asily won praises, and
would rather judge, taste, and abstain from producing, than remain below
their conception and themselves. Or if they write it is by fragments,
for themselves only, at long intervals and at rare moments. Their
fecundity is internal, and known to few.

3. Lastly, there is a third class of minds more powerful and less
delicate or difficult to please, who go on producing and publishing
themselves without being too much dissatisfied with their work.

The majority of our active painters and writers, who fill modern
exhibitions, and produce the current literature of the day, belong to
the last class, to which we are all greatly indebted for the daily bread
of literature and art.

But Sainte-Beuve believed that Joubert belonged to the second class, and
I suspect that both Sainte-Beuve and many others have credited that
class with a potential productiveness beyond its real endowments. Minds
of the Joubert class are admirable and valuable in their way, but they
are really, and not apparently, sterile.

And why would we have it otherwise? When we lament that a man of culture
has "done nothing," as we say, we mean that he has not written books. Is
it necessary, is it desirable, that every cultivated person should write
books?

On the contrary, it seems that a more perfect intellectual life may be
attained by the silent student than by authors. The writer for the
public is often so far its slave that he is compelled by necessity or
induced by the desire for success (since it is humiliating to write
unsaleable books as well as unprofitable) to deviate from his true path,
to leave the subjects that most interest him for other subjects which
interest him less, and therefore to acquire knowledge rather as a matter
of business than as a labor of love. But the student who never
publishes, and does not intend to publish, may follow his own genius and
take the knowledge which belongs to him by natural affinity. Add to this
the immense saving of time effected by abstinence from writing. Whilst
the writer is polishing his periods, and giving hours to the artistic
exigencies of mere form, the reader is adding to his knowledge.
Thackeray said that writers were not great readers, because they had not
the time.

The most studious Frenchman I ever met with used to say that he so hated
the pen as scarcely to resolve to write a letter. He reminded me of
Joubert in this; he often said, "J'ai horreur de la plume." Since h