On the Art of Writing | Page 9

long experience I have had, and the necessary assiduity with which I have pursued these studies in which like you I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to your consideration. They are indeed in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit....
Mark the noble modesty of that! To resume--
In speaking to you of the Theory of the Art, I shall only consider it as it has relation to the method of your studies.
And then he proceeds to preach the Old Masters.--But how?--why?--to what end? Does he recite lists of names, dates, with formulae concerning styles? He does nothing of the sort. Does he recommend his old masters for copying, then?--for mere imitation? Not a bit of it!--he comes down like a hammer on copying. Then for what, in fine, will he have them studied? Listen:--
The more extensive your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention.
Yes, of invention, your power to make something new:
--and what may appear still more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions.
There spake Sir Joshua Reynolds: and I call that the voice of a true Elder Brother. He, standing face to face with the young, thought of the old masters mainly as spiritual begetters of practice. And will anyone in this room tell me that what Reynolds said of painting is not to-day, for us, applicable to writing?
We accept it of Greek and Latin. An old Sixth Form master once said to me, 'You may give up Latin Verse for this term, if you will: but I warn you, no one can be a real scholar who does not constantly practise verse.' He was mistaken, belike. I hold, for my part, that in our Public Schools, we give up a quite disproportionate amount of time to 'composition' (of Latin Prose especially) and starve the boys' reading thereby. But at any rate we do give up a large share of the time to it. Then if we insist on this way with the tongues of Homer and Virgil, why do we avoid it with the tongue of Shakespeare, our own living tongue? I answer by quoting one of the simplest wisest sayings of Don Quixote (Gentlemen, you will easily, as time goes on, and we better our acquaintance, discover my favourite authors):--
The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a Greek; and Virgil wrote not in Greek, because he was a Latin. In brief, all the ancient poets wrote in the tongue which they sucked in with their mother's milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones to express the greatness of their conceptions: and, this being so, it should be a reason for the fashion to extend to all nations.
Does the difference, then, perchance lie in ourselves? Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed?... Can _you,_ sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.
Indeed, when we try to speak prose without having practised it the result is apt to be worse than our own vernacular. How often have I heard some worthy fellow addressing a public audience!--say a Parliamentary candidate who believes himself a Liberal Home Ruler, and for the moment is addressing himself to meet some criticism of the financial proposals of a Home Rule Bill. His own vernacular would be somewhat as follows:--
Oh, rot! Give the Irish their heads and they'll run straight enough. Look at the Boers, don't you know. Not half such a decent sort as the Irish. Look at Irish horses, too. Eh? What?
But this, he is conscious, would hardly suit the occasion. He therefore amends it thus:--
Mr Chairman--er--as regards the financial proposals of His Majesty's Government, I am of the deliberate--er--opinion that our national security--I may say, our Imperial security--our security as--er--a governing people--lies in trusting the Irish as we did in the--er --case of the Boers--H'm Mr Gladstone, Mr Chairman--Mr Chairman, Mr Gladstone----
and so on. You perceive that the style is actually worse than in the sample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at any rate nervous? But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidate was able to speak like this:--
'But what (says the Financier) is peace to us without money? Your plan gives us no revenue.' No? But it does--for it secures to the subject the power of Refusal, the first of all Revenues. Experience is a cheat, and fact is a liar, if this power in the subject of proportioning his grant, or of not granting at all,