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The same thing has happened to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens.
Each subject music, literature, humanitarianism, mysticism, and a dozen others would be treated in turn; and while in no wise belittling the magic inventiveness of an age which has given us an Edison, a Marconi, and a whole host of brilliant explorers, birdmen, and others equally daring and distinguished, he intended to remember always the enormous debt which we of this century owe to the glorious past.
They are all, too, engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying Æneas, an even more pathetic imagination than Homer’s; others attempt to save their household goods; others erect a tent; others, again, attempt to scale the sides of the ark or break into it with axes—one cannot but hope they will succeed.
In all these arrangements, Mr. Stephenson’s inventiveness was kept constantly on the stretch; and though many improvements in detail have been effected since his time, the foundations were then laid by him of the present system of conducting railway traffic.
Mark Twain takes on more and more of the characteristics of the Yankee those characteristics which constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common sense. It is the last phase in the formation of the national type.
A nation that could educate 10,000 automobile mechanics in 60 days might indeed develop 1,000 Diesel engineers in a year. The matter is of too great moment for delay. It touches the interest of everyone. We are in the petroleum age, and how long it will last depends upon our own foresight, inventiveness, and wisdom. Already we are importers of petroleum.
It is instructive to find that in Scripture, genius as displayed in literary insight and facility, in ingenuity and inventiveness as to the various arts, and even in the conception of instruments of husbandry, is attributed to Divine inspiration. This truth was acknowledged in earliest times, and skilled experts in art or handicraft were reckoned to be under the inspiration of God.
The further visions of the Professor are less alluring. "The animals and plants die away before men, except such as he preserves for his food or delight, or such as maintain a precarious footing about him as commensals and parasites. These vermin and pests must succumb sooner or later to his untiring inventiveness and incessantly growing discipline.
For as was the land, such was the art of it while folk yet troubled themselves about such things; it strove little to impress people either by pomp or ingenuity: not unseldom it fell into commonplace, rarely it rose into majesty; yet was it never oppressive, never a slave's nightmare nor an insolent boast: and at its best it had an inventiveness, an individuality that grander styles have never overpassed: its best too, and that was in its very heart, was given as freely to the yeoman's house, and the humble village church, as to the lord's palace or the mighty cathedral: never coarse, though often rude enough, sweet, natural and unaffected, an art of peasants rather than of merchant-princes or courtiers, it must be a hard heart, I think, that does not love it: whether a man has been born among it like ourselves, or has come wonderingly on its simplicity from all the grandeur over-seas.
Inventiveness especially seems to be a quality that we have supposed to be a gift of the gods, and we have given but little attention to producing it, or even giving it an opportunity to display itself.
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