r eye open to new impressions, to be
ready to see beauty in new forms, not to love comfortable and settled
ways, but to bring the same fresh apprehension that youth brings, to
art and to life.

He is merely speaking of a mental process in these words; what he is
condemning is the dulling and encrusting of the mind with prejudices
and habits, the tendency, as Charles Lamb wittily said, whenever a new
book comes out, to read an old one, to get into the
fireside-and-slippers frame of mind, to grumble at novelty, to complain
that the young men are violating all the sacred canons of faith and art.

This is not at all the same thing as knowing one's own limitations;
every one, whether he be artist or writer, critic or practitioner,
ought to take the measure of his forces, and to determine in what
regions he can be effective; indeed it is often necessary for a man of
artistic impulses to confine his energies to one specific department,
although he may be attracted by several. Pater was himself an instance
of this. He knew, for instance, that his dramatic sense was weak, and
he wisely let drama alone; he found that certain vigorous writers
exercised a contagious influence over his own style, and therefore he
gave up reading them. But within his own region he endeavoured to be
catholic and sympathetic; he never tied up the contents of his mind
into packets and labelled them, a task which most men between thirty
and forty find highly congenial.

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 o