ld finish a few pages and then rewrite them, using the same incident
and nearly the same words, but altering that indefinite something which
is scarcely so much style as manner, or atmosphere. He was astonished at
the enormous change that was thus effected, and often, though he himself
had done the work, he could scarcely describe in words how it was done.
But it was clear that in this art of manner, or suggestion, lay all the
chief secrets of literature, that by it all the great miracles were
performed. Clearly it was not style, for style in itself was
untranslatable, but it was that high theurgic magic that made the English
_Don Quixote_, roughly traduced by some Jervas, perhaps the best of all
English books. And it was the same element that made the journey of
Roderick Random to London, so ostensibly a narrative of coarse jokes
and common experiences and burlesque manners, told in no very choice
diction, essentially a wonderful vision of the eighteenth century,
carrying to one's very nostrils the aroma of the Great North Road,
iron-bound under black frost, darkened beneath shuddering woods, haunted
by highwaymen, with an adventure waiting beyond every turn, and great old
echoing inns in the midst of lonely winter lands.

It was this magic that Lucian sought for his opening chapters; he tried
to find that quality that gives to words something beyond their sound and
beyond their meaning, that in the first lines of a book should whisper
things unintelligible but all significant. Often he worked for many hours
without success, and the grim wet dawn once found him still searching for
hieroglyphic sentences, for words mystical, symbolic. On the shelves, in
the upper part of his bureau, he had placed the books which, however
various as to matter, seemed to have a part in this curious quality of
suggestion, and in that sphere which might almost be called supernatural.
To these books he often had recourse, when further effort appeared
altogether hopeless, and certain pages in Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe
had the power of holding him in a trance of delight, subject to emotions
and impressions which he knew to transcend altogether the realm of the
formal understanding. Such lines as:

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dews that drip all over;

had for Lucian more than the potency of a drug, lulling him into a
splendid waking-sleep,