Walter Scott became a professional in the last years of his life, and for the noblest of reasons; but he also became a bad writer.  A good pair to contrast are Southey and Coleridge.  They began as amateurs.  Southey became a professional writer, and his sun set in the mists of valuable information.  Coleridge, as an amateur, enriched the language with a few priceless poems, and then got involved in the morass of dialectical metaphysics.  The point is whether a man writes simply because he cannot help it, or whether he writes to make an income.  The latter motive does not by any means prevent his doing first-rate artistic work—­indeed, there are certain persons who seem to have required the stimulus of necessity to make them break through an initial indolence of nature.  When Johnson found fault with Gray for having times of the year when he wrote more easily, from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, he added that a man could write at any time if he set himself doggedly to it.  True, no doubt!  But to write doggedly is not to court favourable conditions for artistic work.  It may be a finer sight for a moralist to see a man performing an appointed task heavily and faithfully, with grim tenacity, than it is to see an artist in a frenzy of delight dashing down an overpowering impression of beauty; but what has always hampered the British appreciation of literature is that we cannot disentangle the moral element from it:  we are interested in morals, not in art, and we require a dash of optimistic piety in all writing that we propose to enjoy.

The real question is whether, if a man sets himself doggedly to work, the appetite comes with eating, and whether the caged bird begins to flutter its wings and to send out the song that it learnt in the green heart of the wood.  When Byron said that easy writing made damned hard reading, he meant that careless conception and hasty workmanship tend to blur the pattern and the colour of work.  The fault of the amateur is that he can make the coat, but he cannot be bothered to make it fit.  But it is not by any means true that hard writing makes easy reading.  The spirit of the amateur is the spirit of the lover, who trembles at the thought that the delicate creature he loves may learn to love him in return, if he can but praise her worthily.  The professional spirit is the spirit in which a man carefully and courteously woos an elderly spinster for the sake of her comfortable fortune.  The amateur has an irresponsible joy in his work; he is like the golfer who dreams of mighty drives, and practises “putting” on his back lawn:  the professional writer gives his solid hours to his work in a conscientious spirit, and is glad in hours of freedom to put the tiresome business away.  Yet neither the amateur nor the professional can hope to capture the spirit of art by joy or faithfulness.  It is a kind of divine felicity, when all is said and done, the kindly gift of God.