variety of minds, required a discipline and a broadening
invaluable to the man who really has something to say. The specialist
is inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many
things; he acquires a jargon of his own; his mind runs in the narrow
channel to which that jargon corresponds; the language he uses becomes
stilted and dead. There is no tonic in the truths he tries to
proclaim, no relevance to the rest of knowledge. In other words, what
he has to say may be scientifically valuable, but he fails to convey
it to any but his fellow-specialists.

Mr. Brander Matthews points out that the great students are those who
have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French
comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great
examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in
writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather
the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense,
than the romantic or transcendental tradition, with its mysticism and
obscurity. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the most lucid of philosophers,
are scarcely easier to follow than John Stuart Mill, Huxley, and
Leslie Stephen. But it is hardly necessary to enter a _caveat_ against
supposing that lucidity of expression is precisely proportional to
clearness of thought. The philosophy of Kant did not admit of the
simple language of Hume, and T.H. Green and Mr. Bradley are not to be
blamed if they are more difficult to understand than Sir Leslie
Stephen.

The second aspect of the question is more important, especially at a
time when we are constantly reminded that the public is indifferent to
the finest creative literature now produced. The fault may be with the
public, and it may also be with the authors. It is worth remembering
that this is a time when special forms of expression are being made to
do work which once belonged to other forms. Fiction, for example, is
being made to carry the load of philosophic psychology, of poetry, of
the economic, moral, or political treatise. Drama is often used as a
vehicle for truths which were once left to the pulpit, the political
platform, or the lecture hall. Both of them, in the case of the
extreme realists, are being used as the store-room or the dissecting
chamber of the experimental scientist. Supposing that an author's
facts are supremely important, his discernment most acute, his ideas
significant, still, before we condem