increase at the same ratio. Progress should not be made
in the faculty of expression alone,--progress at the same time should be
made in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds.
Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a short
time the man feels that he has expressed himself,--that now he can only
more or less dexterously repeat himself,--more or less prettily become
his own echo. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing;
but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the
only thing he has acquired,--when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he
has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests
vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life in
which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no
satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not
create,--he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at once
become "a base mechanical," and his successes are not much higher than
the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer. This want of proper
relationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, or
subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slight
suspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the best
authors. It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literary
life. Frequently a man's first book is good, and all his after
productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first. The
men who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines. A
man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as
to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar
bitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells us that, after one of his
early interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the Natural
Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. "I sat down to the task shortly
afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined to
make clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of a
mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and,
after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions,
apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in
which I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up the
attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency