But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to develop himself; and his earning of money and his intellectual development should proceed simultaneously and in proportionate degrees.  Herein lies the main difficulty of the literary life.  Out of his thought the man must bring fire, food, clothing; and fire, food, clothing must in their turns subserve thought.  It is necessary, for the proper conduct of such a life, that while the balance at the banker’s increases, intellectual resource should increase at the same ratio.  Progress should not be made in the faculty of expression alone,—­progress at the same time should be made in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds.  Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a short time the man feels that he has expressed himself,—­that now he can only more or less dexterously repeat himself,—­more or less prettily become his own echo.  It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing; but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the only thing he has acquired,—­when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he has striven to acquire.  Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint.  In the life in which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort.  The man does not create,—­he is only desperately keeping up appearances.  He has at once become “a base mechanical,” and his successes are not much higher than the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer.  This want of proper relationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, or subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slight suspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the best authors.  It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literary life.  Frequently a man’s first book is good, and all his after productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first.  The men who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines.  A man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar bitters of the literary life.  Hazlitt tells us that, after one of his early interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind.  “I sat down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined to make clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and, after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up the attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency on the blank unfinished paper.  I can write fast