f 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, admirable humour, and poetical
suggestiveness, to sow the seed of the mind freely and lavishly. We
English are of course the chosen race; but we should be none the worse
for a little more intellectual apprehension, a little more amiable
charm. If my friend had been a professional man, obliged to earn a
living by his pen, he would, I do not doubt, have given to the world a
series of great books, which would have done something to spread the
influence