l process of self-development, and always stop short
of those final achievements which sum up and express all that has been
known or felt about a subject and give it permanent form; men of
essential greatness take this last step in that higher education which
makes one master of the force of his personality, and give his words
and works universal range and perennial interest.

Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student
may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own.
When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a
great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the
reality of this process of passing experience through consciousness
into the unconscious side of a man's nature, but he was also hinting
at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth. For time and
life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning
experience and observation into knowledge and power. It is a secret in
the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a
trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula.
Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed
through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other
words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed
through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and
simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so
completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it
as a thing distinct from himself. There is no easy road to this last
height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an
essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.

There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this
power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the
imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of
preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also
so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend
it must be purely academic. It is enough to know that if we are in any
degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision,
insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which
favor the development of those supreme gifts. There is laid,
therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of
literature the nece