We must raise this question at the outset: whether there is any art of sublimity or of profundity, since some hold roundly that those who reduce such matters to technical precepts are altogether mistaken. Greatness, they say, is born and does not come by teaching; the only art for it is to be born so. Works of nature, they think, are the worse for being trussed up in lifeless rules, and grow weaker the more they are dissected by technical handling. §1
I, for my part, maintain that this view will be refuted if one only reflects that nature, though for the most part autonomous in matters of feeling and elevation, is not given to acting at random or wholly without method; and that, while nature herself is the primal element of generation in all things, yet method is competent both to define the proper measures and the right occasion for each, and to supply the steadiest training and use besides. Greatness, when left to itself, without science, untethered and unballasted, abandoned to mere impulse and untaught daring, is more dangerous still: such forces need a goad as often as they need a curb. §2
What Demosthenes declares of human life in general, that the greatest of goods is to enjoy good fortune, but the second, and no less great, to take good counsel, and that the absence of good counsel utterly cancels the other as well, may be applied to writing also: nature occupies the place of good fortune, and art the place of good counsel. The decisive point, however, is this: the very fact that a thing in literature can rest on nature alone we have no means of learning except from art. If the man who finds fault with serious students would think this over with himself, as I have said, he would not, I believe, any longer think the inquiry into our subject either superfluous or unprofitable. §3