point the way to those stylistic developments that most suit the natural bent of the language.  It is not in the least likely that a truly great style can seriously oppose itself to the basic form patterns of the language.  It not only incorporates them, it builds on them.  The merit of such a style as W.H.  Hudson’s or George Moore’s[199] is that it does with ease and economy what the language is always trying to do.  Carlylese, though individual and vigorous, is yet not style; it is a Teutonic mannerism.  Nor is the prose of Milton and his contemporaries strictly English; it is semi-Latin done into magnificent English words.

[Footnote 199:  Aside from individual peculiarities of diction, the selection and evaluation of particular words as such.]

It is strange how long it has taken the European literatures to learn that style is not an absolute, a something that is to be imposed on the language from Greek or Latin models, but merely the language itself, running in its natural grooves, and with enough of an individual accent to allow the artist’s personality to be felt as a presence, not as an acrobat.  We understand more clearly now that what is effective and beautiful in one language is a vice in another.  Latin and Eskimo, with their highly inflected forms, lend themselves to an elaborately periodic structure that would be boring in English.  English allows, even demands, a looseness that would be insipid in Chinese.  And Chinese, with its unmodified words and rigid sequences, has a compactness of phrase, a terse parallelism, and a silent suggestiveness that would be too tart, too mathematical, for the English genius.  While we cannot assimilate the luxurious periods of Latin nor the pointilliste style of the Chinese classics, we can enter sympathetically into the spirit of these alien techniques.

I believe that any English poet of to-day would be thankful for the concision that a Chinese poetaster attains without effort.  Here is an example:[200]

[Footnote 200:  Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai for Canada.]

Wu-river[201] stream mouth evening sun sink,
North look Liao-Tung,[202] not see home. 
Steam whistle several noise, sky-earth boundless,
Float float one reed out Middle-Kingdom.

[Footnote 201:  The old name of the country about the mouth of the Yangtsze.]

[Footnote 202:  A province of Manchuria.]

These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted:  “At the mouth of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is about to sink, I look north toward Liao-Tung but do not see my home.  The steam-whistle shrills several times on the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth.  The steamer, floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of the Middle Kingdom."[203] But we must not envy Chinese its terseness unduly.  Our more sprawling mode of expression is capable of