There is an old aphorism--it is twelve hundred years old--which covers all this ground of the importance of technic, of science, in the literary art, with such completeness and compactness that it always affects one like a poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet--and a rare one he must have been--an old Armorican named Hervé, of whom all manner of beautiful stories have survived. This aphorism is, "He who will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of you have read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these same Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography of Millet, the painter, and which was recently quoted in a number of _Scribner's Magazine_, you can realize that one who lived in that old Armorica--the modern Brittany from which Millet comes--knew full well what it meant to answer to the rocks. Now, it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, which is the rudder of the literary artist, whether he work at verse or novels. I wish it were everywhere written, even in the souls of all our young American writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest literary artist our language has ever produced. We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an Elizabethan eulogy: Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art, (Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science), My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part; For though the poet's matter Nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and that he Who casts to write a living line must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, _For a good poet's made as well as born, And such wert thou._ Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race. Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines _In his well-turned and true-filed lines, In each of which he seems to shake a lance_, As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance. No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.