ubject too abstruse for clear
presentation. The examples of Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hume are
enough to show how such subjects can be mastered, and the very
implication of writing a book is that the writer has mastered his
material and can give it intelligible form.

A grave treatise, dealing with a narrow range of subjects or moving
amid severe abstractions, demands a gravity and severity of style which
is dissimilar to that demanded by subjects of a wider scope or more
impassioned impulse; but abstract philosophy has its appropriate
elegance no less than mathematics. I do not mean that each subject
should necessarily be confined to one special mode of treatment, in the
sense which was understood when people spoke of the "dignity of
history," and so forth. The style must express the writer's mind; and
as variously constituted minds will treat one and the same subject,
there will be varieties in their styles. If a severe thinker be also a
man of wit, like Bacon, Hobbes, Pascal, or Galileo, the wit will flash
its sudden illuminations on the argument; but if he be not a man of
wit, and condescends to jest under the impression that by jesting he is
giving an airy grace to his argument, we resent it as an impertinence.

I have throughout used Style in the narrower sense of expression rather
than in the wider sense of "treatment" which is sometimes affixed to
it. The mode of treating a subject is also no doubt the writer's or the
artist's way of expressing what is in his mind, but this is Style in
the more general sense, and does not admit of being reduced to laws
apart from those of Vision and Sincerity. A man necessarily sees a
subject in a particular light--ideal or grotesque, familiar or
fanciful, tragic or humorous, he may wander into fairy-land, or move
amid representative abstractions; he may follow his wayward fancy in
its grotesque combinations, or he may settle down amid the homeliest
details of daily life. But having chosen he must be true to his choice.
He is not allowed to represent fairy-land as if it resembled Walworth,
nor to paint Walworth in the colours of Venice. The truth of
consistency must be preserved in his treatment, truth in art meaning of
course only truth within the limits of the art; thus the painter may
produce the utmost relief he can by means of light and shade, but is
peremptorily forbidden to use actual solidities on a plane surface. He
must represent gold by colour, not by sticking