Captain Shannon by Coulson Kernahan

The striking of that fusee was a critical moment in my life, for before the thing had hissed itself into a black and crackling cinder I had decided to follow up the clue which had been so strangely thrown in my way. My principal reason for so deciding was that I wanted a rest -- the rest of a change of occupation, not the rest of inaction. I am by profession what George Borrow would have called "one of the writing fellows. " But, much as I love my craft, and generous and large-hearted as I have always found literary men -- at all events, large-brained literary men -- to be, I cannot profess much admiration for the fussy folk who seem to imagine that God made our world and the infinite worlds around it, life and death, and the human heart, with its joys and sorrows and hope of immortality, for no other reason than that they should have something to write about.

Instead of recognising that it is only life and the unintelligible mystery of life which make literature of any consequence, they seem to fancy that literature is the chief concern and end of man's being. As a matter of fact, literature is to life what a dog's tail is to his body -- a very valuable _appendage_; but the dog must wag the tail, not the tail the dog, as some of these gentry would have us to believe. The dog could, at a pinch, make shift to do without the tail, but the tail could under no circumstances do without the dog.