I

SKILL AS NATURAL OR ACQUIRED

I. LEARNING to write is first learning that you must learn. The art of literature is the greatest of the arts, the most complex, the most sophisticated, the most highly intellectual, and the most exacting, but those who have made little or no progress in it seem to be very generally of the opinion that it is not a thing to be learned as one learns to paint or to play the piano. In fact, absurd as it seems, this misunderstanding is very common among first-year students in college. For the instructor, a prime difficulty in dealing with such students is that of bringing them to realize that writing is not a spontaneous and natural activity that happens to succeed better in some cases than in others. Youth has a great deal of faith in its ability to crowd things through by its own sheer energy in defiance of the rules. From its point of view, they are rules, rather than laws, a distinction of some importance. Laws, in the sense in which the term would be used either in literary criticism or in physics, are inherent in the nature of things. Rules are man-imposed. Disregard of rules, even those put on the statute books for the regulation of conduct, may sometimes be evaded without penalty. With laws, in the larger sense, that is not true. They may be but imperfectly known. Those who assume to speak with authority in regard to them may state them inadequately or incorrectly. In the case of some individual writer or of a worker in some other of the creative arts, they may seem not to be operative, but a sufficient examination will always reveal

that appearance as a fallacy. Laws are not to be thought of as commands or prohibitions. They are not restraints or limitations. Put into words, they are, instead, merely statements of the way things work. As laws of writing or painting or any other art, they are intensely human, because they are laws of our response to words, colors, sounds, and all the varied phenomena of the world that the artist, in his medium, can crowd upon our minds and our senses. Knowledge of these laws and mastery of them is opportunity and power. Giving attention to them is not lessening our own individuality and shutting its activities up within a prescribed channel, but opening doors of possibility to fuller expression of ourselves, surer, freer, and more commanding.

2. In this matter, nothing can be more instructive than the experience of great writers. Did Shakespeare, Dickens, Hawthorne sit down in a fine frenzy of inspiration and dash off their immortal works, or did they think out somewhat patiently what they were to do and how they were to do it, as might any other kind of workman? They have not all been thoughtful enough to make report on the subject for us. Shakespeare is notably incommunicative with regard to this question, as, indeed, with regard to practically every personal question that we might ask. Nevertheless there is one outstanding fact that certainly has some meaning in this connection. Shakespeare's plays are not uniform. The earlier ones are more or less bad. In reading them, perhaps one would be justified in saying now and then that this is downright bad, and that this again is very bad. From such facts there is only one conclusion. The world's greatest artist learned his art. Its laws were not in print for him to weigh and consider comfortably under an electric globe. He could not accept them as formulated by other minds, but he learned them and

through that learning came to better and higher accomplish

ment.

3. There are other writers, however, who have taken us into their workshops and have let us see the chips and shavings tossed from the bench to the floor. Here is what Robert Louis Stevenson has to say about his early apprenticeship to the literary art.

never

"Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the name of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works: Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable goutyfooted lyrics I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King's Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein-for it was not Congreve's verse, it was

his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs. So I might go on forever, through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors: the other, originally known as Semiramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.

66

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back, to earlier or fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But that is not the way to be original. It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can have good writers; it is almost invari-· ably from a school that great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practiced the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens

of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it."

4. There is abundant other evidence to the long discipline that the great writers have given themselves, the patient care with which they have sought for the just word, the happy phrase, the telling turn of a sentence or a clause. Newman's prose style will be the delight of readers for generations, but all his life he is reported to have been compelled to spend a great deal of time upon the careful reshaping of everything he wrote. Poe is read and enjoyed all over the habitable globe, and he has made it amply clear to us that all that he did was the work, not of an uncontrolled genius yielding to the rush of his own imaginings, but of a conscious intelligence seeing the end of his work from the beginning and ordering the details toward that end with a finer precision than that of a carpenter putting up the scaffolding for a house.

66

5. It is not difficult to construct an outline of the 'formula' by which thousands of current narratives are being whipped into shape." 1

For this formula Poe is in some measure responsible, and it is partly to the existence of a formula that we must credit the enormous body of good literary work that is now being done. A formula is valuable for everybody, but the man of original powers should see to it that he does not reduce his work to the level of the rule of thumb that is employed by all his fellows. A formula is a thing to be used, but he who uses it should always be superior to it. He should use it and not be used by it. He should think of it as an instrumentality by which he may bring his work

'Henry Seidel Canby in The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1915.