Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/258

242 The dominant quality of Oriani’s style was eloquence. His mental attitude was primarily historic. A writer by instinct, abundant without recourse to the recherché, solid but never dull, laconic and epigrammatic in spite of an apparent prolixity, colorful without display, lofty without over-emphasis, he was better qualified to command than to narrate, to persuade than to describe. He was a born orator, though he seldom spoke in public. His prose reflected the constant activity of a mind stirred by high thoughts and qualified to summarize them in rapid and illuminating surveys. His method of proceeding by contrasts and antitheses recalls Victor Hugo and Ferrari, with whom he must certainly have been familiar.

But the orator cannot be a true artist in the sense in which we now use that word: that is, he cannot be disinterested. In the orator, together with the real and powerful art of expression, there exists a desire to convince himself and others which is foreign to the pure artist, since it is of practical origin. When Oriani gave himself up to his own imagination, or when in his novels he succeeded in living in his characters, he approached art as we understand it. He was not always as original or as perfect as others