of
omission. For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the
ornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference,
is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but
will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind it
of perhaps quite alien associations.

Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of
scholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the true
artist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word ornament
indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all
literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and
verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its
fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in
Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned,
with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel,
allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:--he
knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to
which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder,
because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject.
Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does
not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never
depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a
ponderable something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will
still question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford,
to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just
then?--Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles.
For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage,
from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle
of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20] the finished
work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the
rough-hewn block of stone.

And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other
accidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of
specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which
language as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own sake,
to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant
observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for
obviously mixed metaphors of course, but