mply and openly to each other of our hopes and
fears--what we love, what we dread, what we avoid. The saddest thing in
the world is to feel that we are alone; the best thing in the world is
to feel that we are loved and needed.

However, as things are, the sad fact remains that in common talk we
speak of knowing a man whom we have met and spoken to a dozen times,
while it would never occur to us to use the word of a man whose books
we might have read a dozen times and yet never have seen; though as
matter of fact we know the latter's real mind, or a part of it, while
we may only know the healthy or pathetic face of the former.

If we make writing the business of our lives, it will be necessary to
give up many things for it, things which are held to be the prizes of
the world--position, station, wealth--or, rather, to give up the
pursuit of these things; probably, indeed, if we really love our art we
shall be glad enough to give up what we do not care about for a thing
about which we do care. But there will be other things to be given up
as well, which we may not like resigning, and one of these things is
the multiplication of pleasant relations with other people, which
cannot indeed be called friendships, but which rank high among the easy
pleasures of life. We must give them up because they mean time, and
time is one of the things that the artist cannot throw away. Of course
the artist must not lose his hold on life; but if he is working in a
reflective medium, it is his friendships that help him, and not his
acquaintances. He must learn to be glad to be alone, for it is in
solitude that an idea works itself out, very often quite unconsciously,
by a sort of secret gestation. How often have I found that to put an
idea in the mind and to leave it there, even if one does not
consciously meditate upon it, is sufficient to clothe the naked thought
with a body of appropriate utterance, when it comes to the birth. But
casual social intercourse, the languid interchange of conventional
talk, mere gregariousness, must be eschewed by an artist, for the
simple reason that his temptation will be to expend his force in
entering into closer relations with the casual, and possibly
unintelligent, person than the necessities of the situation warrant.
The artist is so impatient of dulness, so greedy of fineness, in all
his relations, that he is apt to subject himself to a wasteful strain
in talking to unperceptive and unappreciative per