I hear
some one of my young readers exclaim against the disheartening tendency
of what is here said. Ambitious of success, and conscious that he has
no great resources within his own experience, he shrinks from the idea
of being thrown upon his naked faculty and limited resources, when he
feels himself capable of dexterously using the resources of others, and
so producing an effective work. "Why," he asks, "must I confine myself
to my own small experience, when I feel persuaded that it will interest
no one? Why express the opinions to which my own investigations have
led me when I suspect that they are incomplete, perhaps altogether
erroneous, and when I know that they will not be popular because they
are unlike those which have hitherto found favour? Your restrictions
would reduce two-thirds of our writers to silence!"
This reduction would, I suspect, be welcomed by every one except the
gagged writers; but as the idea of its being operative is too
chimerical for us to entertain it, and as the purpose of these pages is
to expound the principles of success and failure, not to make Quixotic
onslaughts on the windmills of stupidity and conceit, I answer my young
interrogator: "Take warning and do not write.
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