the style is the man. A dullard will write obscurely, because he thinks obscurely; or a madman will write nonsense. In these cases it is true, because inevitable, that the style is the man. The reason why I have always demurred at this phrase is that I deny the aspersion it contains that great writers cultivate styles other than those most natural to them, or most appropriate to their 'subjects.

If this is the case, it is beside the question to say of this or that writer that he has a good style or a bad style, because he has the only style which is natural to him. Mannerism or conscious affectation or imitation of any kind is, of course, as contemptible in writing as it is in personal intercourse. But there is no affectation in the quaint old phrases of Charles Lamb. It was the style of expression which most genuinely pleased him. Similarly there is presumably no affection in the most rugged passages in Carlyle. The cold, clear, and almost frigid style of J. S. Mill is the one best suited to scientific exposition, and the ornate, stately, well-balanced sentences of Macaulay become a part of the splendour which he is describing. The contributors to our periodical literature are almost invariably good writers, that is to say that they have no fixed styles, and cannot be identified by any tricks of manner. Herbert Spencer, in his Philosophy of Style, says:

As now, in a fine nature, the play of the features, the tone of the voice and its cadences, vary in harmony with every thought uttered; so in one possessed of a fully developed power of speech, the mould in which each combination of words is cast will similarly vary with, and be appropriate to, the sentiment.

The most perfect writer is therefore the man who has not one, but fifty, styles; who can describe a steeple-chase or a grand mass with equal felicity, and write with the same clearness about the state of the weather or the Board of Trade returns.

The contributor, like the editor, has undergone no special training; and, as Mr. Fitzboodle says, he often has not a particle of information. But then he is an imperfect genius. He has originality, and can put new life into the tritest subject. He has the gift of expression, and can suit his style to the occasion. I have heard well-meaning people say to a contributor: "I thought that such and such an article was yours. I thought I recognized the style." If instead of this they said: "I thought I

recognized it by its transcendent ability, its high moral teaching, and the irresistible force of its reasoning," they might perhaps give the contributor pleasure. But to tell him that they recognize him by his style is as bad as it would be to tell a fashionable beauty that you know her again by the colour of her dress. But what I would ask you to keep clearly in mind, as explaining and reconciling the seeming power with the actual obscurity of the contributor, is that being a man of genius, though an imperfect one, his affinities are with weakness. He opposes no obstacles, and if nature operates through the poet, the editor operates through. the contributor. A subject is given to him; he has not a particle of information about it either before or after, but for the time being the subject takes possession of him, because his mind. opposes no obstacles. Before he has left the editor's presence his originality is at work; he has seen his subject in half-a-dozen different lights. It is his fruitfulness of invention offering so many different modes of treatment that forms his first difficulty. As to the actual language which he uses he is less often conscious of hesitation or choice than is a practised orator. I believe that contributors, like painters or musicians, early discover their special aptitude, and are not happy until they have become professional writers. The irregular habits of life involved; the excitement of working under pressure; the delight of intellectual activity; the languor and the leisure which follow; the pride and pleasure in the work itself; these are only some of the conditions of the journalist's life which seem to offer attractions greater than the larger money gains he might win in other occupations.

The relationship existing between editors and contributors would seem, at the first glance, to be of a somewhat delicate nature. The editor of the Nineteenth Century, with his aristocratic staff, suggests the idea of an admiral who has two or three princes of the royal blood on board his ship learning discipline. But in the anonymous journal in which the editor retains his full sovereignty, I have tried to show that the editor has naturally a good deal of force of character, and that the contributor has naturally very little; and, as in married life, the undisputed rule of either husband or wife is more productive of peace than all the mutual forbearance which the good people enjoin; so between editor and contributor, the only lasting happiness is in letting the

editor have his own way, without remonstrance, as he cannot prevent you from holding a strong belief in the doctrine of retribution.

Through the publication, about three months ago, of a selection. from the correspondence of Macvey Napier, who was editor of the Edinburgh Review for eighteen years, from 1829 to 1847, we get the first public record of the relations which actually existed between, not a great editor, but the editor of a great and powerful magazine and his contributors. In the thirty years which have elapsed since the close of this correspondence, journalism has advanced as much, if not more, than any other element in our progress. Yet there is a great deal in the troubles of this editor that is common to all editors; the jealousies of his contributors; their impatience at corrections; their abundant and gratuitous advice; and it is, therefore, better that we should get a glimpse of the relations between editor and contributors from history than from imagination.

The most fruitful and the most deadly source of enmity between editors and contributors is, as everybody knows, and especially contributors themselves, all that is included in the words "editorial revision." Speaking in the abstract-that is not for myself, but for everybody else—and always assuming that the editor has the two qualities with which we have endowed him, namely, a robust and even popular judgment added to a fine and pure literary taste, I hold that an editor ought, in virtue of his critical faculty, to be able to improve almost any article that is submitted to him. Contributors betray their partiality, as against the editor's impartiality, by invariably pleading for the passages scored out that they are the most precious and important in the article. Why should the editor so systematically detect and put his pen through the best things in an article? The contributor is perfectly sincere in his belief that the best things have been omitted; but if totally different passages had been omitted, he would have believed with equal sincerity that THEY were the best. Writing in 1830, Macaulay says to his editor:

There were, by the bye, in my last article, "Utilitarian Theory," a few omissions made, of no great consequence in themselves-the longest, I think, a paragraph of twelve or fourteen lines. I should scarcely have thought this worth mentioning, as it certainly by no means exceeds the limits of that editorial prerogative which I most willingly recognize, but that the omissions seem to me, and to one or two persons who had seen the article in its original

state, to be made on a principle which, however sound in itself, does not, I think, apply to compositions of this description. The passages omitted were the most pointed and ornamental sentences in the review. Now for high and grave works-a history, for example, or a system of political or moral philosophy-Doctor Johnson's rule, that every sentence which the writer thinks fine ought to be crossed out, is excellent. But periodical works like ours, which, unless they strike at the first reading, are not likely to strike at all, whose whole life is a month or two, may, I think, be allowed to be sometimes even viciously florid. Probably, in estimating the real value of any tinsel which I may put upon my articles, you and I should not materially differ. But it is not by his own taste, but by the taste of the fish, that the angler is determined in his choice of bait.

A little later Carlyle comes upon the scene. Jeffrey was once asked why Mr. Carlyle's articles in the Edinburgh Review were so much better written than his subsequent productions, and Jeffrey replied: "I altered them." Now Napier, Jeffrey's successor, has written to ask him to contribute to the Review, and Carlyle writes:

My respected friend your predecessor had some difficulty with me in adjusting the respective prerogatives of author and editor, for though not, as I hope, insensible to fair reason, I used sometimes to rebel against what I reckoned mere authority, and this partly perhaps as a matter of literary conscience. Being wont to write nothing without studying it, if possible, to the bottom, and writing always with an almost painful feeling of scrupulosity, that light editorial hacking and hewing to right and left was in general nowise to my mind.

Two years later Jeffrey, who constantly advised his successor, writes:

I fear Carlyle will not do, that is, if you do not take the liberties and the pains with him that I did, by striking out freely and writing in occasionally. The misfortune is that he is very obstinate and, I am afraid, conceited, and unluckily in a place like this, he finds people enough to abet and applaud him, to intercept the otherwise infallible remedy of general avoidance and neglect. It is a great pity, for he is a man of genius and industry, and with the capacity of being an elegant and impressive writer.

In the year 1842 Macaulay thus defends his Essay on Frederic the Great against his editor, who appears to have been scandalized at the introduction of a number of colloquialisms in the article:

I have thought over what you say, and should be disposed to admit part of it to be just. But I have several distinctions and limitations to suggest.

The charge to which I am most sensible is that of interlarding my sentences with French terms. I will not positively affirm that no such expression may have dropped from my pen in writing hurriedly on a subject so very French. It is, however, a practice to which I am extremely averse, and into

which I could fall only by inadvertence. I do not really know to what you allude; for as to the words Abbé and Parc-aux-cerfs, which I recollect, those surely are not open to objection. I remember that I carried my love of English in one or two places almost to the length of affectation. For example, I called the Place des Victoires the place of victories, and the Fermier Général Etioles a publican.

The other charge, I confess, does not appear to me to be equally serious. I certainly should not, in regular history, use some of the phrases which you censure. But I do not consider a review of this sort as regular history, and I really think that, from the highest and most unquestionable authority, I could vindicate my practice. Take Addison, the model of pure and graceful writing. In his Spectators I find "wench,' baggage," " queer old put," "prig," "fearing that they should smoke the knight.' All these expressions I met this morning in turning over two or three of his papers at breakfast. I would no more use the words bore or awkward squad in a composition meant to be uniformly serious and earnest, than Addison would, in a State Paper, have called Louis an old put, or have described Shrewsbury and Argyle as smoking the design to bring in the Pretender. But I did not mean my article to be uniformly serious and earnest. If you judge of it as you would judge of a regular history, your censure ought to go very much deeper than it does, and to be directed against the substance as well as against the diction.

In 1845, three years before the publication of Vanity Fair, Thackeray writes:

From your liberal payment I can't but conclude that you reward me not only for labouring, but for being mutilated in your service. I assure you I suffered cruelly by the amputation which you were obliged to inflict upon my poor dear paper. I mourn still-as what father can help doing for his children-for several lovely jokes and promising facetiæ, which were born, and might have lived but for your scissors, urged by ruthless necessity. to think of my pet passages gone for ever!

. . O,

About the same period John Stuart Mill writes, in reference to an article of his on Guizot:

The omission of the concluding paragraph I do not regret; it could be well spared, and though I am fully convinced of the truth of all it contained, I was not satisfied with the manner in which it was expressed. You are of course quite right in not printing what you think would expose you to attack, when you do not agree with it yourself. At the same time I do not know how a writer can be more usefully employed than in telling his countrymen their faults.

Here, then, you have the relations which exist between editor and contributors amply illustrated. The editor is seen exercising his arbitrary power alike upon little points of diction and the more important question of suppressing the opinions of authors. I have said that, upon the whole, I believe that this censorship is

F