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view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and affinity
of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not so,
for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these
difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two
oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously
or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so
little recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which
we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect, not,
as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is
the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which attains the
highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively;
or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour.
Even the derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) natural
order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the means of such
designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most
pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most
perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical,
an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the
foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be
read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this quality
is poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on the
other hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with
pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted
to mention Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will.
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