nd reason why certain authors fail to find favour with the general
reader. In the case which Mr. Matthews seemed to be considering there
are authors who have every qualification for writing except that they
cannot write. Secondly, there are authors who, in the ordinary
literary sense of the term, can write, who have gathered knowledge and
formed seriously-grounded opinions about life, who are nevertheless so
out of touch with the broad, common interests of men that they
invariably fail to make a strong emotional or imaginative appeal.

Every reader is acquainted with the tiresome writer who has a great
deal to say but labours infinitely in the saying of it. In a crude,
energetic, excessively eulogised novel published in America a few
years ago--_Queed_--we were introduced to an economist engaged upon a
work so learned that he knew there were only three persons in America
capable of understanding it. There is, doubtless, something to be said
for an appreciative audience of three; but it is safe to assert that
even the exact sciences might be made more widely intelligible. I am,
however, thinking primarily of those studies which have some claim to
rank as literary studies. It is through literature that the historian,
the biographer, the sociologist, and the philosopher must make their
contributions to knowledge. Yet how much research and how much acute
thinking are wasted because the student has not the means of making
his subject alive for others, has not the reconstructive imagination
by means of which truth is communicated! It is because he cannot
write.

But this being able to write is not a matter of putting words and
clauses together with correctness and elegance. That much the mere
scholar generally understands, and it is because he thinks it
sufficient that he fails. What is wanted is a quality of mind which is
too often excluded from the specialist by his habit of thought. "A few
years of journalism," said Mr. W.B. Yeats on one occasion, "is an
invaluable discipline for the man of letters." No one is more fully
alive to the defects of journalism than Mr. Yeats--its frequent
looseness, prejudice, obviousness, and dissipation of interest. But,
in spite of that, he saw that the good journalist's faculty of
addressing himself directly to the subject in hand, of stating it
clearly and in its essentials without waste of words, of so escaping
his own particular mould of thought that he may be easily intelligible
to a