A RESOLUTION.—Never again to read a book that is born and christened (with ink) at the same moment. 131. IMPROVING OUR IDEAS.—Improving our style means improving our ideas, and nothing else. He who does not at once concede this can never be convinced of the point. 132. CLASSICAL BOOKS.—The weakest point in every classical book is that it is written too much in the mother tongue of its author. 133. BAD BOOKS.—The book should demand pen, ink, and desk, but usually it is pen, ink, and desk that demand the book. That is why books are of so little account at present. 134. PRESENCE OF SENSE.—When the public reflects on paintings, it becomes a poet; when on poems, an investigator. At the moment when the artist summons it it is always lacking in the right sense, and accordingly in presence of sense, not in presence of mind. 135. CHOICE IDEAS.—The choice style of a momentous period does not only select its words but its ideas—and both from the customary and prevailing usage. Venturesome ideas, that smell too fresh, are to the maturer taste no less repugnant than new and reckless images and phrases. Later on both choice ideas and choice words soon smack of mediocrity, because the scent of the choice vanishes quickly, and then nothing but the customary and commonplace element is tasted. 136. MAIN REASON FOR CORRUPTION OF STYLE.—The desire to display more sentiment than one really feels for a thing corrupts style, in language and in all art. All great art shows rather the opposite tendency. Like every man of moral significance, it loves to check emotion on its way and not let it run its course to the very end. This modesty of letting emotion but half appear is most clearly to be observed, for example, in Sophocles. The features of sentiment seem to become beautified when sentiment feigns to be more shy than it really is. 137. AN EXCUSE FOR THE HEAVY STYLE.—The lightly uttered phrase seldom falls on the ear with the full weight of the subject. This is, however, due to the bad training of the ear, which by education must pass from what has hitherto been called music to the school of the higher harmony—in other words, to conversation. 138. BIRD’S-EYE VIEWS.—Here torrents rush from every side into a ravine: their movement is so swift and stormy, and carries the eye along so quickly, that the bare or wooded mountain slopes around seem not to sink down but to fly down. We are in an agonised tension at the sight, as if behind all this were hidden some hostile element, before which all must fly, and against which the abyss alone gave protection. This landscape cannot be painted, unless we hover above it like a bird in the open air. Here for once the so-called bird’s-eye view is not an artistic caprice, but the sole possibility. 139.