selves as a real law, not as whim or anomaly or accident. Discipline, if the paradox may be allowed, works the natural talent into nature; it supplies the staying and steadying power, the equable consent of will, judgment, and habit by which alone nature can do and maintain its best. More than this, it brings to light many powers previously latent, or only dimly conscious of themselves; so that many who had not thought of authorship have by its evoking influence found some rewarding field of literary work open to them.

The Response to Occasion. Under the general term occasion may be included all the circumstances that attend the devising of a literary work, circumstances inhering in the sub

ject, the public, and the question of timeliness.

causes;

1. Different minds are set astir, inventively, by different this is an individual matter for which we cannot legislate. To some a subject, with its resources of thought and illustration, is a sufficient inspirer; others, not so given to analytic study, are called out into fluent utterance by an audience or the touch of the public; still others are moved to have their say by the ideas that are in the air. In most cases one of these influences will predominate, and the product will take substance and flavor accordingly. It is one of the results of discipline, however, to make the writer mindful of all three; and that literary work will be most vital and solid which derives inspiration from all, which will wait, if need be, till all these influences have contributed. It is an important thing thus, before a work is begun, to have an inspiration point from which its life starts, and from which the mind works with energy.

2. On this inspired impulse, acting with the individual bent and aptitude, is based the specific sense of literary form, the sense, in the first place, whether the idea conceived is adapted to vital utterance has the real movement of literaor is only dead truism and commonplace.

ture

This is an

important point to discover, as important as is the finding of a telling subject for pictorial art. Then further, this quickened sense must be instinctively aware what form suits its conception, whether poem, sketch, essay, story, or oration; and conversely, what treatment of the conception will fit the form. Ideas shape themselves subtly to these forms, and are more or less misshapen out of their type of discourse. To take the natural instinct for these things and make it selfjustifying and self-rectifying is the deepest work of systematic discipline.

Lines of Inventive Talent. Apart from the specific forms of discourse, to be discussed later, two main lines in which inventive skill works may here be defined, as a kind of chart to those, especially untried writers, who are looking over into the realm of letters and questioning whether their endowments will entitle them to enter.

1. The invention which, answering most nearly to the type, centres in the creation of some new product of thought or imagination, opening as it were a new region in life, may be

1 "There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what the word 'picturesque' expresses for the fine arts. Picturesque means fit to be put into a picture; we want a word literatesque, 'fit to be put into a book.' An artist goes through a hundred different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms and merits, but he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till he finds the hundred-and-first a scene which many observers would not think much of, but which he knows by virtue of his art will look well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a scene, 'How picturesque !' meaning by this a quality distinct from that of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur - meaning to speak not only of the scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be copied by man. . . . Literature the painting of words- has the same quality, but wants the analogous word. The word 'literatesque' would mean, if we possessed it, that perfect combination in the subject-matter of literature, which suits the art of literature. As a painter must

not only have a hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish -as he must go here and there through the real world to catch the picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his canvas-so the poet must find in that reality, the literatesque man, the literatesque scene which nature intends for him, and which will live in his page."BAGEHOT, Literary Studies, Vol. ii, pp. 341, 343, 345.

called the ORIGINATIVE invention. It is what the Greeks had in mind in naming a supreme author onτns, a maker, from which name comes our word poet, but which in their sense of it covered all works of the distinctively creative imagination, - poetry, romance, the drama. It is in these forms of discourse that we oftenest see this kind of invention embodied; and though it may reveal all degrees, or almost no degree, of originality therein, still, independent discovery and settingforth, the making of a new work in kind as in order, is its motive and aim. In our day the prevailing output of this line of invention is fiction.

NOTE. The great works of literature which have survived their age and become classic have been works of the creative invention; and their writers, whether the works are much read at first hand or not, rank as leaders of thought, - as "the born seers, men who see for themselves and who originate." That the roll of such names should be headed by Homer, Æschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, ranking by the side of great creative thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, does not shut out the lowlier names, of those who can by some creative stroke open a new tract of thought or imagination; Anthony Trollope, who added a new shire to England, is in his way a worker in this line.

2. The invention which, taking the great thoughts that in their original form may have been too massive or too concentrated for the general mind, works these out interpretatively into plainness and lucid order, may be called the ORGANIZING invention. The products of this kind of work may or may not seem to the inventor original; but as it centres in making things clear and plain, it is mainly in the organism, the elucidation, that the originality consists. And if this is not the greatest or most permanent work, it is the most widely useful; it serves its own generation, if not the next, in responding to great movements of thought and giving them wider currency and diffusion. In its grades of usefulness, too, it may show all degrees, from a masterly body of proportioned and illus

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. 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.