Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/239

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THE QUESTION OF STYLE

justification of the sentence so fortunately born, "entire, smooth and round," that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration. Here is the office of ornament; here also the purpose of restraint in ornament.… The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty,—the phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter.

Literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art.

It is Pater who says of the author of Madame Bovary, "If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might per-

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