I. “_Le Style fait l’homme_” If you want to become an author, give up your life to the study of calligraphy, if a painter, devote yourself to the manufacture of paints and brushes, if a composer, commit to memory the number of notes in every standard classical work, and if a singer or instrumentalist, spend your whole energy in the establishing of a “sound technical foundation.” Emotional expression can then, if desired, be subsequently smeared like treacle on bread over all these different stylistic bases, this operation requiring neither skill nor expression. II. “_Means to an End_” The amateur must learn that technique represents an obstacle to be overcome and a set of tools to be acquired. It has nothing to do with expression. Only an imaginative artist like Maeterlinck would suggest that the road along which the student travels towards his destination is in reality a link, a connection joining one with the other—an umbilical cord partaking of the nature and attributes of both traveler and goal. To a perfectly rational person the road is merely a distance to be covered, a separation. III. _Personality, or, as some authorities have it: Individuality_ This is the greatest asset of the Amateur. An artist is like everybody in the world. The book we read, the picture we see or the music we hear which renders tangible our own dimly-felt thoughts and emotional stirrings shows that we are in reality one with the artist and with the universe of which these expressions are but reflections of unseen and unheard forces. An artist combines the power and responsibilities of the aristocrat with the feelings of an anarchist, he is the guardian of privilege and the destroyer of authority, the leveler of barriers and the creator of the superman, the leader and the servant of humanity and ... the Arch Enemy of the Amateur! The artist is like all humanity, but the Amateur is not like the Artist. The Amateur must hang on for dear life to his precious soul and resist to the last gasp the incursions of any outside force in which he can trace the semblance of his own nature, for if anything gets in something may get out and he won’t be able to sort himself out afterwards. Hence the Amateur must be an Individualist; otherwise he is doomed to extinction. The Amateur’s business is to interpret the universe in terms eternally incomprehensible to anyone but himself, and to compromise with the necessity for intercourse with his fellow-creatures by the adoption of an artificial language which can convey thoughts and feelings of a superficial character, but nothing more.