexact quotation, has
perhaps been oftenest and most confidently quoted by those who have
had little literary or other art to conceal; and from the very
beginning of professional literature, the "labour of the file"--a
labour in the case of Plato, for instance, or Virgil, like [98] that
of the oldest of goldsmiths as described by Apuleius, enriching the
work by far more than the weight of precious metal it removed--has
always had its function. Sometimes, doubtless, as in later examples
of it, this Roman Euphuism, determined at any cost to attain beauty
in writing--es kallos graphein+--might lapse into its characteristic
fopperies or mannerisms, into the "defects of its qualities," in
truth, not wholly unpleasing perhaps, or at least excusable, when
looked at as but the toys (so Cicero calls them), the strictly
congenial and appropriate toys, of an assiduously cultivated age,
which could not help being polite, critical, self-conscious. The
mere love of novelty also had, of course, its part there: as with the
Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, and of the modern French
romanticists, its neologies were the ground of one of the favourite
charges against it; though indeed, as regards these tricks of taste
also, there is nothing new, but a quaint family likeness rather,
between the Euphuists of successive ages. Here, as elsewhere, the
power of "fashion," as it is called, is but one minor form, slight
enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper
yearning of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is a
continuous force in it; and since in this direction too human nature
is limited, such fashions must necessarily reproduce themselves.