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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to
destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who
cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily
papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at
least, some good.
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under
the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi
exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will
bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass,
it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are
always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit
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