mself climbs upward.

Technic, however, can be had for the asking. Any man can acquire it if
he will but pay the price,--the needful study and experiment. Any man
can make himself a master of his craft, if he will but serve his
apprenticeship loyally. The beginner in painting, for example, can go
into the studio of an older practitioner to get grounded in the grammar
of his art, and to learn slowly how to speak its language, not
eloquently at first, but so as to make his meaning clear. In that
workshop he soon awakens to the fact that permanent success is never won
by any audacity of ignorance, and that the most famous artists are those
who acquainted themselves with every artifice of their craft and with
every trick of their trade. They went to school to certain of their
elders to acquire that tradition of technic, past along from hand to
hand, enriched by the devices of one after another of the strong men who
had practised the art, following each in the other's footsteps and
broadening the trail blazed by those who went first.

Every generation is privileged to stand on the shoulders of its
predecessors, and it is taller by what they accomplished. The art of
fiction, for example, is a finer art to-day than it was yesterday; and
so is every other art, even tho the artists themselves are no greater
now than then, and even tho genius is no more frequent than it was
formerly. Ghirlandajo and Marlowe and Cervantes were men of genius; but
their technic is seen to-day to be as primitive as their native talent
is indisputable. We can perceive them doubtfully feeling for a formula,
fumbling in the dark, for want of the model which they themselves were
to aid in establishing and which every novice nowadays has ready to his
hand, even tho he may lack the temperament to profit by what is set
before him.

It is significant that not a few of the masters, in the days when they
were but novices, found so much satisfaction in this mere acquiring of
the secrets of the craft, that they chose to linger in the
apprentice-stage longer than might seem necessary. In their earlier work
they were content modestly to put in practise the technical principles
they had just been acquiring; and for a little while they sought
scarcely more than mere technical adroitness. Consider the firstlings of
Shakspere's art and of Moliere's; and observe how they reveal these
prentice playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness
and each satis