Do not fancy, when I say that we must learn poetry before we learn prose, that I am only advancing a paradox; mere talking is no more prose than mere rhyme is poetry.  Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere’s comedy, makes, I suspect, a very great mistake, when he tells his master:  “If that means prose, I’ve been talking prose all my life.”  I fancy the good man had been no more talking prose, than an awkward country boy has been really walking all his life, because he has been contriving somehow to put one leg before the other.  To see what walking is, we must look at the perfectly-drilled soldier, or at the perfectly-accomplished lady, who has been taught to dance in order that she may know how to walk.  Dancing has been well called the poetry of motion; but the tender grace, the easy dignity in every gesture of daily life which the perfect dancer exhibits answers exactly to that highly-organised prose which ought to be the offspring of a critical acquaintance with poetry.  Milton’s matchless prose style, for instance, grows naturally from his matchless power over rhyme and metre.  Practice in versification might be unnecessary if we were all born world-geniuses; so would practice in dancing, if every lady had the figure of a Venus and the garden of Eden for a playground.  But even the ancient Greeks amid every advantage of climate, dress, and physical beauty, considered a thorough instruction in all athletic and graceful exercises as indispensably necessary, not only to a boy’s but also to a girl’s education, and in like manner, I think the exquisite models of prose with which English literature abounds will not supersede the necessity of a careful training in versification, nay, will rather make such a training all the more requisite for those who wish to imitate such excellence.  Pray understand me:  by using the word “imitate,” I do not mean that I wish you to ape the style of any favourite author.  Your aim will not be to write like this man or that woman, but to write like yourselves, being of course responsible for what yourselves are like.  Do not be afraid to let the peculiarities of your different characters show yourselves in your styles.  Your prose may be the rougher for it, but it will be at least honest; and all mannerism is dishonesty, an attempt to gain beauty at the expense of truthful expression which invariably defeats its own ends, and produces an unpleasing effect, so necessarily one are truth and beauty.  So far then from wishing to foster in you any artificial mannerism, mannerism is that foul enchanter from whom, above all others, I am sworn “en preux chevalier” to deliver you.  As Professor Maurice warned me when I undertook this lectureship, my object in teaching you about “styles” should be that you may have no style at all.  But mannerism can be only avoided by the most thorough practice and knowledge.  Half-educated writers are always mannerists; while, as the ancient canon says, “the perfection of art is to conceal art”—­to depart from uncultivated and therefore defective nature, to rise again through art to a more organised and therefore more simple naturalness.  Just as, to carry on the analogy which I employed just now, it is only the perfect dancer who arrives at that height of art at which her movements seem dictated not by conscious science, but unconscious nature.