A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly
rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will
understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is
utterly devoid of the faculty of style (_denue de la faculte du
style_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great
Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in
prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and
audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too,
some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers,
have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities,
with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the
exclusive property of the poetic idiom."
A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the
better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in
presence of the defective or the incomplete. This endowment implies a
mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of
thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the
writer exacting towards himself. Hence only he attains to a genuine
correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by
discipline.
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