The reason why very few uneducated persons have been writers of note, is because they have been unable to take up the problem at the right point.  A writer cannot start absolutely afresh; he must have the progress of thought behind him, and he must join the procession in due order.  Therefore the best outfit for a writer is to have just enough cultivation to enable him to apprehend the drift and development of thought, to discern the social and emotional problems that are in the air, so that he can interpret—­ that is the secret—­the thoughts that are astir, but which have not yet been brought to the birth.  He must know enough and not too much; he must not dim his perception by acquainting himself in detail with what has been said or thought; he must not take off the freshness of his mind by too much intellectual gymnastic.  It is a race across country for which he is preparing, and he will learn better what the practical difficulties are by daring excursions of his own, than by acquiring a formal suppleness in prescribed exercises.

The originality and the output of the writer are conditioned by his intellectual and vital energy.  Most men require all their energy for the ordinary pursuits of life; all creative work is the result of a certain superabundance of mental force.  If this force is used up in social duties, in professional business, even in the pursuit of a high degree of mental cultivation, originality must suffer; and therefore a man whose aim is to write, ought resolutely to limit his activities.  What would be idleness in another is for him a storing of forces; what in an ordinary man would be malingering and procrastination, is for the writer the repose necessary to allow his energies to concentrate themselves upon his chosen work.

June 8, 1889.

I have been looking at a catalogue, this morning, of the publications of a firm that is always bringing out new editions of old writers.  I suppose they find a certain sale for these books, or they would not issue them; and yet I cannot conceive who buys them in their thousands, and still less who reads them.  Teachers, perhaps, of literature; or people who are inspired by local lectures to go in search of culture?  It is a great problem, this accumulation of literature; and it seems to me a very irrational thing to do to republish the complete works of old authors, who perhaps, in the midst of a large mass of essentially second-rate work, added half-a-dozen lyrics to the literature of the world.  But surely it is time that we began to select?  Whatever else there is time for in this world, there certainly is not time to read old half-forgotten second-rate work.  Of course people who are making a special study of an age, a period, a school of writers, have to plough through a good deal that is not intrinsically worth reading; but, as a rule, when a man has done this, instead of saying boldly that the greater part of an author’s writings may be wisely neglected