Wherefore it is that all men of genius have been great workers. Even when, as has been observed in certain cases, they indulge in more or less protracted periods of idleness, they later make amends by an unusual industry; and, for that matter, their idleness often is more seeming than real, their minds being busied all the while with some baffling problem. Ardent, whole-souled absorption in the thing he has set himself to do—that, unquestionably, is a distinguishing characteristic of the man of genius. It is almost as if by instinct he labours hard to provide his subconsciousness with the data it must have in order to afford him, by way of recompense, those flashes of insight, those moments of “inspiration,” that mean acknowledged leadership among his fellow-men. I have already quoted Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of what his subconscious did for him. Let me now give his account of how he toiled to provide his subconscious with its working material. Never was there a man who strove more diligently and deliberately to attain success as an author; and this even while he was a student in college, where most of those who knew him thought that his chief occupation was “killing time.” As he tells us: “All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. When I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand, to write down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. “Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author—though I wished that, too—as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.... I worked in other ways, also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory. “This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me—so far as I have learned them at all—the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word; things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement.