ogician from the
backwoods.

There was once a "mast-fed" novelist in this country, who scandalously
slighted his academic opportunities, went to sea, went into the navy,
went to farming, and then went into novel-writing to amuse himself. He
cared nothing and knew nothing about conscious literary art; his style
is diffuse, his syntax the despair of school-teachers, and many of his
characters are bores. But once let him strike the trail of a story, and
he follows it like his own Hawkeye; put him on salt water or in the
wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe and rifle, sea and forest
and sky; and he knows his road home to the right ending of a story by
an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Professional novelists like Balzac,
professional critics like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore
Cooper's skill and power. The true engineering and architectural lines
are there. They were not painfully plotted beforehand, like George
Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the easiest path across country,"
just as a bee-hunter seems to take the easiest path through the woods.
But the bee-hunter, for all his apparent laziness, never loses sight of
the air-drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and your _Last of the
Mohicans_ will be instinctively, inevitably right, while your _Daniel
Deronda_ will be industriously wrong.

Cooper literally builded better than he knew. Obstinately unacademic in
his temper and training, he has won the suffrages of the most
fastidious and academic judges of excellence in his profession. The
secret is, I suppose, that the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the
indifference to standards were on the surface,--apparent to
everybody,--the soundness and rightness of his practice were
unconscious.

Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, therefore, may be taken as striking
examples of individuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky way, and yet
with marked capacities for socialization, for fellowship. They
succeeded, even by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their lack
of discipline. But for most men the chief obstacle to effective labor
even as individuals is the lack of thoroughgoing training.

It is scarcely necessary to add that there are vast obstacles in the
way of individualism as a working theory of society. Carlyle's theory
of "Hero Worship" has fewer adherents than for half a century. It is
picturesque,--that conception of a great, sincere man and of a world
reverencing him and begging to be led by hi