Characteristic

'Life seen throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually selected ­that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound by dogma.  Truth admits but the one rule:  No deficiency, and no excess!  Disobedient to that rule ­nothing attains full vitality.  And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of vital things.That aesthete, to be sure, was right, when he said:  “It is Style that makes one believe in a thing; nothing but Style.”  For, what is Style in its true and broadest sense save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect balance in the clothing of them? '