When Matthew Arnold insisted upon it that in all vital prose there is a process of evolution, he enunciated the same principle as did Renan. We all know well that which is organic in books as distinguished from the inorganic, the vital as distinguished from the mechanical. Read the learned address of the president of some local scientific or literary society, and then turn to one of Professor Huxley’s trenchant papers. The difference is just that between weapons in an armory and weapons in the hands of trained soldiers. Huxley’s will and purpose, or his personality, pervade and vitalize his material and make it his own, while the learned president sustains only an accidental and mechanical relation to what he has to say. Happy is the writer who can lop off or cut out from his page everything to which he sustains only a secondary and mechanical relation. The summing up of the matter would then seem to be, that there is an analogy of rhetoric and an analogy of science; a likeness that is momentary and accidental, giving rise to metaphor and parable; and a correspondence that is fundamental, arising from the universality of law. III STYLE AND THE MAN I The difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an essential difference--not a difference of substance, but of arrangement of the particles--the crystallization. In substance charcoal and the diamond are one, but in form and effect how widely they differ. The pearl contains nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster shell. Two men have the same thoughts; they use about the same words in expressing them; yet with one the product is real literature, with the other it is a platitude. The difference is all in the presentation; a finer and more compendious process has gone on in the one case than in the other. The elements are better fused and welded together; they are in some way heightened and intensified. Is not here a clue to what we mean by style? Style transforms common quartz into an Egyptian pebble. We are apt to think of style as something external, that can be put on, something in and of itself. But it is not; it is in the inmost texture of the substance. Choice words, faultless rhetoric, polished periods, are only the accidents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one thing; style, as the great writers have it, is quite another. It may, and often does, go with faulty workmanship. It is the use of words in a fresh and vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new spiritual force and personality. In the best work the style is found and hidden in the matter.