This reduction would, I suspect, be welcomed by every one except the gagged writers; but as the idea of its being operative is too chimerical for us to entertain it, and as the purpose of these pages is to expound the principles of success and failure, not to make Quixotic onslaughts on the windmills of stupidity and conceit, I answer my young interrogator:  “Take warning and do not write.  Unless you believe in yourself, only noodles will believe in you, and they but tepidly.  If your experience seems trivial to you, it must seem trivial to us.  If your thoughts are not fervid convictions, or sincere doubts, they will not have the power of convictions and doubts.  To believe in yourself is the first step; to proclaim your belief the next.  You cannot assume the power of another.  No jay becomes an eagle by borrowing a few eagle feathers.  It is true that your sincerity will not be a guarantee of power.  You may believe that to be important and novel which we all recognise as trivial and old.  You may be a madman, and believe yourself a prophet.  You may be a mere echo, and believe yourself a voice.  These are among the delusions against which none of us are protected.  But if Sincerity is not necessarily a guarantee of power, it is a necessary condition of power, and no genius or prophet can exist without it.”

“The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton,” says Emerson, “is that they set at nought books and traditions, and spoke not what men thought, but what they thought.  A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within; more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”  It is strange that any one who has recognised the individuality of all works of lasting influence, should not also recognise the fact that his own individuality ought to be steadfastly preserved.  As Emerson says in continuation, “Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.  They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impressions with good-humoured inflexibility, then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.  Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense, precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our opinion from another.”  Accepting the opinions of another and the tastes of another is very different from agreement in opinion and taste.  Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.  Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crochet-monger and an eccentric.  Whether the public will feel its truth and beauty at once, or after long years, or never cease to regard it as paradox and ugliness, no man can foresee; enough for you to know that you have done your best, have been true to yourself, and that the utmost power inherent in your work has been displayed.