Page 363 - The Story of My Lif

You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere,

and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles—a delight in climbing rugged
paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip
backward—if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember, no effort
that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere,
somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as
God intended we should speak and sing.

CHAPTER V. LITERARY STYLE

No one can have read Miss Keller’s autobiography without feeling that she
writes unusually fine English. Any teacher of composition knows that he can
bring his pupils to the point of writing without errors in syntax or in the choice

of words. It is just this accuracy which Miss Keller’s early education fixes as the
point to which any healthy child can be brought, and which the analysis of that
education accounts for. Those who try to make her an exception not to be
explained by any such analysis of her early education, fortify their position by an
appeal to the remarkable excellence of her use of language even when she was a
child.

This appeal is to a certain degree valid; for, indeed, those additional harmonies
of language and beauties of thought which make style are the gifts of the gods.
No teacher could have made Helen Keller sensitive to the beauties of language
and to the finer interplay of thought which demands expression in melodious
word groupings.

At the same time the inborn gift of style can be starved or stimulated. No innate
genius can invent fine language. The stuff of which good style is made must be
given to the mind from without and given skilfully. A child of the muses cannot
write fine English unless fine English has been its nourishment. In this, as in all
other things, Miss Sullivan has been the wise teacher. If she had not had taste
and an enthusiasm for good English, Helen Keller might have been brought up