arly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire."
An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be
confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of
any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning."

The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made"
as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has passed
into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or
were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in
combination with an individual gift of expression.

All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make
a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats
made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or
you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios,
whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary--granted, of course, the
gift of literary expression--is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to
yourself.

In really great writers--or, at all events, in those writings of theirs
by which they immortally exist--there is not one insincere word. The
perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to
be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or
at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection
with their deep-down selves.

All real writing has got to be lived before it is written--lived not
only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't
do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous
seas. Dante had to walk through hell before he could write of it, and
men today who would write either of hell or of heaven will never do it
by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the
country houses of the great.

On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call
"society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in
their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your
trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have
been unfortunately associated with them all your life. To write with
reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate
acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write
about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as
visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. S