Works that can
claim all this will yet die if they are conversant about trivial objects
only, or written without taste, genius, and true nobility of mind; for
range of information, knowledge of details, novelty of discovery are of a
volatile essence and fly off readily into other hands that know better
how to treat them. The matter is foreign to the man, and is not of him;
the manner is the man himself." {162}
"Le style, c'est l'homme memo." Elsewhere he tells us what true style
is, but I quote from memory and cannot be sure of the passage. "Le
style," he says "est comme le bonheur; il vient de la douceur de l'ame."
Is it possible not to think of the following?--
"But whether there be prophecies they shall fail; whether there be
tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away
. . . and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the
greatest of these is charity." {163}
BUFFON'S METHOD--THE IRONICAL CHARACTER OF HIS WORK. (CHAPTER IX. OF
EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW.)
Buffon's idea of a method amounts almost to the denial of the possibility
of method at all. "The true method," he writes, "is the complete
description and exact history of each particular object," {164a} and
later on he asks, "is it not more simple, more natural and more true to
call an ass an ass, and a cat a cat, than to say, without knowing why,
that an ass is a horse, and a cat a lynx?" {164b}
He admits such divisions as between animals and vegetables, or between
vegetables and minerals, but that done, he rejects all others that can be
founded on the nature of things themselves.
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