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 and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some
one cry out: But this 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 expect to have good writers; it is almost
invariably 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 practised 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.
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