Daily Inspiration Quote by James Payn

Payn opens with a small, civilized complaint and uses it to puncture a larger pretension: that literary culture is an endlessly stocked pantry where even the garnish (a title) comes effortlessly. The line performs a neat reversal. “One would think” invokes the confident voice of common sense and salon chatter, the assumption that writing about “literary men and matters” should be the easiest game in town. Then Payn coolly confesses the opposite: the trouble isn’t too many options, it’s the stubborn scarcity of the right one.

The subtext is professional and faintly adversarial. He’s warning that the apparatus of criticism - essays, profiles, appreciations - isn’t automatically fed by genius or gossip. Even in a world crowded with authors, “literary men” don’t readily compress into a label that’s honest, marketable, and clever. That’s the sly jab: literary discourse loves to posture as abundant, but it’s often repetitive, derivative, and dependent on packaging. The title becomes a metonym for the whole enterprise of commentary, where originality is demanded most at the level of presentation.

Context matters. Payn wrote in a late-Victorian ecosystem of magazines and serialized culture where essays were consumer goods and titles were ads in miniature. His mild “embarrassment” is doing double duty: a genteel admission of craft difficulty and a wry critique of the era’s faith that literature is inexhaustible content. What makes it work is its humility with teeth - an unshowy, almost conversational irony that turns a trivial problem into a diagnosis of how cultural writing sells itself.