berate preference of other words,--in fact, in all the conscious
tricks and graces that distinguish the lover of words from their mere
user.

A close examination discovers a similar absence from Huxley's work of
the second contributory to the total effect produced by written words.
Anything that may be said about absence of artistry in the use of
words, may be said as to absence of artistry in building of the words
into sentences, of the sentences into paragraphs and pages. In the
first place, actual infelicities of sentence-building are frequent.
Clause is piled on clause, qualifying phrases are interpolated, the
easy devices of dashes and repetitions are employed wherever
convenience suggests them. It is striking to find how infrequent is
the occurrence of passages marked in any way by sonorous rhythm or by
the charm of a measured proportion. The purple passages themselves,
those which linger in the memory and to which the reader turns back,
linger by their sense and not by their sound. For indeed the truth of
the matter is that Huxley's style was a style of ideas and not of
words and sentences. The more closely you analyse his pages the more
certainly you find that the secret of the effect produced on you lies
in the gradual development of the precise and logical ideas he wished
to convey, in the brilliant accumulation of argument upon argument, in
the logical subordination of details to the whole, in fact, in the
arts of the convinced, positive, and logical thinker, who knew exactly
what he meant you to know and who set about telling you it with the
least possible concern for the words he used or for the sentences into
which he formed his words. The ideas and their ordering are the root
and the branches, the beginning and the end of his style. To put it
in another way: it would be extremely easy to translate any of
Huxley's writings into French or German, and they would lose extremely
little of the personal flavour of their author. The present writer has
just been reading French translations of Huxley's _Physiography_ and
_Crayfish_, made at different times by different translators. At first
reading it seems almost miraculous how identically the effect produced
by the original is reproduced by the French rendering, but the secret
is really no secret at all. Huxley produced his effects by the
ordering of his ideas and not by the ordering of his words. From the
technical point of view of literary craftsmanship, he can