Flynt had no sense of style, and when he began to try to write down what he had seen and what he thought of it, the first result was at once tedious and formal, the life all gone out of what had so literally been lived. I was a fierce critic, and drove and worried him to be natural in his writing, to write as he would talk, in a dry, curt, often ironical way. His danger in writing was to be too literal for art and not quite literal enough for science. He was too completely absorbed in people and things to be able ever to get aloof from them; and to write well of what one has done and seen one must be able to get aloof from oneself and from others. If ever a man loved wandering for its own sake it was George Borrow; but George Borrow had a serious and whimsical brain always at work, twisting the things that he saw into shapes that pleased him more than the shapes of the things in themselves. I tried to get Flynt to read Borrow, but books were of little use to him. He did finally succeed in saying more or less straightforwardly what he wanted to say, but his work will remain a human document, of value in itself, behind which one can divine only a part of the whole man. There was far more in his mind, his sensations were far subtler, his curiosity was more odd and rare, than any one who did not know him will ever recognize from his writing. His life was a marvelous invention: he created it in action, and the words in which he put it down are only a kind of commentary, or footnote to it. Human curiosity: that made up the main part of Flynt's nature; and with it went the desire to find out everything by trying it, not merely by observing. None of the great wanderers of letters, Borrow or Stevenson, was so really a born vagabond; none had so little in the way of second thoughts behind him on his way through the world. The spectacle, the material, all that was so much to these artists, was to him only so much negligible quantity, an outer covering which he had to get through. He went to see Tolstoy in Russia, and was taken into his house, and digged in his garden. He went to see Ibsen at Munich. To neither did he go for anything but that for which he went to the tramps and convicts: to find out what sort of human beings they were at close quarters.