Now, this is the deepest quality in the books of life, which a student may not only enjoy to the full, but may also absorb and make his own.  When Alfred de Musset, in an oft-repeated phrase, said that it takes a great deal of life to make a little art, he was not only affirming the reality of this process of passing experience through consciousness into the unconscious side of a man’s nature, but he was also hinting at one of the greatest resources of pleasure and growth.  For time and life continually enrich the man who has learned the secret of turning experience and observation into knowledge and power.  It is a secret in the sense in which every vital process is a secret; but it is not a trick, a skill, or a method which may be communicated in a formula.  Mrs. Ward describes a character in one of her stories as having passed through a great culture into a great simplicity of nature; in other words, culture had wrought its perfect work, and the man had passed through wide and intensely self-conscious activity into the repose and simplicity of self-unconsciousness; his knowledge had become so completely a part of himself that he had ceased to be conscious of it as a thing distinct from himself.  There is no easy road to this last height in the long and painful process of education; and time is an essential element in the process, because it is a matter of growth.

There are, it is true, a few men and women who seem born with this power of living in the heart of things and possessing them in the imagination without having gone through the long and painful stages of preparatory education; but genius is not only inexplicable, it is also so rare that for the immense majority of men any effort to comprehend it must be purely academic.  It is enough to know that if we are in any degree to share with men and women of genius the faculty of vision, insight, and creative energy, we must master the conditions which favor the development of those supreme gifts.  There is laid, therefore, upon the student who wishes to get the vital quality of literature the necessity of repeating, by deliberate and intelligent design, the process which in so many of the masters of the arts has been, apparently, accomplished instinctively.  To make observation, study, and experience part of one’s spiritual and intellectual capital, it is, in the first place, necessary to saturate one’s self with that which one is studying; to possess it by constant familiarity; to let the imagination play upon it; to meditate upon it.  And it is necessary, in the second place, to make this practice habitual; when it becomes habitual, it will become largely unconscious:  one does it by instinct rather than by deliberation.  This process is illustrated in every successful attempt to master any art.  In the art of speaking, for instance, the beginner is hampered by an embarrassing consciousness of his hands, feet, speech; he cannot forget himself and surrender himself to his thought