But I desire here to go into the larger question of forming habits; and as a general rule it may be said that Pater’s dictum is entirely untrue, and that success in life depends more upon forming habits than upon anything else, except good health.  Indeed, Pater himself is an excellent instance in point.  He achieved his large output of beautiful literary work, the amazing amount of perfectly finished and exquisitely expressed writing that he gave to the world, by an extreme and patient regularity of labour.  He did not, as some writers do, have periods of energetic creation, interrupted by periods of fallow idleness.  Perhaps his work might have been more spontaneous if he could, like Milton’s friend, have been wise enough “of such delights to judge, and interpose them oft.”  But the achievement of Pater was to realize and to carry out his own individual method, and it is upon doing this that successful productivity depends.

I could name, if I chose, two or three friends of my own, men of high and subtle intelligence, admirable humour, undiminished zest, who have failed, and will fail, to realize their possibilities, simply by a lack of method.  Who does not know the men whom Mr. Mallock so wittily describes, of whom, up to the age of forty, their friends say that they could do anything if they only chose, and after the age of forty that they could have done anything if they had chosen?  I have one particular friend in my eye at this moment, the possessor of wealth and leisure, who is a born writer if any man ever was.  He has no particular duties, except the duties of a small landowner and the father of a family; he is a wide reader, and a critic of delicate and sympathetic acuteness.  He is bent on writing; and he has written a single book crammed from end to end with good and beautiful things, the stuff of which would have sufficed, in the hands of a facile writer, for half-a-dozen excellent books.  He is, moreover, sincerely anxious to write, but he does nothing.  If you ask him—­and I conceive it to be my duty at intervals to chide him for not producing more—­what he does with his time, he says with a melancholy smile:  “Oh, I hardly know:  it goes!” I trace his failure to produce, simply to the fact that he has never set apart any particular portion of the day for writing; he allows himself to be interrupted; he entertains many guests whom he has no particular wish to see; he “sets around and looks ornery,” like the frog; he talks delightfully; an industrious Boswell could, by asking him questions and taking careful notes of his talk, fill a charming volume in a month out of his shrewd and suggestive conversation; of course it is possible to say that he practises the art of living, to talk of “gems of purest ray serene” and flowers “born to blush unseen” and all the rest of it.  But his talk streams to waste among guests who do not as a rule appreciate it; and if there is any duty or responsibility in the world at all, it is a duty for men of great endowments,