write in it or sing in it or make laws in it or do anything else in it, because there will be no one to listen or clap the hands.

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49. It may be interesting to bring to mind a number of forms in which a writer is free to exercise his own taste. Authorities disagree in regard to them, and so it is permissible to write "first four," logically preferable, or four first," "Dickens' " or "Dickens's," and to pronounce "either" with the sound of long e or of long i. There are other variant forms of which one is fairly to be held as having better authority and more established use than the other, although that other is not to be ruled out of court. It is more acceptable to say "hadn't better" than "wouldn't better," because the first has the advantage of a longer usage and is more a part of the idiom of English speech.

I can remember, in my early college days, a member of my literary society who found frequent occasion to protest vigorously against the use of the expression "leave the floor." His condemnation was on grounds of literal inaccuracy, not on grounds of taste. He insisted that of course the speaker in retiring did not take the floor with him, and, as a matter of fact and experience, that seems unquestionable. Nevertheless his reasoning from the fact was not conclusive. Language is and should be flexible. It reflects and should reflect the play of the mind, its give and take, its twists and turns, as well as its arrow flight to the truth. It must not be too much the instrument of a hard logic or the mode of an impeccable grammatical form. In general it is better, no doubt, to follow logic and grammatical form in the ordering of our speech, and so, for instance, it is better to say "appropriations committee," because such a committee has the duty of dealing with appropriations, but the abstract idea involved gives some warrant for the use of "appropriation committee,"

illogical though it is. It is better to say "It is I" than "It is me," but usage has given some sanction to the second form, in spite of its being ungrammatical. It is better to say "as if" than "as though," because these forms are followed by conditional rather than concessive clauses, but usage has again given some sanction to the second form.

VIII

LITERARY MATERIAL AND ITS TRANS

FORMATION

50. IN considering style, we are dealing with form and not subject-matter. For that reason, we may ignore literary invention, which is the development of ideas more or less original, and give attention to such writing as has its chief use and function in the organization and reshaping of material to be found in books and other like sources. In the form in which it is found, such material may be not at all literary. It may be hardly more than a body of facts that need interpretation. The first effort, then, should be to find in the facts some ground for a live personal interest. Any writing that is to have a good literary style must be written from the standpoint of a wish to make a personal interpretation of the subject. Literature is distinguished from writings not literary by the presence of that personal attitude toward the subject on the part of the writer. In one sense, a presentation of facts simply as facts can have no style. The things told by a writer who wishes to give his writing style must be told as felt, viewed, believed, cared for by the author as having a peculiar significance for him, a significance that he is concerned to bring home to his readers.

The difficulty of taking material from the writings and reports of others and so transforming it that it becomes our own is a very serious one, but it is one that almost everyone has to reckon with. Few will have call to engage in the finer processes of literary creation, but skill

in this lower form of literary craftsmanship is expected of almost everyone. Let it be borne in mind, then, that the first step in the process is that of making the material that one must consult in books thoroughly one's own, and that the next process is that of establishing in one's own mind an individual understanding, an individual conclusion and belief about the subject. For instance, was Napoleon a great man or a mean man? How does what you have been able to learn about him affect you, and why should someone else feel in that way about him? Let the writer ask himself such questions, and soon the way before him will be clear. Otherwise he may get into the encyclopedia manner or the scientific manner or the chronicle manner, and then no one will care to read what he has written.

51. It is one of the great virtues of our college debating societies that they give students vigorous exercise in the business of supporting a point of view. It is sometimes rather remarkable the amount of fairly substantial reasons a comparatively commonplace young man will discover in defense of the proposition that an income tax is or is not a very valuable bit of government machinery. There is a quite simple reason for that resourcefulness. By the terms of the proposition stated as an affirmation and by his acceptance or rejection of that affirmation, the young man has put himself into definite relations to it. That clarifies his thinking and gives his ideas a road to travel.

It is always a writer's first business to find what is, for him, the strongest interest in a subject. He should ask what in it arouses his sympathies or antipathies, and why. Then he should think not so much of writing as of making others have his interest and his feeling. Achieving that interest for himself and communicating it is, after all, the whole secret of style, when one has freed himself

from the difficulty of using his instrument, language. A genuine enthusiasm for the subject will lessen that difficulty very materially. The student should remember that he is not writing at all when he is copying or imitating the words of someone else. He has no excuse as an intelligent human being for thinking just what some one else has thought about any subject not rigorously scientific, and only thinking what someone else has thought justifies the use of the same language in the expression of ideas.

52. The student theme that follows illustrates very well the strength that comes from concentration on a single point of view.

"THE CHALLENGE

"To Florence's cunning intriguers, her thievish rogues and smiling villains, her debauched and vicious revelers gracing the courts of the tyrant Medici, Savonarola issued a challenge-a challenge thrilling against despotism, against luxury, against the stagnation of godless and thankless acquiescence.' To the very heart of sin he struck for austerity and purification. His revelation of life's simplicities to which they had long been blind startled the Florentines from their vulgar jests and lewd pictures, their stolen jewels and drugged wines, and their alluring paramours -yes, startled even the libertines of Florence. For to them Savonarola preached that clear manliness which is as 'necessary for happiness as for holiness,' as necessary for the lover as for the saint. Clearly he called them to the dignity of everyday life."

This is unified by the writer's feeling for Savonarola, and it drives that feeling home. Clearly, too, it does so, not simply by saying what the writer wishes to say, but by saying it well. That is, it has a fitting style. The following is also a student theme, but it is less successful.