*
So that the first duty of any man who is to write is
intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself
up for a leader in the minds of men; and he must see that
his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright.
Everything but prejudice should find a voice through him;
he should see the good in all things; where he has even a
fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be
wholly silent; and he should recognise from the first that
he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool
is sympathy.
*
Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of
a man's affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall
find faithfully paraded the quaintness and the power, the
triviality and the surprising freshness of the author's
fancy; there you shall find him outstripped in ready
symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially
invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact of
essential goodness, to be made in love with piety, the book
must be read and not the prints examined.
*
And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I
promised myself funds of entertainment: to take an admired
friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and
admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer
qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him
with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness,
and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these
in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin, such physical
surgery is, I think, a common way of 'making character';
perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.
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