The secret of this case, if we are ungallant enough to subject to inquisition so tender a thing as a young lady’s conscience and literary tastes, is that she had learned from some muddied source that a beautiful description is a precious thing in a novel. She was afraid that the things in the book which really interested her might not be admirable--though I dare say they are harmless enough--and so she presented that little white excuse for reading the novel. Just so ladies who are not young have been known to admire a fiction of doubtful character wholly for its “exquisite style,” when if they really appreciated “exquisite style,” they would be reading something else. There is an enjoyment of style that seems either apart from the other kinds of enjoyment in reading or is a refinement, an addition, which makes the other kinds keener. In choosing novels, however, we do not need, as a practical matter, to hunt for style, any more than we need to hunt for descriptions, for the writer who is great enough to contrive plots and draw characters must have learned how to write well. The good novels are all in good style. The fiction maker whose style is poor is almost certain to fail in other ways and be altogether unacceptable. It is true that among the great ones some have more distinction of manner than others. Thackeray never writes so clumsily as Dickens at his worst. Stevenson’s phrasing is invariably excellent, whereas a greater novelist, Walter Scott, often for pages at a time throws off his sentences so hastily that they are not easy, not pleasant, to read. Jane Austen in her style is near to perfection; George Eliot, a writer of much more power, whose heights of eloquence are not equaled by any other woman, seems sometimes to be either expressing a kind of thought, or expressing it in a vocabulary and with a complexity of construction, which would be tolerable in a philosophic essay but is not suited to fictitious narrative. It is well to begin to be aware of the degrees of style and their general effect, to enjoy beauty and eloquence and grace in some measure for their own sake. But the inexperienced reader is safe to choose his novels for their substance; the style will usually be adequate and the merits of the style will enter the reader’s consciousness gradually and without effort of appreciation on his part.