Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take _King Lear_ and take _Père Goriot._ Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose. So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic." [Illustration: dessin de C.B.] II Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, "expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which--apart from that--is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat--all, without exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off.