eter Kropotkin's writings range from obscure articles in unknown papers read by a handful of faithful subscribers, to cloth-bound far-famed volumes translated into several languages; include contributions to periodicals as revolutionary as Revolte and as respectable as the Atlantic Monthly; embrace all subjects from machinery to music, and from Tolstoyism to Terrorism.
Judged from a literary standpoint, his work is distinctly disappointing. It is styleless. But it has one redeeming feature: clearness. The man is straight. He is not ashamed of his ideas. He speaks right out. He is one of the few authors who writes for the peculiar purpose of being understood. He does not bury the flower of his thought in a wilderness of words.
It cannot be contended that Kropotkin gave up his style because he writes for workers who are unable to appreciate the beauty of literary composition. A man may refuse a title with an oath as Carlyle did, or give it up as Kropotkin himself did, but he who has a style relinquishes it not, for this is a gift besides which the 'boast of heraldry' is as a puppy's snappish yelp unto the lion's mighty roar.
Neither can it be claimed that Kropotkin's stylistic deficiency is due to the fact that he is an economist. So was Henry George, and yet there is a magical music in Progress and Poverty which makes the phrases flow like a poem of Pushkin's.
Nor can it be argued that his style has been spoilt by the circumstance that he writes in various languages, for in none of his work is there epigram, imagery or imagination—the glorious trinity of the stylists. But what has a foreign tongue to do with it? Was not Kossuth just as much an artist in English as in his native pepper? Even when he cried that we must seize the opportunity by the front hair? Many waters cannot quench love, and strange alphabets do not wipe out style.
What is a stylist? He is one who handles words, who licks phrases into shape, who moulds clauses to his bidding, who compels a sentence to leave a deathless impression, who weaves a connected chain of harmony from the scattered links of language.
Kropotkin has written very much, but practice does not make a stylist any more than learning the rules in the Rationale of Verse makes one capable of producing The Raven. The secret of style is revealed to few. Its essence is a mystery in which only a handful are initiated. The elusive occultism of art consists in this—that a single expression has the power to either damn a passage into oblivion, or to emblazon it forever in eternity.
To give a striking instance: When Edgar Poe first wrote To Helen, these lines composed the second stanza:
