that the greater portion of it is or has been written under pressure.
It was the case with Scott, the case with Dickens, Tennyson, even with
Browning, and a host of other great contributors to the edifice. No one
who loves Dickens and knows anything of the art he practised but
deplores that evil incessant demand that never permitted him to revise
his plans, to alter, rearrange and concentrate, that never released him
from the obligation to touch dull hearts and penetrate thick skins with
obtrusive pathos and violent caricature.

Once embarked upon his course, he never had a moment for
reconstruction. He had no time to read, no time to think. A writer
nowadays has to think in books and articles; to read a book he must
criticize or edit it; if he dare attempt an experiment, a new
departure, comes his agent in a panic. Every departure from the lines
of his previous success involves chaffering, unless he chance to be a
man of independent means. When one reflects on these things it is only
amazing that the average book is not more copious and crude and hasty
than it is, and how much in the way of comprehensive and unifying work
is even now in progress. There are all too many books to read. It would
be better for the public, better for our literature, altogether better,
if this obligation to write perpetually were lifted. Few writers but
must have felt at times the desire to stop and think, to work out some
neglected corner of their minds, to admit a year's work as futile and
thrust it behind the fire, or simply to lie fallow, to camp and rest
the horses. Let us, therefore, pay our authors as much not to write as
though they wrote; instead of that twenty or thirty volumes, which is,
I suppose, the average product, let us require a book or so, worth
having. Which means, in fact, that we must find some way of giving an
author, once he has proved his quality, a fixed income quite
irrespective of what he does. We might, perhaps, require evidence that