ceaselessly along the great shore of the years. Every man's heart is a living drama; every death is a drop-scene; every book only a faint footlight to throw a little flicker on the stage. There is no need of wandering widely to catch incident or adventure: they are everywhere about us; each day is a succession of escapes and joys;- not perhaps clear to the world, but brooding in our thought, and living in our brain."1 Indeed, nearly every professional writer has many more ideas jotted down in his notebook than he ever has time to work up. Nor does he consider it a particularly important part of whatever genius he may claim, that he can see plenty of things around him to write about.

Another erroneous idea about material for æsthetic composition is still more widely prevalent than the one just mentioned. Many writers, even some of maturity and experience, think that acceptable material is necessarily remote. If they live in a city, the country seems to offer no end of attractive possibilities; if they live in New England, then Texas or Italy or Japan seems to be the only place where life is at all interesting; if they live in comfortable quarters and among decent people, the slums and the underworld seem to abound with subjects for novels and dramas. Whatever it is, the life nearest them, the only life which they can really know, seems impossibly bare and unpromising. They think they must always reach far away for material that is true and interesting and adapted to their powers. But why? The experience of successful writers, of successful artists in general, is just the opposite. Lowell said, "The plowman runs his furrow through the most interesting museum in the world"; and that is typical of the way in which many other writers have made much of the life immediately around them. It was so with Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists; it was so with Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray; it is so with the writers of our generation who command real power. They take people buying and selling, plowing and cooking, drinking and gambling, gossiping and flirting, singing

1 Ik Marvel, Dream Life, Chap. I.

and praying, marrying and dying; men and women at work, children at play; the strong and the weak, the brave and the cowardly, the ambitious and the lazy, the honest and the treacherous, the gay and the sad; they take life just as they find it near at hand and never search farther for the best material. As one of our present-day novelists says, "The more I travel, the more I find to interest me at home." Indeed, it may easily happen that the writer who is looking far away for his ideas has himself lived as good stories as any he could invent. It would seem, therefore, that the real essential in the matter of finding material for æsthetic composition is simply the ability to recognize the possibilities as they exist in life on every hand. As the shop phrase goes, the writer must have" an eye for copy."

A. THE EYE FOR COPY

This precious faculty of picking the significant in one's experiences and impressions and imaginings implies at least three things. In the first place, the person who "sees copy" is thoroughly alive. He takes a full, fresh interest in the world about him. His powers of perception are so sensitive as to catch the fine, subtle effects of nature. He can enjoy the first delicate suggestions of spring as they come in March or April without waiting for the more evident pleasures of May and June. He finds peculiarly fascinating the moving shadows of a willow tree thrown by the sunset light on the wall of a house. He thrills at the slender curving of a reed by the river, or at the gray of some birds against the red of the sky. All his senses are keen, open, quick to record impressions. Similarly, he feels a deep interest in the ways of men. When he is on a train, instead of playing cards or reading a novel or sleeping to put in time, he is consumingly interested in the people about him not in any unworthy way seeking to pry into their private affairs, of course, but watching them intently and following them in imagination to their shop or farm or office or home. He is not bored by what goes on around him anywhere, for he

likes life; it gives him new impressions, it stirs old associations, it fills him with ideas. He has the child's consuming interest in what is going on. As Mr. Arnold Bennett says, The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. . . . Their lives are one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place." Or, as Mr. Howells has put it, "The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested."

Probably no literary craftsman has felt this miraculous interestingness of the universe more than Robert Louis Stevenson. A familiar passage in his Gossip on Romance represents his attitude delightfully: "Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, miching mallecho'. The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river though it is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion and Nelson parted from his Emma still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine - in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. But you need not tell me that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth; how many people have met

us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near, with express intimations here my destiny awaits me and we have but dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford."

Closely related to this attitude of eager interest in men and things is the power of human sympathy. Some people whose senses are keen, and who catch interesting impressions of life, can never get certain warm material lying close to the heart of humanity, because they themselves are too cold and hard and unimaginative. But the person with "the eye for copy" is both broad and deep in his sympathies. He feels with all sorts of people. Without being overwrought by sympathy he gets the other man's point of view; and so ideas come to him which are both true and interesting. For him the sight of a poorly clad old woman fumbling over the slot of a corner mail box and hesitating to let go of her letter, or of a ten-year-old standing in the post office gazing at the colored poster of a United States Army recruiting station, is quite enough to suggest a story or a sketch. He has an emotional nature so rich and fine that when he looks out on life he understands; for, as Carlyle once said, "a loving heart is the beginning of knowledge."

But the finding of ideas depends further upon the writer's thoughtfulness. No matter with what zest he takes life nor how warmly he sympathizes with his fellow men, unless he reflects upon what he sees and hears and feels, his material will have little definiteness and significance. He must clarify the impressions that come to him from every side and find some

meaning in the tangled threads of human experience. Out of the myriad sensations which may come to one in a large city, Mr. Matthews brought together a few which furnished him delightful material for Vignettes of Manhattan. Thackeray centered his thought on a few out of the many lines of London life and wove them together into Vanity Fair, a story full of meaning, one which gives a definite interpretation of life. Thus it is with any writer who has the genuine "eye for copy." He sees in the world of nature and in the affairs of men not only the picturesque, the amusing, the pathetic, the exciting, the monotonous, but also that which stimulates him to thought. As he sees the wicked prosper, the gifted fall, the innocent suffer, the young die, and the weak struggle under all manner of burdens, he wonders what life is all about. As he sees a brilliant man, crippled in his youth, radiate happiness from his chair, a woman reject a man of wealth to marry a poor artist, a family leave a comfortable home to go into some crude, undeveloped country, a man in high position destitute of any real friends, he struggles for some view of life which will explain all. Not that every writer has a carefully formulated philosophy of life or can answer the riddles of our human existence. But he does think seriously about the facts of life as he knows them; and out of his thinking come a few ideas definite enough and sincere enough for expression.

B. DEVELOPING IDEAS

The observation and imagination which are essential to seeing copy" are quite indispensable in the further step of developing the ideas for presentation. Writers rarely get their conceptions complete and ready for immediate expression, and if they attempt to put them on paper at once, the writing is likely to be bare and unconvincing. Ordinarily, they must enrich their material by close observation and sympathetic play of imagination. This is evident when one examines the first notes made by any master novelist or dramatist. It can