scovery of those qualities of style and treatment
which entitled any work to be called good literature.

It will be safe to warn the reader at the very outset that, if he
wishes to avoid being led astray, he should in his search for these
qualities turn to books that have stood the test of time.

For such an amount of hasty writing is done in these days that it is
really difficult for anyone who reads much of it to avoid contracting
its faults, and thus gradually coming to terms of dangerous
familiarity with bad methods. This advice will be especially needful
if things that have little or no claim to be called literature at
all--the newspapers, the monthly magazine, and the last new tale of
intrigue or adventure--fill a large measure, if not the whole, of the
time given to reading. Nor are those who are sincerely anxious to have
the best thought in the best language quite free from danger if they
give too much attention to the contemporary authors, even though these
seem to think and write excellently. For one generation alone is
incompetent to decide upon the merits of any author whatever; and as
literature, like all art, is a thing of human invention, so it can be
pronounced good only if it obtains lasting admiration, by establishing
a permanent appeal to mankind's deepest feeling for truth and beauty.

It is in this sense that Schopenhauer is perfectly right in holding
that neglect of the ancient classics, which are the best of all models
in the art of writing, will infallibly lead to a degeneration of
literature.

And the method of discovering the best qualities of style, and of
forming a theory of writing, is not to follow some trick or mannerism
that happens to please for the moment, but to study the way in which
great authors have done their best work.

It will be said that Schopenhauer tells us nothing we did not know
before. Perhaps so; as he himself says, the best things are seldom
new. But he puts the old truths in a fresh and forcible way; and no
one who knows anything of good literature will deny that these truths
are just now of very fit application.

It was probably to meet a real want that, a year or two ago, an
ingenious person succeeded in drawing a great number of English and
American writers into a confession of their literary creed and the art
they adopted in authorship; and the interesting volume in which he
gave these confessions to the world contained some very good advice,
although most o