lighter or more concrete paragraph is made to relieve one of more severe or closely reasoned nature. Making occasional division between propositional paragraphs and paragraphs of detail or amplification is a great help to this; it serves to keep the thought from being too uniformly strenuous. Finally, in proportion to the difficulty of the thought, frequent intermediate paragraphs of summary or transition should be introduced; they furnish the necessary connecting-link between the single paragraphs as a developed topic and the plan of the whole composition.

II.

INVENTION.

“The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed, everywhere? that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold and justify the first — a condition of literary art, which I shall call the necessity of mind in style."— Walter Pater.

BOOK IV. INVENTION IN ITS

ELEMENTS.

As soon as the foregoing study of style had reached beyond the consideration of mere processes to the stage of completed products, a new aspect of the work came into view; rudimentarily in the sentence, in much more palpable guise, though still subordinate, in the paragraph. To the problem of manner, the inquiry how to word, or color, or emphasize the thought already in hand, we began to add the inquiry what new thought we must supply in order rightly to set off, or round out, or push on to its conclusion, the thought we had; we were thinking of such things as added clauses, and explanatory details, and contrasts. This was the problem of matter asserting itself; the question of gathering thoughts as related thoughts, and not merely as the verbal clothing of thoughts. Thus with the first finished expression of thought there began in its essential principle the endeavor to find and systematize thought, that is, invention.

This inventive effort, subordinate thus far and as it were under the surface, is henceforth to take the lead. We are to work from the starting-point of matter rather than of manner. This it is, mainly, that distinguishes the coming from the preceding study; we are approaching not so much a different thing as the same thing from a different point of view. Our inquiry will lead on to a broader scale of working; but its germinal principles are already in hand, waiting merely for further application. Questions of style, therefore, are not