r to
receive and create at once, is the secret of the effect he produces. The
power to be receptive and creative by turns is only obtained by constant
and daily practice, and when the modulating of one of these moods into
the other becomes a swift and unconscious habit of life, what is called
"temperament" in an artist is attained at last and inspiration is a
daily occurrence. It is as hard for such a man to keep from being
inspired as it is for the rest of us to make ourselves inspired. He has
to go out of his way to avoid inspiration.

In proportion as this principle is recognised and allowed free play in
the habits that obtain amongst men who know books, their habits will be
inspired habits. Books will be read and lived in the same breath, and
books that have been lived will be written.

The most serious menace in the present epidemic of analysis in our
colleges is not that it is teaching men to analyse masterpieces until
they are dead to them, but that it is teaching men to analyse their own
lives until they are dead to themselves. When the process of education
is such that it narrows the area of unconscious thinking and feeling in
a man's life, it cuts him off from his kinship with the gods, from his
habit of being unconscious enough of what he has to enter into the joy
of what he has not.

The best that can be said of such an education is that it is a patient,
painstaking, laborious training in locking one's self up. It dooms a man
to himself, the smallest part of himself, and walls him out of the
universe. He comes to its doorways one by one. The shining of them falls
at first on him, as it falls on all of us. He sees the shining of them
and hastens to them. One by one they are shut in his face. His soul is
damned--is sentenced to perpetual consciousness of itself. What is there
that he can do next? Turning round and round inside himself, learning
how little worth while it is, there is but one fate left open to such a
man, a blind and desperate lunge into the roar of the life he cannot
see, for facts--the usual L.H.D., Ph.D. fate. If he piles around him the
huge hollow sounding outsides of things in the universe that have lived,
bones of soul, matter of bodies, skeletons of lives that men have lived,
who shall blame him? He wonders why they have lived, why any one lives;
and if, when he has wondered long enough why any one lives, we choose to
make him the teacher of the young, that the young also may wonder why