Kai Lung’s Golden Hours

Man is born to make. His business is to construct, to plan, to carry out the plan, to fit together, and to produce a finished thing. That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other is the art of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral, and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed. The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence : that a piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition.