Neither can it be claimed that Kropotkin's stylistic deficiency is due to the fact that he is an economist. So was Henry George, and yet there is a magical music in _Progress and Poverty_ which makes the phrases flow like a poem of Pushkin's. Nor can it be argued that his style has been spoilt by the circumstance that he writes in various languages, for in none of his work is there epigram, imagery or imagination--the glorious trinity of the stylists. But what has a foreign tongue to do with it? Was not Kossuth just as much an artist in English as in his native pepper? Even when he cried that we must seize the opportunity by the _front hair_? Many waters cannot quench love, and strange alphabets do not wipe out style. What is a stylist? He is one who handles words, who licks phrases into shape, who moulds clauses to his bidding, who compels a sentence to leave a deathless impression, who weaves a connected chain of harmony from the scattered links of language. Kropotkin has written very much, but practice does not make a stylist any more than learning the rules in the _Rationale of Verse_ makes one capable of producing _The Raven_. The secret of style is revealed to few. Its essence is a mystery in which only a handful are initiated. The elusive occultism of art consists in this--that a single expression has the power to either damn a passage into oblivion, or to emblazon it forever in eternity. To give a striking instance: When Edgar Poe first wrote _To Helen_, these lines composed the second stanza: "On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the beauty of fair Greece, And the grandeur of old Rome." In this case the concluding couplet is cheap and commonplace--"fair Greece" and "old Rome" being anemic expressions unfit to live. Poe amended it to read: "To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome." Miracle of Art! This is not a change, but an apotheosis. We now have two lines which lay before us in gorgeous perfection a picture of the past; two lines as splendid as they were sickly, as magnificent as formerly they were mediocre. Yet the idea is the same in both cases. What then is it which makes so much difference? It is the manner of expression--it is style--it is art. There is no reason why one man should be a stylist and another should not, but so it is. Huxley was a stylist; Darwin was not; Herzen, yes; Kropotkin, no. Being anxious to know Kropotkin's exact attitude towards Art, I wrote to him asking categorically: "In your opinion, have exquisite poets like Keats and Pushkin--who never touched social questions, but celebrated only beauty--been of much benefit to mankind?"