lishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will
know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the
young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he
was the victim of a fallacy that will never die--the idea that truth can
be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books
demand inspired readers!

There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never
impart it.

Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander,
"everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and
the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.

A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen
Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the Nineteen Steps in Evolution.

The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries,
and all are valuable to the man who evolves them--they serve him as a
scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all
rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.

There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws
afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit,
will express himself in his own way.

Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down
new ones--and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven
upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's
rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner
said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are
transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.

The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.
Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting
log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But
when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making
laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century
Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is
not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought
from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty cactus writes a
book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek
them.

Art is the blossoming of the Soul.

We can not make the plant blossom--all we can do is to comply with the
conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment,
and