Style, then, in the sense in which I am here using the term, implies that vital, intimate, personal relation of the man to his language by which he makes the words his own, fills them with his own quality, and gives the reader that lively sense of being in direct communication with a living, breathing, mental and spiritual force. The writer who appears to wield his language as an instrument or a tool, something exterior to himself, who makes you conscious of his vocabulary, or whose words are the garments and not the tissue of his thought, has not style in this sense. “Style,” says Schopenhauer, “is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.” This definition is as good as any, and better than most, because it implies that identification of words with thoughts, of the man with his subject, which is the secret of a living style. Hence the man who imitates another wears a mask, as does the man who writes in a language to which he was not born. II It has been said that novel-writing is a much finer art in our day than it was in the time of Scott, or of Dickens and Thackeray,--finer, I think, because it is in the hands of finer-strung, more daintily equipped men; but would one dare to say it is a greater art? One may admit all that is charged about Scott’s want of style, his diffuseness and cumbrousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still justly claim for him the highest literary honors. He was a great nature, as Goethe said, and we come into vital contact with that great nature in his romances. He was not deficient in the larger art that knows how to make a bygone age live again to the imagination. He himself seems to have deprecated his “big bow-wow” style in comparison with the exquisite touches of Jane Austen. But no fineness of workmanship, no deftness of handling, can make up for the want of a large, rich, copious human endowment. I think we need to remember this when we compare unfavorably such men as Dickens and Thackeray with the cleverer artists of our own day. Scott makes up to us for his deficiencies in the matter of style by the surpassing human interest of his characters and incidents, their relations to the major currents of human life. His scenes fill the stage of history, his personages seem adequate to great events, and the whole story has a certain historic grandeur and impressiveness. There is no mistaking a great force, a great body, in literature any more than there is in the physical world; in Scott we have come upon a great river, a great lake, a great mountain, and we are more impressed by it than by the lesser bodies, though they have many more graces and prettinesses.