assertion. It is rather a kind of human imitation of the celestial order and motion, informing the whole work as the spirit of God informs creation. It is a spirit which pre-establishes harmony in the movement of one's ideas by reference to a thoroughly preconceived design. Indeed, in the body of his discourse, Buffon declares it to be "nothing but the order and movement which one puts into one's thought." In its essence, therefore, it is almost as little personal as the mathematical element in music. A sound style isn't a rigid thing; it isn't a thing to prescribe and impose from without; it isn't a thing to fear as repressive of personality. It is just the order and movement of one's own thoughts when they are going right.
Mr. Brownell is susceptible to the charms of perfection. Whenever he contemplates them, in matter or in idea, his own style takes wings; and this, he declares with contagious ardor, is the high reward of those who, in letters, seek not their own idiosyncrasy but that moving order which is "art's and heaven's first law."
For the effect of the spirit of style in a work of art is precisely to add wings to it. The effect of following any objective ideal is elevation. Uplift means first of all getting out of one's self. It appeals in this way to the imagination as adventure does. But it also involves what adventure does not, definite aspiration rather than vague enthusiasm. And this aspiration to achieve rather than to experience, to reach a goal rather than to explore the unknown, to attain the normal rather than invent the novel, springs from perceiving the existence in the ideal sphere of a quality for which we have no other word so apt as perfection.
