moment know it, he is often simply encountering one or another of those difficulties which present themselves, almost inevitably, at every successive stage of literary advance.

CHAPTER I

THE LITERARY GREAT

THE methods of distribution of books alter, have always been altering, and will ever continue to alter, in consequence of the ceaseless modifications of manufacture and market. (At the present moment authors seem disposed to trouble themselves a little too much about these purely mercantile problems.) The methods of literary production and the pains which they involve are immutable. The difficulties which the author encounters to-day are the difficulties which authors have for ages encountered and surmounted. The disappointments which irk the author now are the disappointments by which his predecessors were irked — but not vanquished; the discouragements those by which the greatest writers were in their time beset; but by which they were not daunted.

These may seem, indeed, to be bold assertions; amounting, as they certainly do, to a declaration that there is not, either in style,

or construction, or art, or excellence, or method, or laboriousness, or perseverance, or long patience, or anything else that is implied in authorship, aught that a writer may not learn from the precepts and examples of the literary great. Whether the case is so or not may, at the same time, be tested for himself by any man who chooses to make the experiment of cultivating a familiarity with the works and histories of great authors; an experiment with which he will not be long engaged before the truth that they can teach everything will be forced upon him as incontestable. This is, in fact, the sum of the whole matter, and the substance of all that there is to be said. Whether an author is for the moment discouraged, or is simply, as he always should be, anxious to improve his work, whatsoever counsel he may need, or encouragement, or aid, his supreme wisdom will be, as Marcus Hieronymus Vida recommended, "to harvest apposite help gathered in every quarter from the great of old." The pathway of authorship is no uncertain track, but a beaten road, trodden by many, and he who would walk in it securely has only to follow the footprints of the great who have gone before him.

No hour that is spent in learning from

them is lost. There is none with whom an author can associate to his own greater advantage. Access to them is perfectly free; and whosoever will may attend their school. From them, the author who turns over their pages, above all the author who turns them over for himself, to hear what they will say to him individually, is certain to receive counsel, encouragement, help, and strength, not only such as those who are in sore need will welcome, but such also as the foremost of writers will immediately recognise as the purest gold of literary wisdom.

To ascertain who are the literary great is not difficult. The very great, those to whom all, of whatsoever tongue, accord the same supreme honours, are few. Literatures, and extensive ones, exist which cannot claim one of them. Second only to them rank those who stand foremost in their respective languages. These household names may be

learned at once either from an article in an encyclopædia of small pretensions, or from the very briefest sketch of the literature of which they are the ornaments. In fact the more elementary is the treatise that signalises them, the more positive is the evidence of their pre-eminence. Whatsoever may be the opinions of an individual, or of some particu

lar school, concerning them, these are the writers whose indisputable claim to attention is based upon their works having found a response in the thoughts and feelings of millions. These are the masters: the men whose works it will benefit a literary man to read.

An author at least should allow himself no delusions in this province. Particularly he should be on his guard against the personal satisfaction which modern critics derive from drawing some almost unknown writer out of his obscurity, and demonstrating that his work has merits of the rarest quality. It may be true, and it may be a paradox; it may be a mistake, and it may be nothing more than a desperate effort on the critic's part to say something new. In any case it does not make the unknown man one of the great masters. On the other hand, the author, whilst on his guard against being misled by others, should be equally on his guard against deceiving himself. It may easily happen that a man lacking neither intelligence nor education, finds one or more of the acknowledged great distasteful to him. In that case he is to know to know for certain that a fault lies somewhere in his own powers of appreciation and judgment;