les with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him
springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or
sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the
supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the
demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies
of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the
artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no
form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases,
unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and
illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game.
The genius of prose rejects the _cheville_ no less emphatically than the
laws of verse; and the _cheville_, I should perhaps explain to some of
my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike
a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in each other; and it
is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we
judge the strength and fitness of the first.

Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to plait
about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more views of the
subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts them; and while, in
one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary knot, he
will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the meaning, or to
have transacted the work of two sentences in the space of one. In the
change from the successive shallow statements of the old chronicler to
the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is
implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we
clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and
stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and
affinity of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not
so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these
difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two oranges
kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not, afford
the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the
necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much admire. That style
is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most
natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble of the
chronicler; but which attains the hig