hese words exactly
fits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and
the temper of "the grand style"--and that is why they are so irritating
and provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is to
realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to be
born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced to
the simplest terms, is enough to occupy their consciousness and their
passion. In this sphere--in the sphere of the "inevitable things" of
human life--everything becomes to them a sacrament. Not a symbol--be
it noted--but a Sacrament! The food they eat; the wine they drink;
their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and reluctances of their
devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and retreats; their long
loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden "lashings out"; their
hate and their love and their affection; the simplicities of these
everlasting moods are in all of us--become, every one of them,
matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as it dawns,
as a "last day," and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its
sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods--this is to live in
the spirit of the "grand style." It has nothing to do with "right" or
"wrong." Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners often
practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of
those moods and events which are permanent and human, as
compared with those other moods and events which are transitory
and unimportant.

When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy,
devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces,
that can speak, if they will, in "the great style." When a man or
woman "argues" or "explains" or "moralizes" or "preaches," they are
the victims of accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and
return to vanity. That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in
the great style. That is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists,
those who have the genius to express in words their heroic defiance
of "the something rotten in Denmark," move us more, and assume a
grander outline, than the equally admirable, and possibly more
practical, arguments of the Scientific Socialists. It is the eternal
appeal we want, to what is basic and primitive and undying in our
tempestuous human nature!

The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. It
utters oracles and it wrestles