Writing is very different from painting or modelling. To write or to speak is to make use of a faculty necessarily common to all men--a primordial and unconscious faculty which cannot be analyzed without the complete anatomy of the intelligence. That is why all treatises on the art of writing, whether they number ten pages or ten thousand, are but vain sketches. The question is so complex that it is hard to know where to attack' it. It has so many sharp points, and is such a thicket of thorns and thistles that, instead of plunging straight into it, one goes around, and that is wiser. To write, as Flaubert and Goncourt understood it, is to exist, to be one's self. To have a style is to speak, in the midst of the common language, a peculiar dialect, unique and inimitable, yet so constituted as to be at once the language of all and the language of an individual. Style is self-evident. To study its mechanism is useless to the point where uselessness becomes a positive menace. That which can be recomposed from the products of stylistic distillation bears the same resemblance to the style distilled, that a perfumed paper rose bears to a real rose. Whatever be the fundamental importance of a "written" work, possession of style enhances its value. It was Buffon's opinion that all the beauties found in a well-written book, "all the relations which constitute style, are so many truths quite as useful for the mind as those forming the substance of the subject, and perhaps even more precious." And, despite the common disdain, this is also the common opinion, since the books of the past which still live, live only by virtue of their style. Were the contrary possible, such a contemporary of Buffon as Boulanger, author of _L'Antiquité dévoilée_, would not be unknown to-day, for there was nothing mediocre about the man but his way of writing. And is it not because he almost always lacked style, that another contemporary, Diderot, has never enjoyed more than a few hours of reputation at a time, and that as soon as people stop talking about him, he is forgotten?