Franklin or Abraham Lincoln. Books are not made by style alone. Even
lyric poetry is estimated by its fervor and by its sincerity rather than
by the dulcet phrases in which the lyrist has voiced his emotion of the
moment. If verbal felicity alone is all that the poet needs, if he is to
be judged only by the compelling melody of the words he has chosen to
set in array, then is Poe the foremost of lyrists. Even the essay, the
most narrowly literary of all prose-forms, is valued for its wisdom
rather than for its phrasing. The essays of Stevenson, for example, will
survive not because of their style alone, polished as that is and
unexpectedly happy in its phrasing, but because the man who wrote them,
artist as he was in words, had something to say--something which was his
own, the result of his own observation of life from his own angle of
vision. Style is the great antiseptic, no doubt; but style cannot bestow
life on the still-born.

Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has
been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as
"exquisite prose" and "splendid verse,"--in other words as an added
grace, applied externally,--but they also seem to believe that all plays
possessing what they would regard as "literary merit" stand in a class
apart. They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different
from the popular drama. Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a
literary play at first sight--and probably by its excess of applied
ornament. And this attitude is quite as absurd as the other. In no one
of the greater periods of the poetic drama have the plays which we now
revere as masterpieces differed in form from the mass of the other plays
of that epoch. They were better, no doubt, excelling in power, in
elevation, in insight, in skill. But they bore a striking resemblance in
structure and in intent to the host of contemporary plays which we now
perceive to be hopelessly inferior to them.