When we advise the young writer to go honestly to work to say in the simplest manner what he really thinks and feels, one does not mean that by this course he is likely to write like the great prose masters, but that by this means alone can his work have the basic qualities of good literature,--directness, veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of natural things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence afterwards. “The ugliest living face,” says Schopenhauer, “is better than a mask.” It is real, it is alive. So the simple, direct speech of a man in earnest is so much better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so often compelled to hear or to read. Reality, reality--nothing can make up for a want of reality. Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that the peasant always has style; the French peasant probably more often than any other. This is certainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc as a typical peasant. What adroitness, and at times, classic beauty in her answer to her judges! When they sought to entrap her with the question, “Do you know if you are in the grace of God?” she replied, “If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me.” Under pressure, the peasant mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, capable of these things. But usually the charm of rustic speech is in its plainness and simplicity, like that of other rural things, a bridge, a woodshed, a well-sweep, a log house,--no thought of style, thought of service only. But the beauty of what may be called the architectural style of the great prose masters,--Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker, De Quincey,--like the beauty of a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral, is quite another matter. What both have in common is the beauty of sincerity and reality. The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth century, like Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more in keeping with the taste of to-day than the rhetorical and highly wrought style of certain of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers. Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely things, or to speech, we mean something quite different from style when applied to the great compositions either in literature, music, or architecture. Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and attain beauty; Wordsworth attains beauty by his sincerity and simplicity, and his fervent love of rural things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense. One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naïve beauty. The monumental works of the ancients were planned and wrought like their architecture, and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare rarely attains anything like classic beauty, and has any poem since Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” struck the note firmly and surely? V