“Well, then, there is such a thing as inspiration; most creative writers get a book in their minds, and can think of nothing else, day and night, while it is on.  The difficulty is to know what a writer is to do in the intervals between his books, and in the hours in which he is not writing.  He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do.  He can’t, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise.  Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant.  A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn’t writing.  He can’t afford to read very much—­at least he can’t afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style.  There is something horribly contagious about style, because it is often much easier to do a thing in someone else’s way than to do it in one’s own.  Pater was asked once if he had read Stevenson or Kipling, I forget which—­’Oh no, I daren’t!’ he said, ’I have peeped into him occasionally, but I can’t afford to read him.  I have learnt exactly how I can approach and develop a subject, and if I looked to see how he does it, I should soon lose my power.  The man with a style is debarred from reading fine books unless they are on lines entirely apart from his own.’  That is perfectly true, I expect.  There is nothing so dreadful as reading a writer whom one likes, and seeing that he has got deflected from his manner by reading some other craftsman.  The effect is a very subtle one.  If you really want to see that sort of sympathy at work, you should look at Ruskin’s letters—­his letters are deeply affected by the correspondent to whom he is writing.  If he wrote to Carlyle or to Browning, he wrote like Carlyle and Browning, because, as he wrote, they were strongly in his mind.

“With a painter or a musician it is different—­a lot of hand-work comes in which relieves the brain, so that they can work longer hours.  But a writer, as a rule, while he is writing, can’t even afford to talk very much to interesting people, because talking is hard work too.

“Well, then, a writer, as an artistic person, is rather easily bored.  He likes vivid sensations and emphatic preferences—­and it is not really good for him to be bored; a man may read the paper, write a few letters, stroll, garden, chatter—­but if he takes his writing seriously, he must somehow be fresh for it.  It isn’t easy to combine writing with any other occupation, and it leaves many hours unoccupied.

“Carlyle is a terrible instance, because he was wretched and depressed when he was not writing; he was melancholy, peevish, physically unwell; and when he was writing, he was wholly absorbed very impatient of his labour, and most intolerable.  Indeed, it does not look as if the home lives of writers have generally been very happy—­there is too often a patent conspiracy to keep the great irritable babyish giant amused—­and that’s a bad atmosphere for anyone to live in—­an unreal, a royal sort of atmosphere, of deferential scheming.”