main thought, they may be trusted to make more effective application of it by and for themselves than anything the speaker or writer might add would lead them to.

Often and often there is nothing better than to end with the strongest thing you have to say; the one chief thought you wish to impress growing naturally out of all that has been said before, so that the whole discourse is masked behind the clear, shining climax, which is your conclusion. When circumstances permit, the very best conclusion is simply to stop at the height of achievement.

THE COMPLETE EXPRESSION

This is the filling up and rounding out of every feature of the plan, to give it force, effect, and beauty in the appreciation of the readers or hearers.

The one theme has been found and clearly defined. Its elements have been drawn out in the lines and branches of the orderly plan. Now, in the complete expression, all that is in the theme and plan is to be put in finished, effective, and attractive form.

This shaping of all the material into Complete Expression is called, in the books of rhetoric, Amplification. The idea is that the plan is a condensed composition, and that the final utterance is but amplification of the plan. While this is always theoretically true, it may at times be far from the actual fact. A vigorous mind may be almost swamped by its own rush of thought. Intense interest may accumulate material far beyond what time or space will permit one to use, so that the so-called amplification is in fact abridgment. Yet if the abridgment is good, it will be according to a plan, which can be abstracted from the mass and definitely stated in con

secutive items, the complete expression being then the amplification of that abstract.

In the complete expression, illustration, ornament, emotional suggestion or appeal may find place. Here the speaker or writer comes into personal touch with those he addresses, every word designed to go direct from him to them.

The amplification must be as much in harmony with the theme as is the plan itself, and must have the unity of the theme, every finishing touch bringing out more perfectly the central controlling thought. It is as when in the opening spring the strong branches and feathery twigs of the tree, that form its substantial unity of structure, (the plan of the tree) burst out with leaves, blossoms, and fruit from the inherent power of life pervading all the perfect organism. Amplification reaches out into the universe of thought, and draws in every idea and every image that may be fitly gathered within that field along those lines.

Now the element of exclusion in the plan becomes helpful. The author takes each subordinate topic for the moment as if there were no other. All he has to say on that division of the plan, he will, within his prescribed limits of place and time, say then and there. Inventive art is working now along narrower lines. Within those limits he may deal with that single topic independently with all freedom and fulness, as nature perfectly finishes every petal that joins to make the

rose.

It was my privilege many years ago to see that great painting, Church's "Heart of the Andes." It was a large canvas, filling the center of one side of a great room. Each visitor was provided with an opera glass for better view. At first one did not seem to need the

glass. There were the giant mountains. On the left were snow-capped peaks rising far into the sunny heaven, the fleecy clouds flitting midway about their giant forms. On the right were other peaks of less elevation, grim, rugged masses of rock, dark in the fury of a thunder-storm. You could see that they were distant many a mile,-far away, under another sky. Between them stretched lower hills, forests, and forest glades, while far back in the center of the landscape shone the blue waters of a quiet lake. You could just distinguish the groves and scattered trees along its shores, and on the farther side could note a group of white specks, which you knew to be the houses of a village. In the foreground were dense masses of forest, and in the very center a sunlit space full of bright tropical flowers.

When eye and mind had taken in all the scene, we turned upon it the magnifying-glass, when all increased in grandeur and beauty. Every separate crag, every jutting rock of the mountains came out clearly into view; we could distinguish the crowns of the individual trees that made up the mass of the forest; the houses of the far village and the white church with its clock-tower stood out in clear contour; and we could trace every petal of the bright flowers that seemed to lie at our very feet in the foreground.

The artist had first swept the whole scene with a master's vision, and sketched out the mountain masses and all other great features in grand relief and just proportion. That comprehensive sketch answered to the author's or orator's plan of his entire discourse or treatise. Then he had treated with loving care each feature of the vast landscape, devoting himself for the time to that single scene as if it were an independent

picture, and as if that scene were all, bringing out the rocks and crags on the mountain-side, the individual trees that signalized themselves in the forest, and each flower of nature's bright garden that filled the foreground. Each minor scene was perfected as if it were all, yet its relation to the total was never lost, but each was more by association or contrast with all else that made the picture. The mountain lake was more placid by contrast with the thunder-smitten crags, the luxuriant forests were brighter with fulness of life, and the flowers of the plain more delicately beautiful because of the icy peaks rising into eternal cold and silence beyond.

Only by a like comprehensive perfection does the artist of speech become truly master of his art.

CHAPTER XIX

CONSTRUCTIVE LITERARY WORK

To apply the principles of inventive art in speaking and writing to the actual performance-to turn theory into achievement-is the problem that besets, and often dismays, the inexperienced speaker or writer; and from its difficulties even the accomplished orator or author never wholly shakes himself free. Beyond all knowledge of how the thing may be done is the practical ability to do it, so that words shall be spoken worthy the attention of a listening audience, or an effective writing finished under one's hand. We need what the Romans expressed by res gestæ, "things done," and the French by fait accompli, "accomplished fact." By what means may such actual result be attained?

Here is a ream of paper, a pencil or pen, and a writer. How is an essay, a poem, a book, to be made out of that combination? It can be done. It has been done. Sir Walter Raleigh, while a prisoner in the Tower of London, wrote his "History of the World;" Bunyan, in Bedford' jail, his "Pilgrim's Progress;" Milton, in blindness, his "Paradise Lost;" Scott dictated some of his novels while suffering such excruciating pain that he kept the doors of his study closed, lest his irrepressible cries should disturb those without. If there is thought and opportunity, that thought can be written down in readable words. Or, again, here is a man and an assembly waiting for him to address them. How shall he speak words that may hold their interested attention?