The phrase “to make a name” has become so dulled with long usage that it is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for.  What it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging their names—­names given them originally haphazard, as names are given to all of us—­with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that belonging to the commonest noun.  The name “Byron” has a meaning as clear and unmistakable as the word “mutton.”  The words “dog” and “cat” have a meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name “Burns” or “Voltaire.”  An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be confused with Spenser.  If we say “Coleridge,” there is no possibility of any one thinking that perhaps we meant “Browning.”

The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably “made” as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor.  Sincere, intense life has passed into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in combination with an individual gift of expression.

All names that are really “made” are made in the same way.  You may make a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon.  Or you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, whist, and roast pig.  All that is necessary—­granted, of course, the gift of literary expression—­is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to yourself.

In really great writers—­or, at all events, in those writings of theirs by which they immortally exist—­there is not one insincere word.  The perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection with their deep-down selves.

All real writing has got to be lived before it is written—­lived not only once or twice, but lived over and over again.  Mere reporting won’t do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous seas.  Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the country houses of the great.

On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call “society,” those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have been unfortunately associated with them all your life.  To write with reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic.  Those who would write about the depths