It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an author consists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been made before a single one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was the case with Menander, who described one of his plays as "finished" before he had written a word of it. It would be foolish, too, to write as though perfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking and choosing among decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, but of expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative labour and sorrow after it no less than the æsthetes. We who do not know Russian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more trouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and artistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energetic struggle for perfection in writing: When _Anna Karénina_ began to come out in the _Russki Vyéstnik_ [he wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures. My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh. In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when "Lyóvotchka" came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post. My father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last look," and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more. "Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoilt all your work again; I promise I won't do it any more," he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow without fail." But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months together.