In fiction the literary value resides in several different things, as the characterization, the action, the plot, and the style; sometimes more in one, sometimes more in another. In Scott, for instance, it is found in the characters and the action; the style is commonplace. In George Eliot, the action, the dramatic power, is the weakest factor. In Mr. Howells we care very little for the people, but the art, the style, is a perpetual delight. In Hawthorne our pleasure, again, is more evenly distributed. In Poe the plot and the style interest us. In Dickens it is the character and the action. The novelist has many strings to his bow, and he can get along very well without style, but what can the poet, the historian, the essayist, the critic, do without style--that is, without that vital, intimate, personal relation between the man and his language which seems to be the secret of style? The true poet makes the words his own; he fills them with his own quality, though they be the common property of all. This is why language, in the hands of the born writer, is not the mere garment of thought, not even a perfectly adjusted and transparent garment, as a French writer puts it. It is a garment only as the body is the garment of the soul. This is why a writer with a style loses so much in a translation, while with the ordinary composer translation is little more than a change of garments. I should say that the literary value of the modern French writers and critics resides more in their style than in anything else, while with the German it resides least in the style; in the English it resides in both thought and style. The French fall below the English in lyric poetry, because, while the Frenchman has more vanity, he has less egoism, and hence less power to make the universe speak through him. The solitude of the lyric is too much for his intensely social nature, while he excels in the light dramatic forms for this very reason. He has more power of intellectual metamorphosis.