skin were amateurs. It is not a question of how much a man writes
or publishes, it is a question of the spirit in which a man writes.
Walter Scott became a professional in the last years of his life, and
for the noblest of reasons; but he also became a bad writer. A good pair
to contrast are Southey and Coleridge. They began as amateurs. Southey
became a professional writer, and his sun set in the mists of valuable
information. Coleridge, as an amateur, enriched the language with a
few priceless poems, and then got involved in the morass of dialectical
metaphysics. The point is whether a man writes simply because he cannot
help it, or whether he writes to make an income. The latter motive does
not by any means prevent his doing first-rate artistic work--indeed,
there are certain persons who seem to have required the stimulus of
necessity to make them break through an initial indolence of nature.
When Johnson found fault with Gray for having times of the year when
he wrote more easily, from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, he added
that a man could write at any time if he set himself doggedly to
it. True, no doubt! But to write doggedly is not to court favourable
conditions for artistic work. It may be a finer sight for a moralist to
see a man performing an appointed task heavily and faithfully, with grim
tenacity, than it is to see an artist in a frenzy of delight dashing
down an overpowering impression of beauty; but what has always hampered
the British appreciation of literature is that we cannot disentangle the
moral element from it: we are interested in morals, not in art, and we
require a dash of optimistic piety in all writing that we propose to
enjoy.

The real question is whether, if a man sets himself doggedly to work,
the appetite comes with eating, and whether the caged bird begins to
flutter its wings and to send out the song that it learnt in the green
heart of the wood. When Byron said that easy writing made damned hard
reading, he meant that careless conception and hasty workmanship tend
to blur the pattern and the colour of work. The fault of the amateur is
that he can make the coat, but he cannot be bothered to make it fit. But
it is not by any means true that hard writing makes easy reading. The
spirit of the amateur is the spirit of the lover, who trembles at the
thought that the delicate creature he loves may learn to love him in
return, if he can but praise her worthily. The professional spirit is