guards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of
"the phrase," are equally good art. Say what you have to say, what you
have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner
possible, with no surplusage:--there, is the justification of the
sentence so fortunately born, "entire, smooth, and round," that it
needs no punctuation, and also [35] (that is the point!) of the most
elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration. Here is the
office of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament. As
the exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, of
which in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not the
correctness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against the
otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards the
pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one's
sense. License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as
people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming all
that opposes the liberty of beautiful production, will be but faith to
one's own meaning. The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is
nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Miserables is nothing in
itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence,
only redoubled beauty--the phrase so large and so precise at the same
time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of
words to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of
profit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original,
initiative, generative, sense in them.

In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the
man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of
what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions
regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the
medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things,
the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is
to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that.
Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant,
musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic
or expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste
of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified,
yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his
portrait by Raffaelle