Essays in the Art of Writing

The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature ha...

This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the four great elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson be...

_Goethe’s Life_, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first fell into my hands—a strange instance of the partiality of man’s good and man’s evil. I know no one whom I...

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more non...

PAGE On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature 3 The Morality of the Profession of Letters 47 Books which have Influenced Me 75 A Note on Realism 93 My First Book: ‘Trea...

Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following pages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a native; and there are few things more strange, mo...