own;
but it gives one a copious vocabulary, it teaches the art of poise, of
cadence, of choice in words, of picturesqueness. There comes a time
when one abandons poetry, or is abandoned by it; and, after all, prose
is the most real and natural form of expression. There arrives, in the
case of one who has practised poetical expression diligently, a
wonderful sense of freedom, of expansiveness, of delight, when he
begins to use what has been material for poetry for the purposes of
prose. Poetical expression is strictly conditioned by length of
stanzas, dignity of vocabulary, and the painful exigencies of rhyme.
How good are the days when one has escaped from all that tyranny, when
one can say the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in
flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences
of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the
sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy--these are the joys
of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make them
easy and instinctive.

A word may be said about style. Stevenson said that he arrived at
flexibility of style by frank and unashamed imitation of other writers;
he played, as he said, "the sedulous ape" to great authors. This system
has its merits, but it also has its dangers. A sensitive literary
temperament is apt to catch, to repeat, to perpetuate the charming
mannerisms of great writers. I have sometimes had to write critical
monographs on the work of great stylists. It is a perilous business! If
for several months one studies the work of a contagious and delicate
writer, critically and appreciatively, one is apt to shape one's
sentences with a dangerous resemblance to the cadences of the author
whom one is supposed to be criticising. More than once, when my
monograph has been completed, I have felt that it might almost have
been written by the author under examination; and there is no merit in
that. I am sure that one should not aim at practising a particular
style. The one aim should be to present the matter as clearly, as
vigorously, as forcibly as one can; if one does this sincerely, one's
own personality will make the style; and thus I feel that people whose
aim is to write vigorously should abstain from even reading authors
whose style affects them strongly. Stevenson himself dared not read
Livy; Pater confessed that he could not afford to read Stevenson; he
added, that he did not consider h