You have to give up your life to it—­and then that means giving up your life to a great deal of what looks like pure laziness—­loafing about, looking about, travelling, talking, mooning; that is the only way to learn proportion; and it is the only way, too, of learning what not to write about—­a great many things that are written about are not really material for writing at all.  And all this can’t be done in a drivelling mood—­you must pick your way if you are going to write.  That’s a long preface; but I mean this place to be a place to give men the right sort of start.  I happen to be able to teach people, more or less, how to write, if they have got the stuff in them—­and to be frank, I’m not sure that you have!  You think this would be a pleasant sort of experience—­so it can be; but it isn’t done on slack and chattering lines.  It is just meant to save people from hanging about at the start, a thing which spoils a lot of good writers.  But it’s deadly serious, and it isn’t a dilettante life at all.  Do you grasp all that?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I believe I can work!  I know I have wasted my time, but it was not because I wanted to waste time, but because the sort of things I have always had to do—­the classics—­always seemed to me so absolutely pointless.  No one who taught me ever distinguished between what was good and what was bad.  Whatever it was—­a Greek play, Homer, Livy, Tacitus—­it was always supposed to be the best thing of the kind.  I was always sure that much of it was rot, and some of it was excellent; but I didn’t know why, and no one ever told me why.”

“You thought all that?” said he.  “Well, that’s more hopeful!  Have you ever done any essay work?”

“Yes,” I said, “and that was the worst of all—­no one ever showed me how to do it in my own way, but always in some one else’s way.”

He sate a little in silence.  Then he said:  “But mind you, that’s not all!  I don’t think writing is the end of life.  The real point is to feel the things, to understand the business, to have ideas about life.  I don’t want people to learn how to write interestingly about things in which they are not interested—­but to be interested first, and then to write if they can.  I like to turn out a good writer, who can say what he feels and believes.  But I’m just as pleased when a man tells me that writing is rubbish, and that he is going away to do something real.  The real—­that’s what I care about!  I don’t want men to come and pick up grains of truth and reality, and work them into their stuff.  I have turned out a few men like that, and those are my worst failures.  You have got to care about ideas, if you come here, and to get the ideas into shape.  You have got to learn what is beautiful and what is not, because the only business of a real writer is with beauty—­not a sickly exotic sort of beauty, but the beauty of health and strength and generous feeling.  I can’t have any humbugs here, though I have sent out some humbugs.  It’s a hard life this, and a tiring life; though if you are the right sort of fellow, you will get plenty of fun out of it.  But we don’t waste time here; and if a man wastes time, out he goes.”