The Too Ready Writer - Page 2

were a needed preliminary to
discussion, get a man the reputation of being a conceited bore in
conversation, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself in
print? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, and
there is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else other
fellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of delivering
themselves; but the exorbitant writer can occupy space and spread over
it the more or less agreeable flavour of his mind in four "mediums" at
once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such restless and
versatile occupants of literary space and time should have lived earlier
when the world wanted summaries of all extant knowledge, and this
knowledge being small, there was the more room for commentary and
conjecture. They might have played the part of an Isidor of Seville or a
Vincent of Beauvais brilliantly, and the willingness to write everything
themselves would have been strictly in place. In the present day, the
busy retailer of other people's knowledge which he has spoiled in the
handling, the restless guesser and commentator, the importunate hawker
of undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word-compeller who rises
early in the morning to praise what the world has already glorified, or
makes himself haggard at night in writing out his dissent from what
nobody ever believed, is not simply "gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil
agens"--he is an obstruction. Like an incompetent architect with too
much interest at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered work where
place ought to have been left to better men.

Is it out of the question that we should entertain some scruple about
mixing our own flavour, as of the too cheap and insistent nutmeg, with
that of every great writer and every great subject?--especially when our
flavour is all we have to give, the matter or knowledge having been
already given by somebody else. What if we were only like the Spanish
wine-skins which impress the innocent stranger with the notion that the
Spanish grape has naturally a taste of leather? One could wish that even
the greatest minds should leave some themes unhandled, or at least leave
us no more than a paragraph or two on them to show how well they did in
not being more lengthy.

Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected from the young; but
happily their readiness to mirror the universe anew for the rest of
mankind is not encouraged by easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin I
have often seen the image of my early youth, when it seemed to me
astonishing that the philosophers had left so many difficulties
unsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no great poet to
treat them. I had an elated sense that I