itus when I was at school. My Latinity
stops short at Caesar and Cicero. One is, however, led to suppose
that the great executioner of imperial reputations was a mighty
pruner, in his day, of the "many, too many" words. But I am sure
that this other "Great Latin," as Nietzsche calls him, cleans up his
litter and chops off his surplusage quite as effectively as Tacitus,
and I suspect that neither Tacitus nor any other classic writer hits the
nail on the head with so straight, so steady, so effective a stroke.

I suppose it is the usual habit of destiny to rush into literary paths
people who are essentially dreamers and theorists and Utopians;
people who by instinct and temperament shrink away from contact
with brute reality.

I suppose even the great imaginative writers, like Balzac, live, on
the whole, sedentary and exclusive lives, making a great deal, as far
as the materials for their work go, of a very little. Now and then,
however, it happens that a man of action, a man of the world, a man
of love and war and sport, enters the literary arena; and when that
occurs, I have an idea that he hits about him with a more trenchant,
more resolute, more crushing force than the others.

The art of literature has become perhaps too completely the
monopoly of sedentary people--largely of the bourgeois class--who
bring to their work the sedentary sensitiveness, the sedentary
refinement, the sedentary lack of living experience, which are the
natural characteristics of persons who work all day in studies and
studios. That is why the appearance of a Walt Whitman or a Maxim
Gorki is so wholesome and air-clearing an event.

But not less salutary is the appearance of a ferocious aristocrat from
the class which has ridden rough-shod over the fields of submissive
actuality for many tyrannous centuries.

In the hard shrewd blows of a Maxim Gorki, the monopolising tribes
of sedentary dreamers receive their palpable hit, receive it from the
factory and the furrow. In the deadly knocks of a Guy de
Maupassant they get their "quietus" from the height, so to speak, of
the saddle of a sporting gentleman.

Do what they can to get the sharp bitter tang of reality into their
books, the bulk of these people, write they never so cleverly, seem
somehow to miss it.

The smell of that crafty old skunk--the genuine truth of
things--draws them forward through the reeds and rushes of the great dim
forests' edge, but they seldom touch the hide of t