of editing the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to have deserted his ephemeral contributions to literature.  Or if one could have induced Shelley to give up writing his wild lyrics, and devote himself to composing a work on Political Justice.  Jowett, who had a great fancy for imposing uncongenial tasks on his friends, is recorded to have said that Swinburne was a very brilliant, young man but that he would never do anything till he had given up wasting his time in poetry.  Imagine the result if Jowett had had his way!

Of course, it all depends upon what one desires to achieve and the sort of success one sets before oneself.  If one is enamoured of academical posts or honorary degrees, why, one must devote oneself to research and be content to be read by specialists.  That is a legitimate and even admirable ambition—­admirable all the more because it brings a man a slender reputation and very little of the wealth which the popular writer hauls in.

The things which live in literature, the books which make a man worth editing a century or two after he is dead, are, after all, the creative and imaginative books.  It is not in the hope of being edited that imaginative authors write.  Milton did not compose L’Allegro in the spirit of desiring that it might be admirably annotated by a Scotch professor.  Keats did not write La Belle Dame sans Merci in order that it might be printed in a school edition, with a little biography dealing with the paternal livery-stable.  It may be doubted whether any very vital imaginative work is ever produced with a view to its effect even upon its immediate readers.  A great novelist does not write with a moral purpose, and still less with an intellectual purpose.  He sees the thing like a picture; the personalities move, mingle, affect each other, appear, vanish, and he is haunted by the desire to give permanence to the scene.  For the time being he is under the thrall of a strong desire to make something musical, beautiful, true, life-like.  It is a criticism of life that all writers, from the highest to the humblest, aim at.  They are amazed, thrilled, enchanted by the sight and the scene, by the relationships and personalities they see round them.  These they must depict; and in a life where so much is fleeting, they must seek to stamp the impression in some lasting medium.  It is the beauty and strangeness of life that overpowers the artist.  He has little time to devote himself to things of a different value, to the getting of position or influence or wealth.  He cannot give himself up to filling his leisure pleasantly, by society or amusement.  These are but things to fill a vacant space of weariness or of gestation.  For him the one important thing is the shock, the surprise, the delight, the wonder of a thousand impressions on his perceptive personality.  And his success, his effect, his range, depend upon the uniqueness of his personality in part, and in part upon his power of expressing that personality.