However, as things are, the sad fact remains that in common talk we speak of knowing a man whom we have met and spoken to a dozen times, while it would never occur to us to use the word of a man whose books we might have read a dozen times and yet never have seen; though as matter of fact we know the latter’s real mind, or a part of it, while we may only know the healthy or pathetic face of the former.

If we make writing the business of our lives, it will be necessary to give up many things for it, things which are held to be the prizes of the world—­position, station, wealth—­or, rather, to give up the pursuit of these things; probably, indeed, if we really love our art we shall be glad enough to give up what we do not care about for a thing about which we do care.  But there will be other things to be given up as well, which we may not like resigning, and one of these things is the multiplication of pleasant relations with other people, which cannot indeed be called friendships, but which rank high among the easy pleasures of life.  We must give them up because they mean time, and time is one of the things that the artist cannot throw away.  Of course the artist must not lose his hold on life; but if he is working in a reflective medium, it is his friendships that help him, and not his acquaintances.  He must learn to be glad to be alone, for it is in solitude that an idea works itself out, very often quite unconsciously, by a sort of secret gestation.  How often have I found that to put an idea in the mind and to leave it there, even if one does not consciously meditate upon it, is sufficient to clothe the naked thought with a body of appropriate utterance, when it comes to the birth.  But casual social intercourse, the languid interchange of conventional talk, mere gregariousness, must be eschewed by an artist, for the simple reason that his temptation will be to expend his force in entering into closer relations with the casual, and possibly unintelligent, person than the necessities of the situation warrant.  The artist is so impatient of dulness, so greedy of fineness, in all his relations, that he is apt to subject himself to a wasteful strain in talking to unperceptive and unappreciative persons.  It is not that he desires to appear brilliant; it is that he is so intolerant of tedium that he sacrifices himself to fatiguing efforts in trying to strike a spark out of a dull stone.  The spark is perhaps struck, but he parts with his vital force in striking it.  He will be apt to be reproached with being eremitical, self-absorbed, unsociable, fastidious; but he must not care for that, because the essence of his work is to cultivate relations of sympathy with people whose faces he may never see, and he must save his talk, so to speak, for his books.  With his friends it is different, for talking to congenial people with whom one is familiar is a process at once stimulating and tranquillising, and it is at such moments that ideas take swift and brilliant shape.