My next two principles may be more briefly stated.

(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largely with style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said) they cannot in their nature be readily brought to rule-of-thumb tests, and may therefore so easily be suspected of evading all tests, of being mere dilettantism; I propose (I say) that my pupils and I rebuke this suspicion by constantly aiming at the concrete, at the study of such definite beauties as we can see presented in print under our eyes; always seeking the author’s intention, but eschewing, for the present at any rate, all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of which the particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip.  And having excluded them at first in prudence, I make little doubt we shall go on to exclude them in pride.  Definitions, formulae (some would add, creeds) have their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary unintellectual man from making himself a public nuisance with his private opinions.  But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a real sense of prose or verse.  In other words, they are good discipline for some thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use for them.  As Thomas a Kempis ’would rather feel compunction than understand the definition thereof,’ so the initiated man will say of the ‘Grand Style,’ for example—­’Why define it for me?’ When Viola says simply: 

     I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
     And all the brothers too,

or Macbeth demands of the Doctor

     Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
     Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow..?

or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with

     Nymph, in thy orisons
     Be all my sins remembered!

or when Milton tells of his dead friend how

     Together both, ere the high lawns appear’d
     Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
     We drove afield,

or describes the battalions of Heaven

     On they move
     Indissolubly firm:  nor obvious hill,
     Nor strait’ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divide
     Their perfect ranks,

or when Gray exalts the great commonplace

     The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
     And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
     Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour;
     The paths of glory lead but to the grave,

or when Keats casually drops us such a line as

     The journey homeward to habitual self,

or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on a page of William Watson and read

     O ancient streams, O far descended woods,
     Full of the fluttering of melodious souls!...

’why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any definition of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again here—­in all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn—­I recognise and feel the thing?’