be a good man.  Good style is the greatest of revealers,—­it lays bare the soul.  The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so much.  “Always be ready to speak your minds” said Blake, “and a base man will avoid you.”  But to insist that he also shall speak his mind is to go a step further, it is to take from the impostor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative whine, his mumping and his canting, to force the poor silly soul to stand erect among its fellows and declare itself.  His occupation is gone, and he does not love the censor who deprives him of the weapons of his mendicity.

All style is gesture, the gesture of the mind and of the soul.  Mind we have in common, inasmuch as the laws of right reason are not different for different minds.  Therefore clearness and arrangement can be taught, sheer incompetence in the art of expression can be partly remedied.  But who shall impose laws upon the soul?  It is thus of common note that one may dislike or even hate a particular style while admiring its facility, its strength, its skilful adaptation to the matter set forth.  Milton, a chaster and more unerring master of the art than Shakespeare, reveals no such lovable personality.  While persons count for much, style, the index to persons, can never count for little.  “Speak,” it has been said, “that I may know you”—­voice-gesture is more than feature.  Write, and after you have attained to some control over the instrument, you write yourself down whether you will or no.  There is no vice, however unconscious, no virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or of generosity in your character, that will not pass on to the paper.  You anticipate the Day of Judgment and furnish the recording angel with material.  The Art of Criticism in literature, so often decried and given a subordinate place among the arts, is none other than the art of reading and interpreting these written evidences.  Criticism has been popularly opposed to creation, perhaps because the kind of creation that it attempts is rarely achieved, and so the world forgets that the main business of Criticism, after all, is not to legislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.  Graves, at its command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth.  It is by the creative power of this art that the living man is reconstructed from the litter of blurred and fragmentary paper documents that he has left to posterity.

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