world in which, directly or by reference, he would like to live, or to the ruins by means of which his ego brings distinctness to its dream of solitary disdain."
"The egotistic unscrupulous branding of himself" upon his subject matter. We have seen the operation of that passion in the caricatures of Hogarth, in the novels of Laurence Sterne, in the "Sartor" of Carlyle; also, to take only two or three salient recent examples, in the strange "Rahab" of Mr. Waldo Frank, in Mr. Hecht's "Erik Dorn," and in the "Crazy Man" of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is interesting work—work of undeniable power, of a sort. The author's name is in every line like an obvious cryptogram, "branded" there. Mr. Middleton Murry thinks that this is a questionable stylistic ideal; that, in the long run, this remorseless insistence on one's idiosyncrasy becomes insufferably tedious. But Mr. Brownell, clearing the way for re-definition, tells us that this is not style, properly so called, but manner or mannerism, often violently embraced in the misconception that "style is the man himself"—a misconception largely responsible for the vogue of stylistic nudity and the exploitation of undisciplined impulse.
The celebrated phrase—"style is the man himself," casually dropped by Buffon near the close of his discourse on his admission to the Academy, Mr. Brownell has no difficulty in showing has been wrested from its context—like the "simple, sensuous and passionate," now erroneously but almost universally accepted as Milton's recipe for poetry. It does not represent Buffon's conception of style, but is almost antithetical to it. Style, according to the French Academician, is not the man himself, is not a spirit of personal self-
