In this I know that I am sadly and darkly
wrong--the prudent coldness, the fear of sorrow pulls me back;
irresolute, cowardly, base! Yet even so I must trust the Hand that
moulded me, and the Will that bade me be, just so and not
otherwise.
June 4, 1889.
It is a melancholy reflection how very little the highest and most
elaborate culture effects in the direction of producing creative
and original writing. Very few indeed of our great writers have
been technically cultivated men. How little we look to the
Universities, where a lifetime devoted to the study of the nuances
of classical expression is considered well spent, for any
literature which either raises the intellectual temperature or
enriches the blood of the world! The fact is that the highly-
cultivated man tends to find himself mentally hampered by his
cultivation, to wade in a sea of glue, as Tennyson said. It is
partly that highly-cultivated minds grow to be subservient to
authority, and to contemn experiment as rash and obstreperous.
Partly also the least movement of the mind dislodges such a pile of
precedents and phrases and aphorisms, stored and amassed by
diligent reading, that the mind is encumbered by the thought that
most things worth saying have been so beautifully said that
repetition is out of the question.
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