truth, he tosses between the alternatives of self-grandeur and self-disgust.  It is a painful matter, this endless self-scrutiny.  We are all familiar with the addled ego of literature—­the writer whom constant self-communion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain.  And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up.  The discipline of living is a fine cooling-jacket for the engine.

It is essential for our apprentice to remember that, though he begin with the vilest hack-work—­writing scoffing paragraphs, or advertising pamphlets, or freelance snippets for the papers—­that even in hack-work quality shows itself to those competent to judge; and he need not always subdue his gold to the lead in which he works.  Moreover, conscience and instinct are surprisingly true and sane.  If he follows the suggestions of his own inward, he will generally be right.  Moreover again, no one can help him as much as he can help himself.  There is no job in the writing world that he cannot have if he really wants it.  Writing about something he intimately knows is a sound principle.  Hugh Walpole, that greatly gifted novelist, taught school after leaving Cambridge, and very sensibly began by writing about school-teaching.  If you care to see how well he did it, read “The Gods and Mr. Perrin.”  I would propose this test to the would-be writer:  Does he feel, honestly, that he could write as convincingly about his own tract of life (whatever it may be) as Walpole wrote about that boys’ school?  If so, he has a true vocation for literature.

The first and most necessary equipment of any writer, be he reporter, advertising copy-man, poet, or historian, is swift, lively, accurate observation.  And since consciousness is a rapid, shallow river which we can only rarely dam up deep enough to go swimming and take our ease, it is his positive need (unless he is a genius who can afford to let drift away much of his only source of gold) to keep a note-book handy for the sieving and skimming of this running stream.  Samuel Butler has good advice on this topic.  Of ideas, he says, you must throw salt on their tails or they fly away and you never see their bright plumage again.  Poems, stories, epigrams, all the happiest freaks of the mind, flit by on wings and at haphazard instants.  They must be caught in air.  In this respect one thinks American writers ought to have an advantage over English, for American trousers are made with hip-pockets, in which a small note-book may so comfortably caress the natural curvature of man.