"
Lamb had the great advantage of seeing the elder dramatists as they were;
it did not lie within his province to point out what they were not.
Himself a fragmentary writer, he had more sympathy with imagination where
it gathers into the intense focus of passionate phrase than with that
higher form of it, where it is the faculty that shapes, gives unity of
design and balanced gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this higher
form of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work the dignity and
permanence of a classic; for it results in that exquisite something
called Style, which, like the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere
pervasive and nowhere emphatic, makes itself felt by the skill with which
it effaces itself, and masters us at last with a sense of indefinable
completeness. On a lower plane we may detect it in the structure of a
sentence, in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of thought; but
it is only where it combines and organizes, where it eludes observation
in particulars to give the rarer delight of perfection as a whole, that
it belongs to art. Then it is truly ideal, the _forma mentis aeterna,_
not as a passive mould into which the thought is poured, but as the
conceptive energy which finds all material plastic to its preconceived
design.
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