write. Few writers have been more skillful than Alfred Tennyson; yet he found it necessary to revise laboriously. If such care, such selection is necessary in poetry, which more than prose is the product of inspiration, and if it is necessary to a man who had a rare genius for expression, as had Tennyson, it is surely vain for the ordinary or even the extraordinary mortal to expect to dash off his thoughts in their best form at the first trial. No real excellence is attainable without infinite pains and infinite patience. Quite as true is it, that few undertakings so well repay pains and patience, as the task of learning to express ourselves in words.

Finding
Material.

When we confront this great undertaking, we are likely to feel at once that we have nothing to write about. Yet we are never at a loss for subjects upon which we can talk. We narrate events that have happened to us; we describe places and people; we express our feelings and opinions; or we argue about our views. Thus our conversation contains the elements of all written discourse. Often, however, and perhaps justly so, our talk seems too trivial to put in writing, and we begin to look for important material. We soon feel that there is little of this which we can handle, and yet the secret of finding it is an open one: we must observe closely. We must, as Mr. George Meredith says, “keep the eye of a fresh mind on our tangled world.” If we scrutinize carefully a commonplace object, we shall often notice some element of it which had hitherto escaped our attention, and this we can treat in such a manner as to

make it interesting.

Flaubert had this in mind when he

said to his godson, de Maupassant:

The business is to observe everything that you wish to express sufficiently long and attentively to find an aspect of it that no one has yet seen or described. Everything contains an undiscovered principle because we are in the habit of using our eyes only with the recollection of what others have thought of the thing we are examining. The question is to find this unknown element. In order to describe a blazing fire or a solitary tree, we must examine the tree or the fire until, to us, they no longer resemble any other tree or fire ...

And again he says:

When you pass a grocer at his shop-door, a janitor smoking his pipe, or a cab-stand, show me the grocer or the janitor in your description, with their dress and their physical appearance. Show, too, their especial mental qualities in such a way that I can never mistake them for any other grocer or janitor. Describe with a single phrase, wherein a cab-horse differs from the fifty that precede and follow it.

If, then, we but observe and reflect, we shall find material everywhere about us; we shall find subjects waiting to greet us in every country lane and city Kind of street. We need only select. And here the Subjects. danger is that we may select some large or general subject, or one in which we are not truly interested. We should always choose some small, definite subject, within the range of our own experience, or else one about which we can find specific information. Such a subject as The School is too large; volumes could be written upon it; such a subject as Amiability is abstract, and in abstract qualities we are not keenly enough interested

to be able to write of them with force and attractiveness. The chief objection to dealing with a large, a general, or an abstract subject, is that we could not write anything about it which would interest our readers. To summarize the practical directions of Summary. this chapter: in practising the art of writing it is necessary to study with care good models, and to write daily on subjects in which we are interested subjects which lie within our own observation and experience, or about which we can get accurate information.

CHAPTER I

THE WHOLE COMPOSITION: UNITY

THERE are many kinds of composition: some are long, running to hundreds of printed pages, like Carlyle's French Revolution; some are short, the son

Unity.

net, for example, consisting of only fourteen lines. But whether long or short, every good piece of writing deals with one main subject and with only one. What is necessary to the treatment of that subject is included; everything else is ruthlessly cut away. Every composition may be thought of as an organism complete in all its members. While it should lack nothing necessary to its completeness, it should, on the other hand, contain nothing superfluous. As a racing-horse should be freed from every ounce of unnecessary weight, so a composition should be stripped of all that is extraneous. In brief, a writer should select one subject and keep to that subject. This almost self-evident principle is for convenience called the principle of unity.

We have said that the body of principles that a writer should know is very small, and we have stated the principle of unity in a short paragraph, indeed, in a short sentence. It will be our task in this and the ensuing chapters to apply this principle. Just now we are con

cerned with the principle of unity as it appears in the whole composition or theme.

Examples for Study.-The following selection has good unity:

A. THE BATTLE OF PERE-LACHAISE

(NOTE. In 1871, after the defeat of the French at Sedan, a portion of the people of Paris formed a Commune, and, opposing the government then in force, tried to take possession of the city. Some set fire to the Palais Royal and the Hotel de Ville; others occupied Montmartre, Chaumont, and the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Here the soldiers of the Commune made their last stand. The Federates and the National Guard were Communists, while the Marines were government troops.)

The guardian of the cemetery began to laugh.

"A battle here? But there has never been a battle here. That is a newspaper invention. This is what happened. On the afternoon of the twenty-second, we saw about thirty federate artillerymen arrive with heavy cannon. They made me open several chapels for them, and I believed that they were going to break and pillage everything inside, but their leader had them under good control, and placing himself in the midst of them, he said to them:

"The first beast that touches anything shall be shot. Break ranks!'

"He was a white-haired old man, covered with medals from the Crimea and Italy. His men obeyed his orders, and I must say in justice to them that they took nothing from the tombs.

"But these artillerymen of the Commune were mere riff-raff who thought only of getting their three and a half francs pay. The life they led in this cemetery was worth seeing. They slept in crowds in the vaults; in Morny's vault, in Favronne's this beautiful tomb of Favronne, where the nurse of the emperor is buried. They cooled their wine in the tomb of Champeaux, where there