Looking into the field of literature with eyes instructed by lifelong study of the "principle of beauty" in painting, sculpture, architecture, letters and social life, Mr. Brownell has marked, in common with less instructed observers, the growing tendency of authors to appear au naturel "to leave off agony, leave off style"; and he regards this tendency as essentially barbaric. As M. Marsan raises the little pennant of "elegance," so Mr. Brownell raises, on a far loftier standard, the flag of "style" as a positive objective which, clearly explained and persuasively commended, may conceivably enlist the loyalties of an age which acknowledges few. Quoting a Persian poet, he says: "The lion on the flag is but a painted lion, but in the wind it moves and marches." It marches in the chiding wind of current doctrine.
Style, what is it? In "The Nation" of October 8, 1924, you will find, in the resonant and only slightly ungrammatical language of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, a sharp, clean-cut answer, which I will cite because it expresses adequately, I believe, the idea of style entertained by a large number of our younger writers—perhaps by most of our "movement" writers who give time to the entertainment of such ideas. According to Mr. Bodenheim, the literary creator is "a dangerous, persuasive and unfair liar." Well, that is candid, at any rate. We see what he means. We know the type. "The literary creator," he continues, "must look upon creation as the egotistic, unscrupulous branding of himself upon human beings and episodes whose essence is a thousand confused faces, neither of them [sic] one whit more plausible than the other. He enters a distraught, elusively vicious and crisscrossed realm—life—and changes it to the
