meets some well-dressed man of his own age. "Oh yes, I see," we say, and jot down some notes about the return of an "old grad" who has not "made good." Our entire mental experience helps us to clothe the cold, literal facts with warmth and life.

B. MASTERY OF THE MEANS OF EXPRESSION

From this brief consideration of observation, thinking, and imagination, we may say that systematic training in composition helps to provide the first essential to good writing, an invigorated and quickened mind. But it also provides the other essential, a mastery of the means of expression. As we have already seen, the person who believes that knowledge about an art may be made a substitute for practice frequently falls short of the highest success because he remains an awkward workman. The student's surest safeguard against such misfortune is much preliminary practice under conditions which enable him to devote a large part of his attention to learning the possibilities of the means at his disposal. Now he who pursues a systematic course in the subject has the advantage of learning in the shortest possible time how to make the writer's means serve him. He is obliged to exercise his skill in planning whole compositions, in organizing and reorganizing paragraphs, in recasting sentences, in revising punctuation, in finding acceptable idioms, and in choosing individual words. In these processes he not only becomes familiar with the mechanics of his art, but is by force of circumstances compelled to exercise the artist's judgment and the artist's taste in making the mechanical means serve his purpose.

C. DEEPENING OF INSIGHT INTO LITERATURE

If the only beneficial results of training in composition were increased power through the cultivation of the mind, and more certain expression through an enforced familiarity with the tools

of writing, there would be more than sufficient reason for devoting much time to the subject. It has, however, one great value beyond these, a value usually overlooked or forgotten. The student who has sought intelligently to express himself on paper always has a keener, more sympathetic, and more intelligent appreciation of literature than he had before he tried to write; he has learned the principles of art by trying to follow them. Possibly his attempts at writing have been crude and laborious, but they have helped to develop in him the latent artistic sense that all of us possess in some degree; and, according to the degree of his artistic perception, will he read from the author's point of view. Through a simple and perhaps more or less unconscious putting of himself in the other man's place, he sees the difficulties, the possibilities, and the means of producing effects which the writer saw when he set about his work, and he finds intelligent delight in watching the difficulties disappear, in observing how the possibilities are developed, and in studying the skill with which the writer makes the means subservient to his wishes. This increased interest of the reader who has tried to write is not unlike that of the former college athlete, the amateur actor, the amateur concert singer, and the amateur painter, who, because of some practice in their arts, see more in the game, the play, the music, and the painting than is within the hope of the wholly inexperienced.

This more perfect view that results from practice not only brings the student into closer sympathy with all literary art, but guides him in his choice of reading. Instead of blindly accepting whatever is recommended to him by others or whatever promises the largest number of thrills, he insists in all his reading upon the presence of talent. He has himself learned a little about the writer's art, and at once detects the cheap and flimsy practices of the unskilled. As he grows in knowledge of technique through his own efforts, shallow artifices in the work of others become more and more distasteful to him, while the manifestation of real talent becomes a greater and greater source of joy.

IV. THE NECESSARY ATTITUDE TOWARD TRAINING

We have now seen the importance of a mastery of the art of writing, the weakness of the objections that are occasionally made to systematic courses as a means of gaining this mastery, and the true value of such courses in cultivating one's mental powers, mastering the tools of writing, and deepening one's insight into literature. A knowledge of these things, we may remember, was urged in the earlier part of this chapter because such knowledge always helps to create a wholesome attitude toward work. Now we are ready to look more carefully into the character of this attitude. What spirit can we cultivate that will help us to accomplish most? We cannot, of course, define it adequately in a word, yet as a beginning we might say that it is what we hear called every day the spirit of the crafts

man.

A. LOVE FOR ONE'S ART

If we study this spirit, we shall find that it implies, in the first place, a love for one's work. It is to be feared that too little of this devotion enters into present-day endeavor. Instead, we too frequently allow the spirit of the factory to creep into what we do. As a result we are always looking beyond the matter in hand, waiting anxiously to get away from our work so that we may turn our attention free to follow the lines of least resistance. If not this, then we are wondering, perhaps with some misgivings, how much what we are doing is really worth, how much it will bring. In either case, the spirit is reprehensible, and magnifies the pleasure of unproductive ease. On the other hand, the love for our work which earnestness, intelligently directed, will sooner or later develop in the place of this destructive spirit, unfailingly helps to make a perfect product. Stevenson often said, " The best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the man who loves the practice of his art." Why? Because love for our work directs us, stimu

lates us, and even makes it easier for us to understand and to execute. The worker feels "the 'must' of passionate surrender to an ideal" and as a result gets more of his strength and more of his individuality into what he does, so that there is completeness and finish where a spirit of indifference would have stopped with the merest acceptability. "And there is more satisfaction in doing one's best, in doing a thing artistically and right, than in doing what is after all a merely creditable job. Some of the old violin makers could hardly bear to part with the instruments they had made; it was like giving up a part of themselves. They loved their violins. They were conscious of having done fine work; they had made an art out of their business. It was their play. So it is with every piece of work to which we have given the best that is in us. It satisfies us profoundly." 1

B. PATIENCE IN LABOR

Untempered love and unsteadied enthusiasm cannot of themselves guide one to the highest kind of work; another large element of the genuinely productive spirit is patience. We have been told that Plato rewrote the introduction to his Republic not less than six times. Vergil, we know, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the Eneid after it took the seemingly perfect form which is familiar to us. Goethe said, "At length, after forty years, I have learned to write German.” The elder Hazlitt suggests a similar patience: "If such is still my admiration of this man's [Burke's] misapplied powers, what must it have been when I myself was in vain trying, year after year, to write a single essay, nay, a single page or sentence; when I regarded the wonders of his pen with the longing eyes of one who was dumb and a changeling; and when to convey the slightest conception of my meaning to others in words was the height of an almost hopeless ambition." 2 In truth, the history

1 Luther Halsey Gulick, The Spirit of the Game. The Outlook, Vol. 85, p. 615. 2 On Reading Old Books.

of literary achievement is full of accounts of remarkable patience. And the writer at the present time finds it just as indispensable. People are living all about us to-day who worked faithfully for five or ten years before they produced anything acceptable. If all these have found it necessary to labor year after year simply to learn their art, any student should be filled with contempt for the spirit which surrenders after a few unsuccessful or partly successful efforts.

C. OPEN-MINDED CONSIDERATION OF POSSIBLE AIDS

Furthermore, this spirit of the craftsman implies open-mindedness, another essential in the production of the most effective writing. Through it we see beyond all petty prejudices, all favorite opinions about methods of working, all barriers of whatever sort that may stand between us and the possibility of making ourselves more perfectly understood. Moreover, we learn through it to bring all of our knowledge and experience to bear on the problems encountered in mastering our art. Thus we come to see how the methods of craftsmen in other fields of labor may serve us in our own. Likewise we come to see the importance of a study of our own speech as an aid to our writing. Because speech is employed so frequently, it affords many opportunities to improve our expression in ways that contribute to good writing as well as to good speaking. For example, it enables us to try new words which we desire to add to our vocabularies, to form habits of correctness in grammatical structure, to search for acceptable idioms, to sharpen our minds by familiar contact with others, and to clarify our opinions by striving to convey them to our associates. We can, then, profitably bring our own speech, as well as our knowledge of the craftsmanship of other workers, to the aid of our writing.

Likewise we can take advantage of one other opportunity to improve our writing: that which reading always affords. In an earlier paragraph we learned that it was questionable wisdom to try to be influenced directly by our reading, inasmuch