trated thought to a masterly handling of tabulated views and statistics.

NOTE. - The thinking that at beginning found few who were able to compass it, as for instance the great theories of Newton and Darwin, becomes common schoolboy property in the age succeeding; the great movements of research and philosophy get eventual access to the common mind; and this by the work of lecturers, orators, writers of text-books, treatises, and monographs, men whose faculty is clearness of sight and lucid balance of thinking. These are abilities to which in some degree every one may aspire. And the exercise of some such faculty of commonsense invention is what is called for in the great bulk of casual papers that ordinary men have occasion to write.

II. THE SUPPORT FROM SELF-CULTURE.

Apprenticeship to any art goes deeper than learning the use of tools and methods of work. The worker's whole mental attitude must become habituated to the spirit of his pursuit. The carpenter evolves a carpenter mind; the musical composer moves in an atmosphere of musical thought; the painter sees schemes of color and pictorial combination everywhere. In the great field of literature, too, this is so. There must be evolved the literary mind, conscious of its high calling, and with all its faculties united and concentrated on the large art of expression. This is more than being expert in knacks and methods; it is a dominating current of life; it has to be fed and supported by systematic self-culture.

At this point a disadvantage of our work has to be noted and allowed for. In the period while the text-book is studied, this self-culture can only be pointed out, or at most begun. What is to be said about it, therefore, must look mostly to the future. The college course is too brief and crowded, and too early placed in life, for the student to establish that controlling inventive and literary current which is essential. Experience of life, the grip of problems and events at first hand, is want

ing. Besides, the whole temper and attitude of undergraduate study is in the direction of taking in truth, rather than of giving it out in individual mintage and conviction. Yet this latter is the very essence of invention. The writer, in his chosen line, must lead, must teach, must guide, must take the initiative; and to this the prevailing bent of his being must be trained.1 To accomplish this in school days is uphill work, not to say impossible. The most that can be done here is to point out the way, and suggest a line of self-culture which may some day be vital.

The following aspects of self-culture are here treated not for their importance in themselves, though this is real and great, but for their relation to literary invention.

I.

The Spirit of Observation. This, as applied to the world in general, outer and inner, is practically identical with what is called the scientific spirit. It is the spirit that appreciates and appropriates facts, just as they are; first of all by the keen and accurate use of the senses, the fundamental means of gathering truth. But the same spirit is also quick to see the relations of facts, the vitalizing of facts into truths; it is as keen to gather material from life as from nature, from books as from life. So what we here define is the scientific spirit in the large sense, with all the enthusiasm, the sense of values, the accuracy, the verifying caution, that characterize the born observer. Everything thus gathered has its uses in the fabric of literary presentation; but, what is of more importance, the habit of keeping mind and senses open to facts keeps the mind open to activity, to self-reliant energy, to origination.

1 "The first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright."- STEVENSON, The Morality of the Profession of Letters, Works, Vol. xxii, p. 283.

The following aspects of this spirit of observation lie nearest to, and are the greatest supports of, invention.

Alertness of Mind. The beginning of the observing spirit is nothing difficult or profound; it is simply being awake, being interested; and that means letting the mind, the active, curious, discriminative thought, be at work behind the eye in what is seen. By its attitude of interrogation and ready welcome of facts the mind sets up a vitalizing energy which is the first impulse to luminous and ordered use of knowledge.1

Every one has his own sphere in which his mind is alert. Whatever pertains to his own pursuit or calling, for instance, has immediate appeal to him, so that he becomes an expert observer therein; the mechanic in evidences of manual skill, the farmer in soils and crops, the general in topography and strategic points. Every new interest, too, creates its province of specialized observation and keenness; witness, for instance, how soon a bicyclist acquires an expert knowledge of roads, and an amateur photographer of effective points of view. What these limited examples suggest applies, in a degree bounded only by the writer's breadth of mind, to the unlimited field of literature. It is the motive of his calling to make use of a universal special sense, by which the world is laid under contribution for enriching materials, and through

1 "A faculty of wise interrogating is half a knowledge. For as Plato saith, 'Whosoever seeketh, knoweth that which he seeketh for in a general notion; else how shall he know it when he hath found it?' And therefore the larger your Anticipation is, the more direct and compendious is your search.". BACON, Advancement of Learning, Book ii, p. 271.-"When I speak of a waiting mind, I do not mean a non-affirmative, non-energized, Mr. Micawber sort of mind, waiting for something to turn up, but a mind intent, a mind that goes to its windows and looks out and longs, and thrusts forth its telescope to find something. A mind thus intense, investigatory, and practically beseeching, amounts to a tremendous loadstone in the midst of the full-stocked creation - - full-stocked with the materials of thought—and when this or that comes into the windows of such a mind it is stamped by that mind, and specialized to its uses, with a threefold vigor, and all the incomes thus explicitly stamped are the more explicitly germane to each other, and visibly of one species." — BURTON, Yale Lectures, p. 50.

which the rudimentary work of invention, the finding of the germs of new ideas, gets itself done without effort.

Diversity of Interest. Not only to be mentally alert, but to be alert to a great variety of things, to have the perceptions trained in many lines of observation, to be not narrow and partial but having a wide horizon of outlook and taste,

this is where the literary observation is called upon to go beyond the scientific. It thus becomes a perception at once specialized, in its keen penetrativeness, and universal, in its readiness to weigh new elements of the problem and make fair allowance for new points of view.1

Following are some of the good results of this diversity of interest, in forming the literary temperament.

1. To have an eye for many and various kinds of fact is equivalent to having a mastery of so many points and angles of view; and this mastery greatly deepens and enriches any single aspect of things. For no fact is isolated, no truth is known as it is until its relation with its whole realm of truth is understood. The interests of specialization itself, of getting a true comprehension of any one fact, demand that the power to observe and sympathize be varied and liberal.2

2. To cultivate diversity of view is to cultivate the ability to see through many men's eyes; and this, whatever it may

1 Of an eminent master in eloquence and letters this is said: "He habitually fed himself with any kind of knowledge which was at hand. If books were at his elbow, he read them; if pictures, engravings, gems were within reach, he studied them; if nature was within walking distance, he watched nature; if men were about him, he learned the secrets of their temperaments, tastes, and skills; if he were on shipboard, he knew the dialect of the vessel in the briefest possible time; if he travelled by stage, he sat with the driver and learned all about the route, the country, the people, and the art of his companion; if he had a spare hour in a village in which there was a manufactory, he went through it with keen eyes and learned the mechanical processes used in it.”. MABIE, Essays on Books and Culture, p. 27.

2" Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see the good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should recognize from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy." - STEVENSON, The Morality of the Profession of Letters, Works, Vol. xxii, p. 283.

do for science, is essential to literature, which by its fundamental genius exists for no one class but for all. It is only on one side that invention looks toward its subject; the other side, looking toward readers, must take such measures of culture as will meet and satisfy their varieties of taste and temperament. This is a matter not only of education but of literary conscience.

3. To have a varied and flexible view is to have such control over one's judgments of things that the ground of estimate is not likes and dislikes, not any form of prejudice, but a recognition of what is intrinsic in each. It is thus that the literary observer learns trustworthy discrimination; he likes what is likable, in men and things, and makes just allowance whether he likes or not. A tolerant spirit this; sometimes mistaken for a spirit too weakly swayed by some new idea or fashion; but in truth it does not imperil, rather it greatly promotes while it deeply grounds, a tempered positiveness of judgment.1

The Verifying Spirit. In literature as truly as in science, the observation of fact, by which we mean in the large sense getting at the real truth of things, has to be made not more in the glow of discovery than in the spirit of caution. At every step results need to be tested and questioned, held back for verification or change, until the forward step can be taken in full certitude. This applies equally to the fact observed and to the way of relating or expressing it. It is merely giv

1 "Cultivate universality of taste. There is no surer mark of a half-educated mind than the incapacity of admiring various forms of excellence. Men who cannot praise Dryden without dispraising Coleridge; nor feel the stern, earthly truthfulness of Crabbe without disparaging the wild, ethereal, impalpable music of Shelley; nor exalt Spenser except by sneering at Tennyson, are precisely the persons to whom it should in consistency seem strange that in God's world there is a place for the eagle and the wren, a separate grace to the swan and the humming-bird, their own fragrance to the cedar and the violet. Enlarge your tastes, that you may enlarge your hearts as well as your pleasures; feel all that is beautiful - love all that is good."ROBERTSON, Lectures and Addresses, p. 797.