ine used to say, one
good taciturn deserves another.

I was thinking, as I took a parcel of laundry up to the Chinaman on
McFee Street just now, it would be interesting to write a book dealing
solely, candidly, exactly, and fully with the events, emotions, and
thoughts of just one day in a man's life. If one could do that, in a way
to carry conviction, assent, and reality, to convey to the reader's
senses a recognition of genuine actual human _being_, one might claim to
be a true artist.

I have found an admirable book for reading in bed--this little anthology
of prose, collected by Pearsall Smith. He knows what good prose is,
having written some of the daintiest bits of our time in his "Trivia," a
book with which I occasionally delight a truly discerning customer. What
a fascination there is in good prose--"the cool element of prose" as
Milton calls it--a sort of fluid happiness of the mind, unshaken by the
violent pangs of great poetry. I am not subtle enough to describe it,
but in the steadily cumulating satisfaction of first-class prose there
seems to be something that speaks direct to the brain, unmarred by the
claims of the senses, the emotions. I meditate much, ignorantly and
fumblingly, on the modes and purposes of writing. It is so
simple--"Fool!" said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write!"--all
that is needful is to tell what happens; and yet how hard it is to
summon up that necessary candor. Every time I read great work I see the
confirmation of what I grope for. How vivid, straight, and cleanly it
seems when done: merely the outward utterance of "what the mind at home,
in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to
herself." Let a man's mind depart from his audience; let him have no
concern whether to shock or to please. Let him carry no consideration
save to utter, with unsparing fidelity, what passes in his own spirit.
One can trust the brain to do its part. All that is needed is honourable
frankness: not to be ashamed to open our hearts, to speak our privy
weakness, our inward exulting. Then the pain and perplexity, or the
childish satisfactions, of our daily life are the true material of the
writer's art, and that which is sown in weakness may be raised in power.
Curious indeed that in this life, brief and precariously enjoyed, men
should so set their hearts on building a permanence in words: something
to stand, in the lovely stability of ink and leaden types, as our speech
o