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.

It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect
construction. We write to establish a record for a few days: or to
send a thousand unimportant messages: or to express for others or for
ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of
emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot
command it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings,
for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner;
every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff. But when a man sets
out to write as a serious business, proclaiming that by the nature of
his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks
worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to
whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible.

Yet, I say, the great mass of men to-day do not attempt it in the
English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their
slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book
at random, say at once: "This is the voice of such and such a one." It
is no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel.

Therefore in such a time as that of our decline, to come across work