The art of letters, then, is the art whose material is life itself. Such, indeed, is the implication of the approval theories of style. Words, phrases, sentences, chapters, are excellent in so far as they are identical with thought in all its shades of feeling. "Economy of attention," Spencer's familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself, an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching. "All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations."<1> He quotes therewith De Maupassant on Flaubert: "Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but ONE--one form, one mode--to express what I want to say." And adds, "The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!--the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within."... <1> _Appreciations: An Essay on Style._ Thought in words is the matter of literature; and words exist but for thought, and get their excellence as thought; yet, as Flaubert says, the idea only exists by virtue of the form. The form, or the word, IS the idea; that is, it carries along with it the fringe of suggestion which crystallizes the floating possibility in the stream of thought. A glance at the history of language shows how this must have been so. Words in their first formation were doubtless constituted by their imitative power. As Taine has said,<1> at the first they arose in contact with the objects; they imitated them by the grimaces of mouth and nose which accompanied their sound, by the roughness, smoothness, length, or shortness of this sound, by the rattle or whistle of the throat, by the inflation or contraction of the chest. <1> H. Taine, _La Fontaine et ses Fables_, p. 288.