Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/170

 THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS that you either have the inborn talent, or you have not; that if you have it, you need only to plunge into a sort of vortex of creative energy, a fine sibylline frenzy—and your inborn talent will do the rest. That, of course, is arrant nonsense, and very disastrous nonsense, as well—because, if you once get the idea firmly fixed in your mind that a masterpiece can spring, like Pallas Athene, perfected from its author's brain, then good-bye to all hope for that honest drudgery, that loving patience over infinite detail, which is such an essential accompaniment of the creative gift that it almost justifies that threadbare paradox that genius is the art of taking infinite pains.

Now this, of course, is precisely what genius is not, and never can be, in literature any more than in the other arts. No amount of patient juggling with the contents of unabridged dictionaries will give