12 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



I can get them into proper shape, and I believe I become more fastidi- 

 ous as I grow older." And it often turns out that the writer whose 

 pen seems to move most easily is the veriest slave of his skill. The 

 stock example for many years to come will be Stevenson. We all 

 remember the confident and youthful critic who once said that 

 Stevenson obviously wrote with perfect ease, at a high rate of speed, 

 in a style that was essentially innate. But the comment about his 

 unstudied innate style becomes deliciously humorous, when we listen 

 to his own explicit account of the long and tedious process whereby 

 he acquired his power. No writer has more freely and forcefully 

 avowed his willingness to tread in nobler footprints than his own. 

 "This, like it or not, is the way to learn to write." And his letters 

 tell us how slowly and painfully he worked toward the final form of his 

 pages, even at that stage of maturity when he could be said to have 

 won his greatest mastery over words and phrases. Similarly, we 

 have heard Emerson quoted as an example of a writer who framed his 

 sentences without effort; but the authentic records of his career 

 show he would work and hunt, not merely days but weeks, to find 

 the felicitous turn of a sentence. And many enthusiasts assert that 

 something of the same sort is true of every great writer in every 

 language. They even include Lincoln and Franklin. If ever there 

 was a vigorous, incisive, conclusive style that seemed to spring 

 spontaneously from an untutored pen, that style certainly belongs 

 to our great statesman, whom the English poet describes so happily 

 as "he of tragic doom, the later born, he of the short plain word that 

 thrilled the world and set the bondman free." Yet there seems to 

 be evidence to prove that even Lincoln was as patient and wonderful 

 in learning to express himself as he was in everything else; and when 

 our young lawyers and budding statesmen are willing to take several 

 months out of their lives and work at Euclid, not for his geometry, 

 but primarily to learn the effective presentation of an argument from 

 premises to conclusion, we shall no longer have to complain of so 

 many speeches that are utterly jejune on the one hand or bombastic 

 on the other. Even more pertinent is the example offered by 

 Benjamin Franklin, another American who was great in action as 



