This would make their performance a succession of
little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate
triumph.

"But style, but style!" they might return. "What about style? That was
one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to
say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about
perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a
style?"

"By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this
come-back. "Do not think about style. If you do your work well,
patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you.
That is the one thing you must _not_ try for. If you try for style, you
will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will
be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You
will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come
into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that
any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then
have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of
expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which
every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have
borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no
better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing
that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary
qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme
artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or
Dante?"

Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so
dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said
that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected
the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves
respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but
probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He
realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they
did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help
outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without
learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He
reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their
circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could
do this only by t