We might then set up with plausibility an exactly opposite theory to the economic, and maintain that the secret of style is in exciting us to the greatest attentive effort, and that the best style is that which rouses us to the severest mental exertion. However, I believe that these two opposite methods of style are complementary. The great stylist is he who strikes the exact mean between over facility and over difficulty, and touches the exact co-efficient of mental friction in the reader, at which his whole power of mind comes into highest and most harmonious and effective exercise. The accomplished stylist most cleverly throws in questions, suggests doubts, and defers answers. To read his book is not a toboggan slide, but an obstacle race. What is plot interest but a skilful putting of obstacles in the reader’s way, deferring and thwarting his expectations, putting him on the _qui vive_ of attention? By the development of plot the novelist and dramatist plays hide and seek with the reader. No cunning artist reveals at once his whole thought in a blaze of light, but he mystifies and draws in half-tones, thus to stir you to reach out and grasp his meaning. But we are as yet far from exhausting the psychological significance of pleasure in style when we trace it to a reflex from either decrease or increase of attentive effort. The pleasure we have so far considered is naïve and direct; it is from literary art rather than in or at literary art as such. The child and the most ordinary reader derive from books a simple and natural pleasure which they do not reflect upon, and do not in any wise conceive the ways and means by which the effect is produced. Indeed, in the presence of the most lucid and perfect art these readers, like Partridge at the play, take everything as a matter of course, as just the way they would themselves express it. The _dilettante_ alone tastes the pleasure in style as such; as an art, an adaptation of means to ends, he alone appreciates the delicate adjustment of expression to thought, the choice diction, the deft management of word and phrase. The quality of this technical pleasure in style is exemplified in its highest form in this note of a great artist-critic, Shelley, appended to his fine translation of the opening chorus in “Faust”:— "Such is a literal translation of this astonishing chorus; it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation, and its reader is surprised to find a _caput mortuum_."