The stylist cultivates words as the florist cultivates flowers, and a new adjective or a new collocation of terms is to him what a new chrysanthemum or a new pansy is to his brother of the forcing house. He is more an European product than an American. London and Paris abound in men who cultivate the art of expression for its own sake, who study how to combine words so as to tickle the verbal sense without much reference to the value of the idea expressed. Club and university life, excessive library culture--a sort of indoor or hothouse literary atmosphere--foster this sort of thing. French literature can probably show more stylists than English, but the later school of British writers are not far behind in the matter of studied expression. Professor Raleigh, from whose work on style I quoted above, often writes forcibly and suggestively; but one cannot help but feel, on finishing his little volume, that it is more the work of a stylist than of a thinker. This is the opening sentence: “Style, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech.” Does not one faintly scent the stylist at the start? Later on he says: “In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their individual scope,--bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association.” Does not the stylist stand fully confessed here? That he may avoid these “cumbrous fragments” that will stick to words when you suddenly pull them up by the roots, “a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance.” The lust of expression, the conjuring with mere words, is evident. “He is a poor stylist,” says our professor, “who cannot beg half a dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous revolt.” What it is in one that starts into “clamorous revolt” at such verbal gymnastics as are shown in the following sentences I shall not try to define, but it seems to me it is something real and legitimate. “A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sunshine.”