Booth’s scheme for elevating the masses by cymbals and dogma was “corybantic Christianity”; to explain what he thought was the Catholic attitude to the doctrine of evolution, he said it would have been called damnabilis by Father Suarez, and that he would have meant “not that it was to be damned, but that it was an active principle capable of damning.”  Huxley was like a builder who did not limit himself while he was constructing a house to the ordinary materials from the most convenient local quarry, but who collected endlessly from all the quarries and brickfields of the world, and brought to his heaps curiously wrought stones taken from a thousand old buildings.  The swift choice from such a varied material gave an ease and appearance of natural growth to his work; it produced many surprising and delightful combinations, and it never sacrificed convenience of expression to exigencies of the materials for expression.  On the other hand, Huxley lacked the sedulous concern for words themselves as things valuable and delightful; the delight of the craftsman in his tools; the dainty and respectful tribute paid to the words themselves; in fine, he took little pleasure in words themselves and used them as counters rather than as coins.  Careful reflection and examination will make it plain that the pleasure to be got from Huxley’s style is not due in any large measure to his choice and handling of words.  There is no evidence that he deliberately and fastidiously preferred one word to another, that he took delight in the savour of individual words, in the placing of plain words in a context to make them sparkle, in the avoidance of some, in the deliberate preference of other words,—­in fact, in all the conscious tricks and graces that distinguish the lover of words from their mere user.

A close examination discovers a similar absence from Huxley’s work of the second contributory to the total effect produced by written words.  Anything that may be said about absence of artistry in the use of words, may be said as to absence of artistry in building of the words into sentences, of the sentences into paragraphs and pages.  In the first place, actual infelicities of sentence-building are frequent.  Clause is piled on clause, qualifying phrases are interpolated, the easy devices of dashes and repetitions are employed wherever convenience suggests them.  It is striking to find how infrequent is the occurrence of passages marked in any way by sonorous rhythm or by the charm of a measured proportion.  The purple passages themselves, those which linger in the memory and to which the reader turns back, linger by their sense and not by their sound.  For indeed the truth of the matter is that Huxley’s style was a style of ideas and not of words and sentences.  The more closely you analyse his pages the more certainly you find that the secret of the effect produced on you lies in the gradual development of the precise and logical ideas he wished to convey, in the brilliant