No Embellishments.—All ornament of the person, such as jewelry, flowers, feathers, etc., is vulgar so far as not constitutional, i.e., the due expression of the entire person—and of the unseen character whereof the visible person is itself expression. So, likewise, is all ornament of literary style vulgar so far as it is other than the natural expression of the writer’s thought. No dress is ever beautiful of itself, but only in relation to the wearer. A man or woman is best dressed when the dress least diverts the eye of the spectator to itself, and only serves all that is in the power of dress to illustrate, the character of the wearer. A beautiful person transcends and subordinates beautiful parts, nor suffers the eye of beholder to do it so much dishonor as to take note of single parts. It is disparagement to count dainty hands, shapely arms, pure eyes, classic nose, fine cut lips, clear tones, etc., whose proper value is only their collective expression of an integral beauty transcending all partial expressions.

Similarly, a beautiful style of writing is not a style adorned with similes, metaphors, or other figures of speech. Beautiful style, on the contrary, is the normal expression of high health and strength, of majesty and grace. The true writer rather feels the shame of the praise that ‘his sentences are bons-mots’, that they ‘bristle with points’, ‘dazzle with paradoxes’, etc. The true writer writes only with a single sense of the word he has to say. He wants his reader to know nothing of the writing or the writer, but only to stand face to face with the meaning of the whole. All perfection of style is invisibility, all vice conspicuousness. The more perfect is the identity of ‘word’ and ‘thing’, of writing and meaning, the more perfect is that word, that writing. Homer’s, Virgil’s, Dante’s, Shakespeare’s, Goethe’s metaphors are only the normal speech of each, in perfect correspondence with the pith and scope of each word each speaks.