with the conventional counters. Yet what a refreshment it is to
meet with a perfectly sincere person, who makes you feel that you
are in real contact with a human being! This is what we ought to
aim at in writing: at a perfectly sincere presentment of our
thoughts. We cannot, of course, all of us hope to have views upon
art, upon theology, upon politics, upon education, because we may
not have any experience in these subjects; but we have all of us
experience in life, in nature, in emotion, in religion; and to
express what we feel, as sincerely as we can, is certainly useful
to ourselves, because it clears our view, leads us not to confuse
hopes with certainties, enables us to disentangle what we really
believe from what we conventionally adopt.

Of course this cannot be done all at once; when we first begin to
write, we find how difficult it is to keep the thread of our
thoughts; we keep turning out of the main road to explore
attractive by-paths; we cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who
produce original work pass through a stage in which they are
conscious of a throng of kindred notions, all more or less bearing
on the central thought, but the movements of which they cannot
wholly control. Their thoughts are like a turbulent crowd, and
one's business is to drill them into an ordered regiment. A writer
has to pass through a certain apprenticeship; and the cure for this
natural vagueness is to choose small precise subjects, to say all
that we have in our minds about them, and to stop when we have
finished; not to aim at fine writing, but at definiteness and
clearness.

I suppose people arrive at their end in different ways; but my own
belief is that, in writing, one cannot do much by correction. I