"Mental Efficiency And Other Hints to Men and Women"

Herein lies one of the great obstacles to mental efficiency. Tell a man that he should join a memory class, and he will hum and haw, and say, as I have already remarked, that memory isn't everything; and, in short, he won't join the memory class, partly from indolence, I grant, but more from false shame. (Is not this true?) He will even hesitate about learning things by heart.

Yet there are few mental exercises better than learning great poetry or prose by heart. Twenty lines a week for six months: what a cure for debility! The chief, but not the only, merit of learning by heart as an exercise is that it compels the mind to concentrate.

And the most important preliminary to self-development is the faculty of concentrating at will. Another excellent exercise is to read a page of no matter-what, and then immediately to write down-- in one's own words or in the author's -- one's full recollection of it. A quarter of an hour a day! No more! And it works like magic.

This brings me to the department of writing. I am a writer by profession; but I do not think I have any prejudices in favour of the exercise of writing. Indeed, I say to myself every morning that if there is one exercise in the world which I hate, it is the exercise of writing.

But I must assert that in my opinion the exercise of writing is an indispensable part of any genuine effort towards mental efficiency.

I don't care much what you write, so long as you compose sentences and achieve continuity. There are forty ways of writing in an unprofessional manner, and they are all good. You may keep a full diary," as Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson says he does. This is one of the least good ways.

Diaries, save in experienced hands like those of Mr. Benson, are apt to get themselves done with the very minimum of mental effort.

They also tend to an exaggeration of egotism, and if they are left lying about they tend to strife. Further, one never knows when one may not be compelled to produce them in a court of law.

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