Clearness need not be defined. Naturalness will not suffer definition; it
depends on the individual, and must be determined by the individual. What
is proper for one person may be improper for another. Carlyle was
ungraceful with impunity; Lamb could not have been so. We may no more
choose our styles than our characters. Style, like character, can, it is
true, be trained--strengthened, chastened, refined, rendered shapely; but
in essentials it must for ever remain as it originally was. It is the
expression, not only of the thoughts immediately to be set down, but of
the very man himself, and with the man it will develop. It cannot be
invented; it cannot be concocted. It must be a natural growth--watched,
tended, fostered, pruned, but after all a natural growth.

* * * * *

To find out, to uncover, one's true style; to lay bare one's self: how is
this to be set about? Primarily, by experiment in the way of imitation,
which is the commencement of all art. Every great artist--Shakspere,
Beethoven, Velasquez, Inigo Jones--has started by imitating the models
which he admired and to which he felt drawn. You must do the same. It is
the surest and indeed the only way of arriving at one's true
individuality.

I do not find it easy to recommend exemplars to the aspirant; so many
writers of indubitable greatness have been fatal to their disciples; take
the trite instance of Carlyle, whose influence twenty years ago ruined
styles innumerable. Shakspere and Congreve, possibly our two supreme prose
artists, have styles which, in directness and freedom from mannerism, are
well suited to be models for the young journalist; but since they wrote
only dialogue, now archaic in many details, it is very difficult for the
young journalist to follow them with profit in descriptive work. Among