believe that the best way to arrive at lucidity is by incessant
practice; we must be content to abandon and sacrifice faulty
manuscripts altogether; we ought not to fret over them and rewrite
them. The two things that I have found to be of infinite service to
myself, in learning to write prose, have been keeping a full diary,
and writing poetry. The habit of diarizing is easily acquired, and
as soon as it becomes habitual, the day is no more complete without
it than it is complete without a cold bath and regular meals.
People say that they have not time to keep a diary; but they would
never say that they had not time to take a bath or to have their
meals. A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements;
it should aim rather at giving a salient account of some particular
episode, a walk, a book, a conversation. It is a practice which
brings its own reward in many ways; it is a singularly delightful
thing to look at old diaries, to see how one was occupied, say, ten
years ago; what one was reading, the people one was meeting, one's
earlier point of view. And then, further, as I have said, it has
the immense advantage of developing style; the subjects are ready
to hand; and one may learn, by diarizing, the art of sincere and
frank expression.

And then there is the practice of writing poetry; there are certain
years in the life of most people with a literary temperament, when
poetry seems the most natural and desirable mode of self-
expression. This impulse should be freely yielded to. The poetry
need not be very good; I have no illusions, for instance, as to the
merits of my own; but it gives one a copious vocabulary, it teaches
the art of poise, of cadence, of choice in words, of
picturesqueness. There comes a time when one abandons poetry, or is
abandoned by it; and, after all, prose is the most real and natural