of the Louvre with Cellini’s in the adjoining room from the point of view of pure sculpture.  Goujon’s group is superb in every way.  Cellini’s figure is tormented and distorted by an impulse of decadent though decorative aestheticism.  Goujon’s caryatides and figures of the Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their way—­by no means arabesques, as is so much of Renaissance relief, and the modern relief that imitates it.  Everything in fine that Goujon did is unified with the rest of his work and identifiable by the mark of style.

III

What do we mean by style?  Something, at all events, very different from manner, in spite of Mr. Hamerton’s insistence upon the contrary.  Is the quality in virtue of which—­as Mr. Dobson paraphrases Gautier—­

  “The bust outlives the throne,
  The coin Tiberius”

the specific personality of the artist who carved the bust or chiselled the coin that have thus outlived all personality connected with them?  Not that personality is not of the essence of enduring art.  It is, on the contrary, the condition of any vital art whatever.  But what gives the object, once personally conceived and expressed, its currency, its universality, its eternal interest—­speaking to strangers with familiar vividness, and to posterity as to contemporaries—­is something aside from its personal feeling.  And it is this something and not specific personality that style is.  Style is the invisible wind through whose influence “the lion on the flag” of the Persian poet “moves and marches.”  The lion of personality may be painted never so deftly, with never so much expression, individual feeling, picturesqueness, energy, charm; it will not move and march save through the rhythmic, waving influence of style.

Nor is style necessarily the grand style, as Arnold seems to imply, in calling it “a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.”  Perhaps the most explicit examples of pure style owe their production to spiritual coolness; and, in any event, the word “peculiar” in a definition begs the question.  Buffon is at once juster and more definite in saying:  “Style is nothing other than the order and movement which we put into our thoughts.”  It is singular that this simple and lucid utterance of Buffon should have been so little noticed by those who have written in English on style.  In general English writers have apparently misconceived, in very curious fashion, Buffon’s other remark, “le style c’est l’homme;” by which aphorism Buffon merely meant that a man’s individual manner depends on his temperament, his character, and which he, of course, was very far from suspecting would ever be taken for a definition.