 and of all these he made lists for study. He
did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching
mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to
induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for
new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them
properly. In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of
living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that
glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common
speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath. He
wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself. He
was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded
little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam
of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he
was nearer being able to create beauty itself.
    He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not work
blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting to chance
and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine. He
had no patience with chance effects. He wanted to know why and how. His was
deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing
itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of
realizing that end in his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed
to failure. On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and
phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all
tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable
connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, knowing that they were
beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much he dissected
beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty
possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he
did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated. He knew full well,
from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and
that the mystery of beauty was no less than that of life - nay, more - that the
fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit
of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust
