When Sainte-Beuve says Rien ne vit que par le style, he asserts in fact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence to literary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life to expression.  The inward flow will shape itself adequately and harmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary, what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself it will, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command, while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never give vitality to style when are wanting primary resources.  Literary substance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be with the fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient; for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment, albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondary agents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it would have been.  Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanent addition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plastic deficiencies.  A conception that has a soul in it will find itself a body, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of the fine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention.  And the body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of the man.  Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style, but manner.  Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings behind them.  They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined by mental wants.  Picking and polishing words and phrases is ineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts:  below the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style.  And then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive faculties there must be lively harmony.  The executive power is a purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that wields it is feeling.  For the best style the wielding force must be fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.

Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or feel, in such a way as to make the best of it—­presupposed, that what you think or feel is worth putting into printed words.  There are men who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity, will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a style which for their purposes is effective.  Of this class Jeffrey, Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples.  Theirs are not winged minds.  They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent, illuminated by soulful revelations.  All three