Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[34] ardent nature. It is hard to describe this quality, or to give rules for it; the most obvious way to acquire it is to keep one's life fresh and vigorous, to write only what presses to be said, and to utter that as if the world waited for the saying. Where lies the extraordinary power of “Jane Eyre,” for instance? In the intense earnestness which vitalizes every line; each atom of the author's life appears to come throbbing and surging through it; every sentence seems endowed with a soul of its own, and looks up at you with human eyes.

The next element of literary art may be said to be structure. So strong in the American mind is the demand for organization, that the logical element of style, which is its skeleton, is not rare among us. But this is only the basis; besides the philosophical structure of a statement, which comes by thought, there is an artistic structure, which implies the education of the taste. So, in the human body, there is a symmetry of the bony frame, and there is a further symmetry of the rounded flesh which should cover it; and in literature it is not enough to have a perfectly framed logical skeleton,there should be also a well-proportioned beauty of utterance, which is the flesh. Unless this inward and outward structure exist, although a book may be never so valuable, it hardly comes within the ___domain of literary art.

These different types of structure may perhaps be illustrated by three different books, all belonging to the intermediate ground between science and art. I should say that Buckle's “History of civilization,” with all its wealth and vigor, is exceedingly loose-jointed in all its logical structure, and also very defective in its literary structure, although it happens to have an element of freshness which is rare in such a work, and carries the reader along.