This
vigilance may render Literature more laborious; but no one ever
supposed that success was to be had on easy terms; and if you only
write one sincere page where you might have written twenty insincere
pages, the one page is worth writing--it is Literature.
Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less
difficult than is commonly supposed. To take a trifling example: If for
some reason I cannot, or do not, choose to verify a quotation which may
be useful to my purpose, what is to prevent my saying that the
quotation is taken at second-hand? It is true, if my quotations are for
the most part second-hand and are acknowledged as such, my erudition
will appear scanty. But it will only appear what it is. Why should I
pretend to an erudition which is not mine? Sincerity forbids it.
Prudence whispers that the pretence is, after all, vain, because those,
and those alone, who can rightly estimate erudition will infallibly
detect my pretence, whereas those whom I have deceived were not worth
deceiving. Yet in spite of Sincerity and Prudence, how shamelessly men
compile second-hand references, and display in borrowed footnotes a
pretence of labour and of accuracy! I mention this merely to show how,
even in the humbler class of compilers, the Principle of Sincerity may
find fit illustrations, and how honest work, even in references,
belongs to the same category as honest work in philosophy or poetry.
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