friend, Professor Aydelotte, in a chapter called "Writing and Thinking," at the end of his book, College English, has expressed this matter as follows: "To write clearly one must think clearly, to write nobly one must think nobly, to have a great style one must think great thoughts. All of which means that one must be clear-sighted and noble and great, for as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. The problem of improving a man's writing is usually the problem of improving his character.”

This thoroughly logical statement places the problem of learning to write on a high plane, and if it is once realized that it must be so placed to see it clearly, there need be no confusion simply from terminology as to what is meant by style, matter, technique, and thought. If writing were mainly a technique, it might be mastered rapidly and completely as one masters the management of a typewriter. Because it is an art, one grows in it only as fast as one grows up. What at first appeared to be a definite set of conventions and a definite body of knowledge in the rule book, to be utilized freely as soon as mastered, is soon perceived to possess no value of its own, and to depend for vitality entirely on the power to think. Literacy grows with the demands of experience; we become articulate as we develop wants. And at length something more than articulation and literacy is required of us. We must compete in clearness and force and copiousness with the rest of mankind, and for that we must train ourselves in something more vital than mere conventionalities. "Mechanical correctness," says Professor Aydelotte, "is not a merit in writing; it is only a necessity. It does not in the least imply that the writing is good. The absence of it means, on the other hand, that the student's work, no matter how brilliant in other respects, will receive no consideration in practical

life until the mechanical faults are mended. Correctness of this sort is like wearing a necktie, a condition of entrance into good society, but not an admission ticket." We are never done with conventionalities, with attention to the structure of paragraphs, proper guides to the drift of thought, summaries at crucial spots, brightened endings that cast a light back over the whole; but what we notice, if we are growing up, is that these things begin to grow out of the necessities of our thought, and that we cannot finally conceive of technique as something external to our purposes in writing.

In the study of any art it is important to keep this in mind. The painter, the sculptor, or the musician may seem to give himself up for a time more thoroughly than the writer to technical study, to the thorough understanding of the mode of thought before using it for original, personal expression. But what the painter is studying is thought— not just ways of mixing and laying on color. All technique is the technique of thought; it has no existence for its own sake. To forget this is to be either a pedant or a dilettante.

The relation of practise in technique to artistic execution is, however, very generally misunderstood. It is a common remark, which we have all accepted, that the musician who has once mastered his technique can then forget about it and just create or interpret. It is in this way that we like to think of great pianists, especially if we are ourselves still rather hampered in playing scales or such a carefully fingered exercise as childhood's old friend, "The Spinning-Wheel." After hearing Paderewski, we are very apt to say that he does not have to think about fingering at all. We like to say this, and to believe it inadvertently, though we know that a great musician is always playing his scales and that the last thing he wishes to do is to reach

a state of automatism where he might be unconscious of technical control. For his sincerest purpose is to make the technique of his art more and more a part of himself, and to think in its terms with such facility that every change of thought will find its exact expression. Doctor Fite, from whose book on Individualism the above illustration is partly borrowed, points out that being thus facile is the opposite of being highly automatic, and that automatism is the very negation of art. "Art," says Doctor Fite, "aims above all things to be free." Freedom is secured through complete conscious control, or through practised obedience to law, which is exactly the same thing. Only by obeying the technical laws of your automobile do you control it. Only by practising obedience does the musician have his will with his instrument; and when his attention is, as we say, wholly on interpretation, it is because he can be aware, without confusion, of every aspect of his performance. He grows oblivious to nothing. He relies more than ever on all the qualities that make up his final effect. The creation of art demands this kind of expanded consciousness, and the appreciation of art is to a great extent a comprehension of this faculty.

In the foregoing considerations of the nature of art, it is not intended to place before one who is learning to write an ideal that can never be practically comprehended without the gift of genius, but rather to help him realize, as much as possible to begin with, and more and more as maturity sets in, the unity of mental processes in any effective and practical writing. For it is very necessary to understand this general principle, whether apropos of a business letter or of a sonata. Otherwise we shall hardly make out from day to day what the lifelong process of liberal education

1 Warner Fite, Individualism, p. 94.

is for. Otherwise we may constantly fail to appreciate greatness in our fellow men, and by our own fogginess bedim, if ever so little, the creative ardor of our generation. At the end of this volume is an essay, an address to a graduating college class, on "The Unity of Human Nature." Corresponding to the influence of one man's mind on his neighbor's which makes for social unity, there is in every man's mind a natural force for uniting his own mental processes in what may be called their artistic unity. Toward this as an end, learning to write is the fundamental and the supreme training, not because we expect to become creative artists, but because writing is perhaps the only art in which we shall practise enough to cultivate a sense of the universal principles.

II. Originality and Thoroughness

Every man who intends to be a thinker and who escapes being a thinker in these latter days?-will understand much that is fundamental in the problem of literary art; for the textures of great writings, though they are as various as the range of personalities, have something in common in their warp and woof, and this every man understands somewhat, since he himself cultivates so far as he can a share of originality, and since every bit of thoughtful, practical writing he attempts contains principles that relate it to the efforts of genius. The practical man uses these words, genius, originality, art, with increasing respect and familiarity as his knowledge of his own processes of thought expands. Indeed, every one, however humble his own gifts, has an ideal duty, the duty of fitting himself to appreciate art, genius, originality, wherever he meets it.

We often deem it the part of modesty to disclaim this

duty; but it is really not modesty that prompts us here so much as laziness or self-satisfaction. The man who says, "I know nothing about art," seldom feels humbleness or even shame in the acknowledgment, as he usually shows by adding with infinite assurance, "but I know what I like." Now, it is knowing about art that makes a man humble. It is some familiarity with genius and some realization of how genius thinks that makes a man reverent and robs him of his complacency. It is by a keen appreciation of originality that every man shares in the progress of the world.

From this point of view the effort of learning to write has a great importance, whether we succeed very well or not. For even the kind of writing which, as college students, we already seem to do with a certain finality, and the kind of writing that any man, though he have no intention of being a deep thinker, must yet do with skill and force or fail in his profession, even such rather small achievements are bound to give us some knowledge of the greater art which we would not otherwise have. In college it is not the fact that composition is the substratum and the fundamental technique of all intellectual work that gives it its final importance there, but the fact that the effort of learning to write may lead us most directly and personally into the presence of great minds and make us compare ourselves with greatness. Education, whatever skill in method it may teach us, is not liberal education unless it does that. From this point of view-for the purpose, that is, of expanding intellect, of cultivating originality or what I shall presently define as thoroughness—it is important for one who is learning to write at college to see, more vividly than he usually does see, into what presences and toward what kind of enjoyments and appreciations the traditional col