parody Lincoln on Grant's whisky-drinking; you remember, when critics informed him that his commander was habitually soaked in whisky he inquired: "What brand? I want to send some to my other generals." My first impulse is brutally to ejaculate: "Would that more of our authors were ill!" But one must be serious and sober, and one must admit that here is a subject that asks a little threshing-out. What is the relation of disease, particularly tuberculosis, to the development of literary talent? Does it affect one's vision of life in such fashion as to invalidate the vision?
A night or so ago I was sitting before a fire with a robust and sanguine friend who, like myself, restricts a physical strength adequate for a lumberjack, adequate for driving logs through the rocks of a foaming river, to driving a little fountain pen over sheets of smooth white paper. We were full of the summer, full of the delight of not even trying to think, full of remembered pleasure in making something with our hands and in going somewhere with our feet—the sweet, heavy thoughtless monotony of building stone walls all day long in a country garden, the joyous, thoughtless effectiveness of swinging an ax in the woods and such entirely satisfying activities as swimming, canoeing and tennis.
"The ideal human life," I said, "is in some physical action which one has just brains enough to perform." "Yes," agreed my literary friend, and he began to brag of the beauty of his garden tools and of the glorious workmanship and singing rhythm of a scythe. "I am convinced," he concluded, "that no one takes to writing who hasn't something physically or mentally the matter with him." We were in precisely the mood, you see, to be impressed by recollection that Powys and
