literary effort. One can choose his opportunities to study and write when other engagements do not press. But he who is influential in political life has no moment to call his own. He must make and keep regular appointments, no matter how much his business is interfered with; and besides this, he commonly spends many valuable hours in private consultations, in counter mining and petty diplomacy. The lawyer who takes literature, instead of politics, as his "led horse," has much more command of his time, and unquestionably much less exhaustive drain upon his vital energy. A man of any self-control can not only keep his legal life and his literary life from curtailing each other, but can cause each to stimulate the other, by bringing variety and zest to what might otherwise become a monotonous existence.
There are two principal perils awaiting the legal practitioner who essays to produce any thing worthy to be called literature. The first is one of style. The lawyer must learn to dispense with verbiage. It is a rule of literary art to assert a fact or state a thought once, in the most succinct form in which it can be put, and then drop it. The ordinary legal method is much more simple; it consists in emptying a page of synonyms over the sheet, and leaving the reader to pick out the exact meaning as best he can. Too many of our profession take as their model of English composition the granting clause of a deed, or that ancient classic, a General Release. The second danger is one affecting, not manner, but substance. Lawyers are prone not to take literary work seriously. Nearly every man of education has acquired a certain facility in the expression of ideas, and is apt to fancy that he requires but opportunity and determination in order to become a popular writer. This delusion is by no means confined to members of the legal fraternity. The saying has almost become cant, when a professional man retires from active practice, that he intends "to devote himself to literary pursuits," as if here were a field always open to every person not actually illiterate.
Literature is both a profession and an art. Its cultivation is by no means incompatible with success in another profession or another art. But any literary work, to have the slightest value, must be itself professional; that is, it must embody its author's serious and deliberate effort. It must consist of an original, intellectual product, whether of thought proper, or of imagination, fancy, humor, or wit; and be cast in such form as to make it logically effective, or aesthetically pleasing. The composition with which one merely diverts his leisure moments, and into which no part of his mental vitality goes, should be reeled off, page after page, as it flows from the over-facile pen, directly into the study-fire. It will at least impart a cheerful glow to the room; it would not serve even that useful purpose in an editor's waste-basket.
The attempt to speak of literature from the standpoint of the lawyer only serves to demonstrate anew the futility of most general maxims about the literary career. Study of the biographies of great wits never made a new poet or dramatist. Literary geniuses are not the fruit or the creatures of rules; they are usually exceptions to many existing rules, though their success often modifies the rules for the future. Literary production is the flower of whatever is in the man. Culture, observation, training in style, all contribute to the result. But it is the unique personality, the power of assimilating the results of others' work, and of thinking original thoughts, that make the writer. In entering the field of literature a lawyer's professional drill ought in many ways to be a help; there is no excuse for its ever acting as a handicap. But he must remember that if he would produce anything above the grade of amateur journalism, he must go to work as seriously, and with as constant an eye to the critical sense of others, as if he were preparing a brief that he knows his opponent will endeavor to tear to pieces.
