Twenty-nine
I have always been a bookman. From adolescence books have been one of my passions. Books not merely—and perhaps not chiefly—as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, are capable of really agitating me.
[29]
March
One
It is characteristic of the literary artist with a genuine vocation that his large desire is, not to express in words any particular thing, but to express himself, the sum of his sensations. He feels the vague, disturbing impulse to write long before he has chosen his first subject from the thousands of subjects which present themselves, and which in the future he is destined to attack.
Two
In the mental world what counts is not numbers but co-ordination.
Three
In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers: and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform.