a kind of fairyland, and does the writer, alone among men, find that a beaten foot-path opens out before him as he goes, to lead him, straight through the maze, to the goal of his desires?  To think so is to build a childish dream out of facts imperfectly observed, and worthy of a closer observation.  Sometimes the cry for simplicity is the reverse of what it seems, and is uttered by those who had rather hear words used in their habitual vague acceptations than submit to the cutting directness of a good writer.  Habit makes obscurity grateful, and the simple style, in this view, is the style that allows thought to run automatically into its old grooves and burrows.  The original writers who have combined real literary power with the heresy of ease and nature are of another kind.  A brutal personality, excellently muscular, snatching at words as the handiest weapons wherewith to inflict itself, and the whole body of its thoughts and preferences, on suffering humanity, is likely enough to deride the daintiness of conscious art.  Such a writer is William Cobbett, who has often been praised for the manly simplicity of his style, which he raised into a kind of creed.  His power is undeniable; his diction, though he knew it not, both choice and chaste; yet page after page of his writing suggests only the reflection that here is a prodigal waste of good English.  He bludgeons all he touches, and spends the same monotonous emphasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of the Government.  His is the simplicity of a crude and violent mind, concerned only with giving forcible expression to its unquestioned prejudices.  Irrelevance, the besetting sin of the ill-educated, he glories in, so that his very weakness puts on the semblance of strength, and helps to wield the hammer.

It is not to be denied that there is a native force of temperament which can make itself felt even through illiterate carelessness.  “Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics,” says Thoreau, himself by no means a careless writer, “think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken.  The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.”  This true saying introduces us to the hardest problem of criticism, the paradox of literature, the stumbling-block of rhetoricians.  To analyse the precise method whereby a great personality can make itself felt in words, even while it neglects and contemns the study of words, would be to lay bare the secrets of religion and life—­it is beyond human competence.  Nevertheless a brief and diffident consideration of the matter may bring thus much comfort, that the seeming contradiction is no discredit cast on letters, but takes its origin rather from too narrow and pedantic a view of the scope of letters.