Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/171

 THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS birth to a great poem, if there is not the inspiration of a great thought back of it. The statement that if, according to the law of permutations, you toss a sufficient number of Greek alphabets up in the air, and keep on doing so for a sufficient number of times, they will sooner or later come down arranged to form the text of the Iliad, may be all right in higher mathematics, but it is not helpful to the Craftsmanship of Writing. But just because technique will not produce immortal epics all by itself, there is no sense in leaping to the other extreme, and either shirking it or discarding it altogether. The best laid stone-ballast railway track in the world won't take us anywhere unless we run trains upon it, but that is no reason for expecting our little intellectual railway trains to run themselves without any guide rails at all. Undisciplined genius is an erratic, irresponsible [157]