:+ Virile
apprehension of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one's
own impression, first of all!--words would follow that naturally, a
true understanding of one's self being ever the first condition of
genuine style. Language delicate and measured, the delicate Attic
phrase, for instance, in which the eminent Aristeides could speak, was
then a power to which people's hearts, and sometimes even their purses,
readily responded. And there were many points, as Marius thought, on
which the heart of that age greatly needed to be touched. He hardly
knew how strong that old religious sense of responsibility, the
conscience, as we call it, [156] still was within him--a body of inward
impressions, as real as those so highly valued outward ones--to offend
against which, brought with it a strange feeling of disloyalty, as to a
person. And the determination, adhered to with no misgiving, to add
nothing, not so much as a transient sigh, to the great total of men's
unhappiness, in his way through the world:--that too was something to
rest on, in the drift of mere "appearances."

All this would involve a life of industry, of industrious study, only
possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and
soul. For the male element, the logical conscience asserted itself
now, with opening manhood--asserted itself, even in his literary style,
by a certain firmness of outline, that touch of the worker in metal,
amid its richness. Already he blamed instinctively alike in his work
and in himself, as youth so seldom does, all that had not passed a long
and liberal process of erasure. The happy phrase or sentence was
really modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulous
thought. The suggestive force of the one master of his development,
who had battled so hard with imaginative prose; the utterance, the
golden utterance, of the other, so content with its living power of
persuasion that he had never written at all,--in the commixture of
these two qualities he set up his literary ideal, and this rare
blending of grace with an intellectual [157] rigour or astringency, was
the secret of a singular expressiveness in it.

He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the somewhat sombre
habitude of the avowed scholar, which though it never interfered with
the perfect tone, "fresh and serenely disposed," of the Roman
gentleman, yet qualified it as by an interesting oblique trait, and
frightened away s