THE TRUTH ABOUT
AN AUTHOR

NEW EDITION WITH PREFACE

BY

ARNOLD BENNETT

Author of "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day,"
"The Old Wives' Tale," etc.

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1911
By George H. Doran Company

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

Sometime in the last century I was for several years one of the most regular contributors to "The Academy," under the editorship of Mr. Lewis Hind and the ownership of Mr. Morgan Richards. The work was constant; but the pay was bad, as it too often is where a paper has ideals. I well remember the day when, by dint of amicable menaces, I got the rate raised in my favor from ten to fifteen shillings a column, with a minimum of two guineas an article for exposing the fatuity of popular idols. One evening I met Mr. Lewis Hind at the first performance of some very important play, whose name I forget, in the stalls of some theatre whose name I forget. (However, the theatre has since been demolished.) We began to talk about the "Academy", and as I was an editor myself, I felt justified in offering a little advice to a fellow-creature. "What you want in the 'Academy,'" I said, "is a sensational serial." "Yes, I know," he replied, with that careful laziness of tone which used to mark his more profound utterances, "and I should like you to write your literary autobiography for us!" In this singular manner was the notion of the following book first presented to me. It was not in the least my own notion.

I began to write the opening chapters immediately, for I was fascinated by this opportunity to tell the truth about the literary life, and my impatience would not wait. I had been earning a living by my pen for a number of years, and my experience of the business did not at all correspond with anything that I had ever read in print about the literary life, whether optimistic or pessimistic. I took a malicious and frigid pleasure, as I always do, in setting down facts which are opposed to accepted sentimental falsities; and certainly I did not spare myself. It did not occur to me, even in the midst of my immense conceit, to spare myself. But even had I been tempted to spare myself I should not have done so, because there is no surer way of damping the reader's interest than to spare oneself in a recital which concerns oneself.

The sensational serial ran in "The Academy" for about three months, but I had written it all in the spare hours of a very much shorter period than that. It was issued anonymously, partly from discretion, and partly in the hope that the London world of letters would indulge in conjecture as to its authorship, which in theory was to be kept a dark secret. The London world of letters, however, did nothing of the kind. Everybody who had any interest in such a matter seemed to know at once the name of the author. Mr. Andrew Chatto, whose acquaintance I made just then, assured me that he was certain of the authorship of the first article, on stylistic evidence; and I found him tearing out the pages of the "Academy" and keeping them. I found also a number of other people doing the same. In fact I do not exaggerate in saying that the success of the serial was terrific—among about a hundred people. It happened to me to see quite sane and sober writing persons gurgle with joy over the mere recollection of sundry scenes in my autobiography. But Mr. Andrew Chatto, an expert of immense experience, gave me his opinion, with perhaps even more than his customary blandness, that the public would have no use for my autobiography. I could scarcely adopt his view. It seemed to me impossible that so honest a disclosure, which had caused such unholy joy in some of the most weary hearts that London contains, should pass unheeded by a more general public.

Mr. Andrew Chatto did not publish this particular book of mine. I cannot remember if it was offered to him. But I know that it was offered to sundry other publishers before at last it found a sponsor. There was no wild competition for it, and there was no excitement in the press when it appeared. On the other hand, there was a great deal of excitement among my friends. The book divided my friends into two camps. A few were extraordinarily enthusiastic and delighted. But the majority were shocked. Some—and among these the most intimate and beloved—were so shocked that they could not bear to speak to me about the book, and to this day have never mentioned it to me. Frankly, I was startled. I suppose the book was too true. Many fine souls can only take the truth in very small doses, when it is the truth about some one or something they love. One of my friends—nevertheless a realistic novelist of high rank—declined to credit that I had been painting myself; he insisted on treating the central character as fictional, while admitting the events described were factual.

The reviews varied from the flaccid indifferent to the ferocious. No other book of mine ever had such a bad press, or anything like such a bad press. Why respectable and dignified organs should have been moved to fury by the publication of a work whose veracity cannot be impugned, I have never been quite able to understand; for I attacked no financial interests; I did not attack any interest; I merely destroyed a few illusions and make-believes. Yet such organs as "The Athenaeum" and "Blackwood's" dragged forward their heaviest artillery against the anonymous author. In its most virulent days "Blackwood's" could scarcely have been more murderous. Its remarks upon me will bear comparison even with its notorious attack, by the same well-known hand, on Mr. Bernard Shaw. I had, of course, ample opportunities for adjusting the balance between myself and the well-known hand, which opportunities I did not entirely neglect. Also I was convinced that the time had arrived for avowing the authorship, and I immediately included the book in the official list of my publications. Till then the dark secret had only once been divulged in the press—by Sir W. Robertson Nicoll. But this journalist, whose interest in the literary life is probably unsurpassed, refrained from any criticism.

I have purposely forgotten the number of copies sold. It was the smallest in my experience of infinitesimal numbers. In due season the publishers—to my regret, and conceivably now to theirs—'remaindered' the poor red-and-green volume. And The Times Book Club, having apparently become possessed of a large stock of the work, offered it, with my name but without my authority, at a really low price. I think the first bargain was fivepence, but later sixpence was demanded. As The Times Book Club steadily continued to advertise the book, I suppose that at sixpence it must have had quite a vogue. At any rate it has been quoted from with more freedom than any other book of mine, and has indeed obviously formed the basis of dozens of articles—especially in the United States—of which the writers have omitted to offer me any share in their remuneration. I have myself bought copies of it at as high as a shilling a piece, as a speculation. And now here, after about a dozen years, is a new edition, reproducing word for word the original text in all its ingenuous self-complacency.

I

I who now reside permanently on that curious fourth-dimensional planet which we call the literary world; I, who follow the incredible parasitic trade of talking about what people have done, who am a sort of public weighing-machine upon which bookish wares must halt before passing from the factory to the consumer; I, who habitually think in articles, who exist by phrases; I, who seize life at the pen's point and callously wrest from it the material which I torture into confections styled essays, short stories, novels, and plays; who perceive in passion chiefly a theme, and in tragedy chiefly a "situation"; who am so morbidly avaricious of beauty that I insist on finding it where even it is not; I, in short, who have been victimized to the last degree by a literary temperament, and glory in my victimhood, am going to trace as well as I can the phenomena of the development of that idiosyncrasy from its inception to such maturity as it has attained. To explain it, to explain it away, I shall make no attempt; I know that I cannot. I lived for a quarter of a century without guessing that I came under the category of Max Nordau's polysyllabic accusations; the trifling foolish mental discipline which stands to my credit was obtained in science schools, examination rooms, and law offices. I grew into a good man of business; and my knowledge of affairs, my faculty for the nice conduct of negotiations, my skill in suggesting an escape from a dilemma, were often employed to serve the many artists among whom, by a sheer and highly improbable accident, I was thrown. While sincerely admiring and appreciating these people, in another way I condescended to them as beings apart and peculiar, and unable to take care of themselves on the asphalt of cities; I felt towards them as a policeman at a crossing feels towards pedestrians. Proud of my hard, cool head, I used to twit them upon the disadvantages of possessing an artistic temperament. Then, one day, one of them retorted: "You've got it as badly as any of us, if you only knew it." I laughed tolerantly at the remark, but it was like a thunderclap in my ears, a sudden and disconcerting revelation. Was I, too, an artist? I lay awake at night asking myself this question. Something hitherto dormant stirred mysteriously in me; something apparently foreign awoke in my hard, cool head, and a duality henceforth existed there. On a certain memorable day I saw tears in the eyes of a woman as she read some verses which, with journalistic versatility, I had written to the order of a musical composer. I walked straight out into the street, my heart beating like a horrid metronome. Am I an artist? I demanded; and the egotist replied: Can you doubt it?

From that moment I tacitly assumed a quite new set of possibilities, and deliberately ordered the old ruse self to exploit the self just born. And so, by encouragement and fostering, by intuition and imitation, and perhaps affectation, I gradually became the thing I am, the djinn that performs tricks with, some emotions, a pen, and paper. And now, having shadowed forth the tale, as Browning did in the prologue to The Ring and the Book, I will proceed to amplify it.

II

My dealings with literature go back, I suppose, some thirty and three years. We came together thus, literature and I. It was in a kitchen at midday, and I was waiting for my dinner, hungry and clean, in a tartan frock with a pinafore over it. I had washed my own face, and dried it, and I remember that my eyes smarted with lingering soap, and my skin was drawn by the evaporation of moisture on a cold day. I held in my hand a single leaf which had escaped from a printed book. How it came into that chubby fist I cannot recall. The reminiscence begins with it already there. I gazed hard at the paper, and pretended with all my powers to be completely absorbed in its contents; I pretended to ignore some one who was rattling saucepans at the kitchen range. On my left a very long and mysterious passage led to a pawnshop all full of black bundles. I heard my brother crying at the other end of the passage, and his noisy naughtiness offended me. For myself, I felt excessively "good" with my paper; never since have I been so filled with the sense of perfect righteousness. Here was I, clean, quiet, sedate, studious; and there was my brother, the illiterate young Hooligan, disturbing the sacrosanct shop, and—what was worse—ignorant of his inferiority to me. Disgusted with him, I passed through the kitchen into another shop on the right, still conning the page with soapy, smarting eyes. At this point the light of memory is switched off. The printed matter, which sprang out of nothingness, vanishes back into the same.

I could not read, I could not distinguish one letter from another. I only knew that the signs and wonders constituted print, and I played at reading with intense earnestness. I actually felt learned, serious, wise, and competently superior, something like George Meredith's "Dr. Middleton." Would that I could identify this my very first literature! I review three or four hundred books annually now;[1] out of crass, saccharine, sentimentality, I would give a year's harvest for the volume from which that leaf was torn, nay, for the leaf alone, as though it might be a Caxton. I remember that the paper was faintly bluish in tint, veined, and rather brittle. The book was probably printed in the eighteenth century. Perhaps it was Lavater's Physiognomy or Blair's Sermons, or Burnet's Own Time. One of these three, I fancy, it must surely have been.

After the miraculous appearance and disappearance of that torn leaf, I remember almost nothing of literature for several years. I was six or so when The Ugly Duckling aroused in me the melancholy of life, gave me to see the deep sadness which pervades all romance, beauty, and adventure. I laughed heartily at the old henbird's wise remark that the world extended past the next field and much further; I could perceive the humour of that. But when the ugly duckling at last flew away on his strong pinions, and when he met the swans and was accepted as an equal, then I felt sorrowful, agreeably sorrowful. It seemed to me that nothing could undo, atone for, the grief and humiliations of the false duckling's early youth. I brooded over the injustice of his misfortunes for days, and the swans who welcomed him struck me as proud, cold, and supercilious in their politeness. I have never read The Ugly Duckling since those days. It survives in my memory as a long and complex narrative, crowded with vague and mysterious allusions, and wet with the tears of things. No novel—it was a prodigious novel for me—has more deliciously disturbed me, not even "On the Eve" or "Lost Illusions." Two years later I read "Hiawatha." The picture which I formed of Minnehaha remains vividly and crudely with me; it resembles a simpering waxen doll of austere habit. Nothing else can I recall of "Hiawatha," save odd lines, and a few names such as Gitchee-Gumee. I did not much care for the tale. Soon after I read it, I see a vision of a jolly-faced house-painter graining a door. "What do you call that?" I asked him, pointing to some very peculiar piece of graining, and he replied, gravely: "That, young sir, is a wigwam to wind the moon up with." I privately decided that he must have read, not "Hiawatha," but something similar and stranger, something even more wig-wammy. I dared not question him further, because he was so witty.

I remember no other literature for years. But at the age of eleven I became an author. I was at school under a master who was entirely at the mercy of the new notions that daily occurred to him. He introduced games quite fresh to us, he taught us to fence and to do the lesser circle on the horizontal bar; he sailed model yachts for us on the foulest canal in Europe; he played us into school to a march of his own composing performed on a harmonium by himself; he started a debating society and an amateur dramatic club. He even talked about our honour, and, having mentioned it, audaciously left many important things to its care—with what frightful results I forget. Once he suffered the spell of literature, read us a poem of his own, and told us that any one who tried could write poetry. As it were to prove his statement, he ordered us all to write a poem on the subject of Courage within a week, and promised to crown the best poet with a rich gift. Having been commanded to produce a poem on the subject of Courage, I produced a poem on the subject of Courage in, what seemed to me, the most natural manner in the world. I thought of lifeboats and fire-engines, and decided on lifeboats for the mere reason that "wave" and "save" would rhyme together. A lifeboat, then, was to save the crew of a wrecked ship. Next, what was poetry? I desired a model structure which I might copy. Turning to a school hymn-book I found—

That stanza I adopted, and slavishly imitated. In a brief space a poem of four such stanzas was accomplished. I wrote it in cold blood, hammered it out word after word, and was much pleased with the result. On the following day I read the poem aloud to myself, and was thrilled with emotion. The dashing cruel wave that rhymed with save appeared to me intensely realistic. I failed to conceive how any poem could be better than mine. The sequel is that only one other boy besides myself had even attempted verse. One after another, each sullenly said that he had nothing to show. (How clever I felt!) Then I saw my rival's composition; it dealt with a fire in New York and many fire-engines; I did not care for it; I could not make sense of much of it; but I saw with painful clearness that it was as far above mine as the heaven was above the earth. . . .

"Did you write this yourself?" The master was addressing the creator of New York fire-engines.

"Yes, sir."

"All of it?"

"Yes, sir."

"You lie, sir."

It was magnificent for me. The fool, my rival, relying too fondly on the master's ignorance of modern literature, had simply transcribed entire the work of some great American recitation-monger. I received the laurel, which I fancy amounted to a shilling.

Nothing dashed by the fiasco of his poetry competition, the schoolmaster immediately instituted a competition in prose. He told us about M. Jourdain, who talked prose without knowing it, and requested us each to write a short story upon any theme we might choose to select. I produced the story with the same ease and certainty as I had produced the verse. I had no difficulty in finding a plot which satisfied me; it was concerned with a drowning accident at the seaside, and it culminated—with a remorse—less naturalism that even thus early proclaimed the elective affinity between Flaubert and myself—in an inquest. It described the wonders of the deep, and I have reason to remember that it likened the gap between the fin and the side of a fish to a pocket. In this competition I had no competitor. I, alone, had achieved fiction. I watched the master as he read my work, and I could see from his eyes and gestures that he thought it marvellously good for the boy. He spoke to me about it in a tone which I had never heard from him before and never heard again, and then, putting the manuscript in a drawer, he left us to ourselves for a few minutes.

"I'll just read it to you," said the big boy of the form, a daring but vicious rascal. He usurped the pedagogic armchair, found the manuscript, rapped the ruler on the desk, and began to read. I protested in vain. The whole class roared with laughter, and I was overcome with shame. I know that I, eleven, cried. Presently the reader stopped and scratched his head; the form waited.

"Oh!" he exclaimed. "Fishes have pockets! Fishes have pockets!"

The phrase was used as a missile against me for months.

The master returned with his assistant, and the latter also perused the tale.

"Very remarkable!" he sagely commented—to be sage was his foible, "very remarkable, indeed!"

Yet I can remember no further impulse to write a story for at least ten years. Despite this astonishing success, martyrdom, and glory, I forthwith abandoned fiction and went mad on water-colours.

III

The insanity of water-colours must have continued for many years. I say insanity, because I can plainly perceive now that I had not the slightest genuine aptitude for graphic art. In the curriculum of South Kensington as taught at a provincial art school I never got beyond the stage known technically as "third-grade freehand," and even in that my "lining-in" was considered to be a little worse than mediocre. O floral forms, how laboriously I deprived you of the grace of your Hellenic convention! As for the "round" and the "antique," as for pigments, these mysteries were withheld from me by South Kensington. It was at home, drawn on by a futile but imperious fascination, that I practised them, and water-colours in particular. I never went to nature; I had not the skill, nor do I remember that I felt any sympathetic appreciation of nature. I was content to copy. I wasted the substance of uncles and aunts in a complicated and imposing apparatus of easels, mahlsticks, boards, What-man, camel-hair, and labelled tubes. I rose early, I cheated school and office, I outraged the sanctity of the English Sabbath, merely to satisfy an ardour of copying. I existed on the Grand Canal in Venice; at Toledo, Nuremburg, and Delft; and on slopes commanding a view of Turner's ruined abbeys, those abbeys through whose romantic windows streamed a yellow moonlight inimitable by any combination of ochre, lemon, and gamboge in my paint-box. Every replica that I produced was the history of a disillusion. With what a sanguine sweep I laid on the first broad washes—the pure blue of water, the misty rose of sun-steeped palaces, the translucent sapphire of Venetian and Spanish skies! And then what a horrible muddying ensued, what a fading-away of magic and defloriation of hopes, as in detail after detail the picture gradually lost tone and clarity! It is to my credit that I was always disgusted by the fatuity of these efforts. I have not yet ceased to wonder what precise part of the supreme purpose was served by seven or eight years of them.

From fine I turned to applied art, diverted by a periodical called "The Girl's Own Paper." For a long period this monthly, which I now regard as quaint, but which I shall never despise, was my principal instrument of culture. It alone blew upon the spark of artistic feeling and kept it alive. I derived from it my first ideals of aesthetic and of etiquette. Under its influence my brother and myself started on a revolutionary campaign against all the accepted canons of house decoration. We invented friezes, dadoes, and panels; we cut stencils; and we carried out our bright designs through half a house. It was magnificent, glaring, and immense; it foreshadowed the modern music-hall. Visitors were shown through our rooms by parents who tried in vain to hide from us their parental complacency. The professional house-decorator was reduced to speechless admiration of our originality and extraordinary enterprise; he really was struck—he could appreciate the difficulties we had conquered.

During all this, and with a succession of examinations continually looming ahead, literature never occurred to me; it was forgotten. I worked in a room lined with perhaps a couple of thousand volumes, but I seldom opened any of them. Still, I must have read a great deal, mechanically, and without enthusiasm: serials, and boys' books. At twenty-one I know that I had read almost nothing of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot. An adolescence devoted to water-colours has therefore made it forever impossible for me to emulate, in my functions of critic, the allusive Langism of Mr. Andrew Lang; but on the other hand, it has conferred on me the rare advantage of being in a position to approach the classics and the alleged classics with a mind entirely unprejudiced by early recollections. Thus I read David Copperfield for the first time at thirty, after I had written a book or two and some hundreds of articles myself. The one author whom as a youth I "devoured" was Ouida, creator of the incomparable Strathmore, the Strathmore upon whose wrath the sun unfortunately went down. I loved Ouida much for the impassioned nobility of her style, but more for the scenes of gilded vice into which she introduced me. She it was who inspired me with that taste for liaisons under pink lampshades which I shall always have, but which, owing to a puritanical ancestry and upbringing, I shall never be able to satisfy. Not even the lesson of Prince Io's martyrdom in "Friendship" could cure me of this predilection that I blush for. Yes, Ouida was the unique fountain of romance for me. Of poetry, save "Hiawatha" and the enforced and tedious Shakespeare of schools, I had read nothing.

The principal local daily offered to buy approved short stories from local readers at a guinea apiece. Immediately I wrote one. What, beyond the chance of a guinea, made me turn so suddenly to literature I cannot guess; it was eight years since I had sat down as a creative artist. But I may mention here that I have never once produced any literary work without a preliminary incentive quite other than the incentive of ebullient imagination. I have never "wanted to write," until the extrinsic advantages of writing had presented themselves to me. I cannot recall that I found any difficulty in concocting the story. The heroine was named Leonora, and after having lost sight of her for years, the hero discovered her again as a great actress in a great play. (Miss Ellen Terry in "Faust" had passed disturbingly athwart my existence.) I remember no more. The story was refused. But I firmly believe that for a boy of nineteen it was something of an achievement. No one saw it except myself and the local editor; it was a secret, and now it is a lost secret. Soon afterwards another local newspaper advertised for a short serial of local interest. Immediately I wrote the serial, again without difficulty. It was a sinister narrative to illustrate the evils of marrying a drunken woman. (I think I had just read "L'Assommoir" in Vizetelly's original edition of Zola.) There was a street in our town named Commercial Street. I laid the scene there, and called it Speculation Street. I know not what satiric criticism of modern life was involved in that change of name. This serial too was refused; I suspect that it was entirely without serial interest.

I had matriculated at London University three years before, and was then working, without heart, for a law degree (which I never won); instead of Ouida my nights were given to Austin's Jurisprudence, the Institutes of Justinian and of Gaius, and Maine's Ancient Law; the last is a great and simple book, but it cannot be absorbed and digested while the student is pre-occupied with the art of fiction. Out of an unwilling respect for the University of London, that august negation of the very idea of a University, I abandoned literature. As to water-colours, my tubes had dried up long since; and house-decoration was at a standstill.

The editor of the second newspaper, after a considerable interval, wrote and asked me to call on him, for all the world as though I were the impossible hero of a journalistic novel. The interview between us was one of these plagiarisms of fiction which real life is sometimes guilty of. The editor informed me that he had read my sinister serial with deep interest, and felt convinced, his refusal of it notwithstanding, that I was marked out for the literary vocation. He offered me a post on his powerful organ as a regular weekly contributor, without salary. He said that he was sure I could write the sort of stuff he wanted, and I entirely agreed with him. My serene confidence in my ability, pen in hand, to do anything that I wished to do, was thus manifest in the beginning. Glory shone around as I left the editorial office. The romantic quality of this episode is somewhat impaired by the fact, which I shall nevertheless mention, that the editor was a friend of the family, and that my father was one of several optimistic persons who were dropping money on the powerful organ every week. The interview, however, was indeed that peculiar phenomenon (so well-known to all readers of biography) styled the "turning-point in one's career." But I lacked the wit to perceive this for several years.

The esteemed newspaper to which I was now attached served several fairly large municipalities which lay so close together as to form in reality one very large town divided against itself. Each wilful cell in this organism was represented by its own special correspondent on the newspaper, and I was to be the correspondent for my native town. I had nothing to do with the news department; menial reporters attended to that. My task was to comment weekly upon the town's affairs to the extent of half a column of paragraphic notes.

"Whatever you do, you must make your pars bright," said the editor, and he repeated the word—"Bright!"

Now I was entirely ignorant of my town's affairs. I had no suspicion of the incessant comedy of municipal life. For two days I traversed our stately thoroughfares in search of material, wondering what, in the names of Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and Mr. Delane, my first contribution was going to consist of. Law went to the devil, its natural home. Then I happened to think of tram-lines. The tram-lines, under the blessing of Heaven, were badly laid, and constituted a menace to all wheeled traffic save trams; also the steam-engines of the trams were offensive. I wrote sundry paragraphs on that topic, and having thus acquired momentum, I arrived safely at the end of my half column by the aid of one or two minor trifles.

In due course I called at the office to correct proof, and I was put into the hands of the sub-editor. It was one of those quarters-of-an-hour that make life worth living; for the sub-editor appreciated me; nay, he regarded me as something of a journalistic prodigy, and his adjectives as he ran through the proof were extremely agreeable. Presently he came to a sentence in which I had said that such-and-such a proceeding "smacked of red tape."

"'Smacked of red tape'?" He looked up at me doubtfully. "Rather a mixed metaphor, isn't it?"

I didn't in the least know what he meant, but I knew that sentence was my particular pet. "Not at all!" I answered with feeling. "Nothing of the sort! It does smack of red tape—you must admit that."

And the sentence stood. I had awed the sub-editor.

My notes enjoyed a striking success. Their brightness scintillated beyond the brightness of the comments from any other town. People wondered who this caustic, cynical, and witty anonymous wag was. I myself was vastly well satisfied; I read the stuff over and over again; but at the same time I perceived that I could make my next contribution infinitely more brilliant. And I did. I mention this matter, less because it was my first appearance in print, than because it first disclosed to me the relation between literature and life. In writing my stories I had never thought for a moment of life. I had made something, according to a model, not dreaming that fiction was supposed to reflect real life. I had regarded fiction as—fiction, a concoction on the plane of the Grand Canal, or the Zocodover at Toledo. But in this other literature I was obliged to begin with life itself. The wheel of a dog-cart spinning off as it jammed against a projecting bit of tram-line; a cyclist overset: what was there in that? Nothing. Yet I had taken that nothing and transformed it into something—something that seemed important, permanent, literary. I did not comprehend the process, but I saw its result. I do not comprehend it now. The man who could explain it could answer the oft-repeated cry: What is Art?

Soon afterwards I had a delightful illustration of the power of the press. That was the era of coffee-houses, when many excellent persons without too much humour tried all over the country to wean the populace from beer by the superior attractions of coffee and cocoa; possibly they had never tasted beer. Every town had its coffee-house company, limited. Our coffee-house happened to be a pretty bad one, while the coffee-house of the next town was conspicuously good. I said so in print, with my usual display of verbal pyrotechny. The paper had not been published an hour before the aggrieved manager of our coffee-house had seen his directors on the subject. He said I lied, that I was unpatriotic, and that he wanted my head on a charger; or words to that effect. He asked my father, who was a director of both newspaper and coffee-house, whether he could throw any light on the identity of the scurrilous and cowardly scribe, and my father, to his eternal credit, said that he could not. Again I lived vividly and fully. As for our coffee-house, it mended its ways.

The County Council Bill had just become law, and our town enjoyed the diversions of electing its first County Councillor. The rival candidates were a brewer and a prominent lay religionist. My paper supported the latter, and referred to the conflict between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism. It had a magnificent heading across two columns: "Brains versus Beer," and expressed the most serene confidence as to the result. Of course, my weekly notes during the campaign were a shield and a buckler to the religionist, who moreover lived next door.

The result of the poll was to be announced late on the night before the paper went to press. The editor gave me instructions that if we lost, I was to make fun of the brewer, and in any case to deliver my copy by eleven o'clock next morning. We lost heavily, disastrously; the forces of civilization were simply nowhere. I attended the declaration of the poll, and as the elated brewer made his speech of ceremony in front of the town hall, I observed that his hat was stove-in and askew. I fastened on that detail, and went to bed in meditation upon the facetious notes which I was to write early on the morrow. In the middle of the night I was wakened up. My venerable grandfather, who lived at the other end of the town, had been taken suddenly ill and was dying. As his eldest grandson, my presence at the final scene was indispensable. I went, and talked in low tones with my elders. Upstairs the old man was fighting for every breath. The doctor descended at intervals and said that it was only a question of hours. I was absolutely obsessed by a delicious feeling of the tyranny of the press. Nothing domestic could be permitted to interfere with my duty as a journalist.

"I must write those facetious comments while my grandfather is dying upstairs!" This thought filled my brain. It seemed to me to be fine, splendid. I was intensely proud of being laid under a compulsion so startlingly dramatic. Could I manufacture jokes while my grandfather expired? Certainly: I was a journalist. And never since have I been more ardently a journalist than I was that night and morning. With a strong sense of the theatrical, I wrote my notes at dawn. They delicately excoriated the brewer.

The curious thing is that my grandfather survived not only that, but several other fatal attacks.

A few weeks later, my newspaper was staggering under the blow of my migration to London.

IV

I came to London at the age of twenty-one, with no definite ambition, and no immediate object save to escape from an intellectual and artistic environment which had long been excessively irksome to me. Some achievement of literature certainly lay in the abyss of my desires, but I allowed it to remain there, vague and almost unnoticed. As for provincial journalism, without meed in coin, it had already lost the charm of novelty, and I had been doing it in a perfunctory manner. I made no attempt to storm Fleet Street. The fact is that I was too much engaged in making a meal off London, swallowing it, to attend to anything else; this repast continued for over two years. I earned a scanty living as shorthand clerk, at first, in a solicitor's office; but a natural gift for the preparation of bills of costs for taxation, that highly delicate and complicated craft, and an equally natural gift for advancing my own interests, soon put me in receipt of an income that many "admitted" clerks would have envied: to be exact and prosaic, two hundred a year. Another clerk in the office happened to be an ardent bibliophile. We became friends, and I owe him much. He could chatter in idiomatic French like a house on fire, and he knew the British Museum Reading Room from its centre to its periphery. He first taught me to regard a book, not as an instrument for obtaining information or emotion, but as a book, printed at such a place in such a year by so-and-so, bound by so-and-so, and carrying colophons, registers, water-marks, and fautes d'impression. He was acquainted, I think, with every second-hand bookstall in the metropolis; and on Saturday afternoons we visited most of them. We lived for bargains and rarities. We made it a point of honour to buy one book every day, and when bargains failed we used to send out the messengers for a Camelot Classic or so—ninepence net; this series was just then at the height of its vogue. We were for ever bringing into the office formidable tomes—the choice productions of the presses of Robert and Henry Stephen, Elzevir, Baskerville, Giunta, Foulis, and heaven knows whom. My discovery of the Greek editio princeps of Plutarch, printed by Philip Giunta at Florence in 1517, which I bought in Whitechapel for two shillings, nearly placed me on a level with my preceptor. We decidedly created a sensation in the office. The "admitted" clerks and the articled clerks, whom legal etiquette forbids as a rule to fraternize with the "unadmitted," took a naïve and unaffected pleasure in our society. One day I was examining five enormous folios full-bound in yellow calf, in the clients' waiting-room, when the senior partner surprised me thus wasting the firm's time.

"What's all this?" he inquired politely. He was far too polite to remonstrate.

"This, sir? Bayle's 'Dictionaire Historique et Critique,'" I replied.

"Is it yours?"

"Yes, sir. I bought it in the lunch-hour at Hodgson's."

"Ah!"

He retired abashed. He was a gentle fellow, and professed an admiration for Browning; but the chief thing of which he had the right to be proud was his absolutely beautiful French accent.

I had scarcely been in London a year when my friend and I decided to collaborate in a bibliographical dictionary of rare and expensive books in all European languages. Such a scheme sounds farcical, but we were perfectly serious over it; and the proof of our seriousness is that we worked at it every morning before breakfast. I may mention also that we lunched daily at the British Museum, much to the detriment of our official duties. For months we must have been quite mad—obsessed. We got about as far as the New English Dictionary travelled in the first twenty years of its life, that is to say, two-thirds through A; and then suddenly, irrationally, without warning, we dropped it. The mere conception of this dictionary was so splendid that there was a grandeur even in dropping it.

Soon after this, the managing clerk of the office, a university man, autocratic, but kindly and sagacious, bought a country practice and left us. He called me into his room to say good-bye.

"You'd no business to be here," he said, sharply. "You ought to be doing something else. If I find you here when I visit town next, I shall look on you as a d——d fool. Don't forget what I say."

I did not. On the contrary, his curt speech made a profound impression on me. He was thirty, and a man of the world; I was scarcely twenty-three. My self-esteem, always vigorous, was flattered into all sorts of new developments. I gradually perceived that, quite without intending it, I had acquired a reputation. As what? Well, as a learned youth not lacking in brilliance. And this reputation had, I am convinced, sprung solely from the habit of buying books printed mainly in languages which neither myself nor my acquaintances could read. I owned hundreds of books, but I seldom read any of them, except the bibliographical manuals; I had no leisure to read. I scanned. I can only remember, in this period, that I really studied one book—Plato's "Republic," which I read because I thought I was doing the correct thing. Beyond this, and a working knowledge of French, and an entirely sterile apparatus of bibliographical technique, I had mastered nothing. Three qualities I did possess, and on these three qualities I have traded ever since. First, an omnivorous and tenacious memory (now, alas, effete!)—the kind of memory that remembers how much London spends per day in cab fares just as easily as the order of Shakespeare's plays or the stock anecdotes of Shelley and Byron. Second, a naturally sound taste in literature. And third, the invaluable, despicable, disingenuous journalistic faculty of seeming to know much more than one does know. None knew better than I that, in any exact, scholarly sense, I knew nothing of literature. Nevertheless, I should have been singularly blind not to see that I knew far more about literature than nine-tenths of the people around me. These people pronounced me an authority, and I speedily accepted myself as an authority: were not my shelves a silent demonstration? By insensible degrees I began to assume the pose of an authority. I have carried that pose into newspaper offices and the very arcana of literary culture, and never yet met with a disaster. Yet in the whole of my life I have not devoted one day to the systematic study of literature. In truth, it is absurdly easy to impress even persons who in the customary meaning of the term have the right to call themselves well-educated. I remember feeling very shy one night in a drawing-room rather new to me. My host had just returned from Venice, and was describing the palace where Browning lived; but he could not remember the name of it.

"Rezzonico," I said at once, and I chanced to intercept the look of astonishment that passed between host and hostess.

I frequented that drawing-room a great deal afterwards, and was always expected to speak ex cathedra on English literature.

London the entity was at least as good as my dreams of it, but the general mass of the persons composing it, considered individually, were a sad disappointment. "What duffers!" I said to myself again and again. "What duffers!" I had come prepared to sit provincially at the feet of these Londoners! I was humble enough when I arrived, but they soon cured me of that—they were so ready to be impressed! What struck me was the extraordinary rarity of the men who really could "do their job." And when I found them, they were invariably provincials like me who had come up with the same illusions and suffered the same enlightenment. All who were successfully performing that feat known as "getting on" were provincials. I enrolled myself in their ranks. I said that I would get on. The "d——d fool" phrase of the Chancery clerk rang in my ears like a bugle to march.

And for about a year I didn't move a step. I read more than I have ever read before or since. But I did nothing. I made no effort, nor did I subject myself to any mental discipline. I simply gorged on English and French literature for the amusement I could extract from such gluttony, and found physical exercise in becoming the champion of an excessively suburban lawn-tennis club. I wasted a year in contemplating the magnificence of my future doings. Happily I never spoke these dreams aloud! They were only the private solace of my idleness. Now it was that I at last decided upon the vocation of letters; not scholarship, not the dilettantism of belles-lettres, but sheer constructive journalism and possibly fiction. London, however, is chiefly populated by grey-haired men who for twenty years have been about to become journalists and authors. And but for a fortunate incident—the thumb of my Fate has always been turned up—I might ere this have fallen back into that tragic rearguard of Irresolutes.

Through the good offices of my appreciative friends who had forgotten the name of the Palazzo Rezzonico, I was enabled to take up my quarters in the abode of some artists at Chelsea. I began to revolve, dazzled, in a circle of painters and musicians who, without the least affectation, spelt Art with the majuscule; indeed, it never occurred to them that people existed who would spell it otherwise. I was compelled to set to work on the reconstruction of nearly all my ideals. I had lived in a world where beauty was not mentioned, seldom thought of. I believe I had scarcely heard the adjective "beautiful" applied to anything whatever, save confections like Gounod's "There is a green hill far away." Modern oak sideboards were called handsome, and Christmas cards were called pretty; and that was about all. But now I found myself among souls that talked of beauty openly and unashamed. On the day that I arrived at the house in Chelsea, the drawing-room had just been papered, and the pattern of the frieze resembled nothing in my experience. I looked at it.

"Don't you think our frieze is charming?" the artist said, his eyes glistening.

It was the man's obvious sincerity that astounded me. O muse of mahogany and green rep! Here was a creature who took a serious interest in the pattern of his wall-papers! I expressed my enthusiasm for the frieze.

"Yes," he replied, with simple solemnity, "it is very beautiful."

This worship of beauty was continuous. The very teaspoons were banned or blessed on their curves, and as for my rare editions, they wilted under tests to which they were wholly unaccustomed. I possessed a rarissime illustrated copy of Manon Lescaut, of which I was very proud, and I showed it with pride to the artist. He remarked that it was one of the ugliest books he had ever seen.

"But," I cried, "you've no idea how scarce it is! It's worth—"

He laughed.

I perceived that I must begin life again, and I began it again, sustained in my first efforts by the all-pervading atmosphere of ardour. My new intimates were not only keenly appreciative of beauty, they were bent on creating it. They dreamed of great art-works, lovely compositions, impassioned song. Music and painting they were familiar with, and from me they were serenely sure of literature. The glorious accent with which they clothed that word—literature! Aware beforehand of my authority, my enthusiasm, they accepted me with quick, warm sympathy as a fellow-idealist. Then they desired to know what I was engaged upon, what my aims were, and other facts exceedingly difficult to furnish.

It happened that the most popular of all popular weeklies had recently given a prize of a thousand pounds for a sensational serial. When the serial had run its course, the editor offered another prize of twenty guineas for the best humorous condensation of it in two thousand words. I thought I might try for that, but I feared that my friends would not consider it "art." I was mistaken. They pointed out that caricature was a perfectly legitimate form of art, often leading to much original beauty, and they urged me to enter the lists. They read the novel in order the better to enjoy the caricature of it, and when, after six, evenings' labour, my work was done, they fiercely exulted in it. Out of the fulness of technical ignorance they predicted with certainty that I should win the prize.

Here again life plagiarized the sentimental novel, for I did win the guineas. My friends were delighted, but they declined to admit a particle of surprise. Their belief in what I could do kept me awake at nights.

This was my first pen-money, earned within two months of my change of air. I felt that the omen was favourable.

V

Now I come to the humiliating part of my literary career, the period of what in Fleet Street is called "free-lancing." I use the term "humiliating" deliberately. A false aureole of romance encircles the head of that miserable opportunist, the free-lance. I remember I tried to feel what a glorious thing it was to be a free-lance, dependent on none (but dependent on all), relying always on one's own invention and ingenuity, poised always to seize the psychological moment, and gambling for success with the calm (so spurious) of a dicer in the eighteenth century. Sometimes I deceived myself into complacency, but far more often I realized the true nature of the enterprise and set my teeth to endure the spiritual shame of it. The free-lance is a tramp touting for odd jobs; a pedlar crying stuff which is bought usually in default of better; a producer endeavouring to supply a market of whose conditions he is in ignorance more or less complete; a commercial traveller liable constantly to the insolence of an elegant West End draper's "buyer." His attitude is in essence a fawning attitude; it must be so; he is the poor relation, the doff-hat, the ready-for-anything. He picks up the crumbs that fall from the table of the "staff"—the salaried, jealous, intriguing staff—or he sits down, honoured, when the staff has finished. He never goes to bed; he dares not; if he did, a crumb would fall. His experience is as degrading as a competitive examination, and only less degrading than that of the black-and-white artist who trudges Fleet Street with a portfolio under his arm. And the shame of the free-lance is none the less real because he alone witnesses it—he and the postman, that postman with elongated missive, that herald of ignominy, that dismaying process-server, who raps the rap of apprehension and probable doom six, eight, and even twelve times per diem!

The popular paper that had paid me twenty guineas for being facetious expressed a polite willingness to consider my articles, and I began to turn the life of a law-office into literature; my provincial experience had taught me the trick. Here was I engaged all day in drawing up bills of costs that would impose on a taxing-master to the very last three-and-fourpence; and there was the public in whose chaotic mind a lawyer's bill existed as a sort of legend, hieroglyphic and undecipherable. What more natural than a brief article—"How a bill of costs is drawn up," a trifling essay of three hundred words over which I laboured for a couple of evenings? It was accepted, printed, and with a postal order for ten shillings on the ensuing Thursday I saw the world opening before me like a flower. The pathos of my sanguine ignorance! I followed up this startling success with a careful imitation of it—"How a case is prepared for trial," and that too brought its ten shillings. But the vein suddenly ceased. My fledgling fancy could do no more with law, and I cast about in futile blindness for other subjects. I grew conscious for the first time of my lack of technical skill. My facility seemed to leave me, and my self-confidence. Every night I laboured dully and obstinately, excogitating, inventing, grinding out, bent always to the squalid and bizarre tastes of the million, and ever striving after "catchiness" and "actuality." My soul, in the arrogance of a certain achievement, glances back furtively, with loathing, at that period of emotional and intellectual dishonour. The one bright aspect of it is that I wrote everything with a nice regard for English; I would lavish a night on a few paragraphs; and years of this penal servitude left me with a dexterity in the handling of sentences that still surprises the possessor of it. I have heard of Fleet Street hacks who regularly produce sixty thousand words a week; but I well know that there are not many men who can come fresh to a pile of new books, tear the entrails out of them, and write a fifteen-hundred-word causerie on them, passably stylistic, all inside sixty minutes. This means skill, and I am proud of it. But my confessions as a reviewer will come later.

No! Free-lancing was not precisely a triumph for me. Call it my purgatorio. I shone sometimes with a feeble flicker, in half-crown paragraphs, and in jumpy articles under alliterative titles that now and then flared on a pink or yellow contents-bill. But I can state with some certainty that my earnings in the mass did not exceed threepence an hour. During all this time I was continually spurred by the artists around me, who naïvely believed in me, and who were cognizant only of my successes. I never spoke of defeat; I used to retire to my room with rejected stuff as impassive as a wounded Indian; while opening envelopes at breakfast I had the most perfect command of my features. Mere vanity always did and always will prevent me from acknowledging a reverse at the moment; not till I have retrieved my position can I refer to a discomfiture. Consequently, my small world regarded me as much more successful than I really was. Had I to live again, which Apollo forbid, I would pursue the same policy.

During all this time, too, I was absorbing French fiction incessantly; in French fiction I include the work of Turgenev, because I read him always in French translations. Turgenev, the brothers de Goncourt, and de Maupassant were my gods. I accepted their canons, and they filled me with a general scorn of English fiction which I have never quite lost. From the composition of 'bits' articles I turned to admire "Fathers and Children" or "Une Vie," and the violence of the contrast never struck me at the time. I did not regard myself as an artist, or as emotional by temperament. My ambition was to be a journalist merely—cool, smart, ingenious, equal to every emergency. I prided myself on my impassivity. I was acquainted with men who wept at fine music—I felt sure that Saint Cecilia and the heavenly choir could not draw a single tear from my journalistic eye. I failed to perceive that my appreciation of French fiction, and the harangues on fiction which I delivered to my intimates, were essentially emotional in character, and I forgot that the sight of a successful dramatist before the curtain on a first-night always caused me to shake with a mysterious and profound agitation. I mention these facts to show how I misunderstood, or ignored, the progress of my spiritual development. A crisis was at hand. I suffered from insomnia and other intellectual complaints, and went to consult a physician who was also a friend.

"You know," he said, in the course of talk, "you are one of the most highly-strung men I have ever met."

When I had recovered from my stupefaction, I glowed with pride. What a fine thing to be highly-strung, nervously organized! I saw myself in a new light; I thought better of myself; I rather looked down on cool, ingenious journalists. Perhaps I dimly suspected that Fleet Street was not to be the end of all things for me. It was soon afterwards that the artists whom I had twitted about their temperament accused me of sharing it with them to the full. Another surprise! I was in a state of ferment then. But I had acquired such a momentum in the composition of articles destined to rejection that I continued throughout this crisis to produce them with a regularity almost stupid. My friends began to inquire into the nature of my ultimate purpose. They spoke of a large work, and I replied that I had no spare time. None could question my industry. "Why don't you write a novel on Sundays?" one of them suggested.

The idea was grandiose. To conceive such an idea was a proof of imagination. And the air with which these enthusiasts said these things was entirely splendid and magnificent. But I was just then firmly convinced that I had no vocation for the novel; I had no trace of a desire to emulate Turgenev. Again and again my fine enthusiasts returned to the charge, urged on by I know not what instinct. At last, to please them, to quieten them, I promised to try to write a short story. Without too much difficulty I concocted one concerning an artist's model, and sent it to a weekly which gives a guinea each week for a prize story. My tale won the guinea.

"There! We told you so!" was the chorus. And I stood convicted of underestimating my own powers; fault rare enough in my career!

However, I insisted that the story was despicably bad, a commercial product, and the reply was that I ought next to write one for art's sake. Instead, I wrote one for morality's sake. It was a story with a lofty purpose, dealing with the tragedy of a courtesan's life. (No, I had not then read "Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes.") A prominent philanthropist with a tendency to faddism, who for morality's sake was running a monthly magazine, was much impressed by my tale, and after some trouble—the contributors were supposed to contribute con amore—I got another guinea. This story only pleased me for a few weeks; its crudity was too glaring. But I continued to write short stories, and several of them appeared in halfpenny evening papers. Gaining in skill, I aimed political skits in narrative form at the more exclusive, the consciously superior, penny evening papers, and one or two of these hit the mark. I admired the stuff greatly. Lo, I had risen from a concocter of 'bits' articles to be the scorpion-sting of cabinet ministers! My self-confidence began to return.

Then, one day, one beneficent and adorable day, my brain was visited by a Plot. I had a prevision that I was about to write a truly excellent short story. I took incredible pains to be realistic, stylistic, and all the other istics, and the result amazed me. I knew that at last I had accomplished a good thing—I knew by the glow within me, the emotional fatigue, the vista of sweet labour behind me. What moved me to despatch this jewel, this bit of caviare-to-the-general, to the editor of a popular weekly with a circulation of a quarter of a million, I cannot explain. But so I did. The editor returned it with a note to say that he liked the plot, but the style was below his standard. I laughed, and, more happily inspired, sent it to the Yellow Book, where it duly appeared. The Yellow Book was then in apogee. Several fiercely literary papers singled out my beautiful story for especial praise.

"By heaven!" I said, "I will write a novel." It was a tremendous resolution.

I saw that I could write.

VI

But before continuing the narration of my adventures in fiction, I must proceed a little further in the dusty tracks of journalism. When I had laboured sordidly and for the most part ineffectively as a free-lance for two or three years, I became, with surprising suddenness, the assistant-editor of a ladies' paper. The cause of this splendid metamorphosis was sadly unromantic. I had not bombarded the paper, from the shelter of a pseudonym, with articles of unexampled brilliance. The editor had not invited his mysterious and talented contributor into the editorial sanctum, and there informed him that his exclusive services, at a generous salary, were deemed absolutely essential to the future welfare of the organ which he had hitherto assisted only on occasion. I had never written a line for the paper, nor for any ladies' paper. I obtained the situation by "influence," and that of the grossest kind. All that I personally did was to furnish a list of the newspapers and periodicals to which I had contributed, and some specimens of my printed work. These specimens proved rather more than satisfactory. The editor adored smartness; smartness was the "note" of his paper; and he discovered several varieties of smartness in my productions. At our first interview, and always afterwards, his attitude towards me was full of appreciation and kindness. The post was a good one, a hundred and fifty a year for one whole day and four half-days a week. Yet I was afraid to take it. I was afraid to exchange two hundred a year for a hundred and fifty and half my time, I who ardently wished to be a journalist and to have leisure for the imitation of our lady George Sand! In the end I was hustled into the situation. My cowardice was shameful; but in recording it I am not unconscious of the fact that truth makes for piquancy.

"I am sorry to say that I shall have to leave you at Christmas, sir."

"Indeed!" exclaimed the lawyer who admired Browning. "How is that?"

"I am going on to the staff of a paper." Perhaps I have never felt prouder than when I uttered those words. My pride must have been disgusting. This was the last time I ever said "sir" to any man under the rank of a knight. The defection of a reliable clerk who combined cunning in the preparation of costs with a hundred and thirty words a minute at shorthand was decidedly a blow to my excellent; employer; good costs clerks are rarer than true poets; but he suffered it with impassive stoicism; I liked him for that.

On a New Year's Day I strolled along Piccadilly to the first day's work on my paper. "My paper"—O the joyful sound! But the boats were burnt up; their ashes were even cool; and my mind, in the midst of all this bliss, was vexed by grave apprehensions. Suppose the paper to expire, as papers often did! I knew that the existence of this particular paper was precarious; its foundations were not fixed in the dark backward and abysm of time—it was two years old. Nevertheless, and indisputably and solely, I was at last a journalist, and entitled so to describe myself in parish registers, county court summonses, jury papers, and income-tax returns. In six months I might be a tramp sleeping in Trafalgar Square, but on that gorgeous day I was a journalist; nay, I was second in command over a cohort of women whose cleverness, I trusted, would be surpassed only by their charm.

The office was in the West End—index of smartness; one arrived at ten thirty or so, and ascended to the suite in a lift. One smoked cigars and cigarettes incessantly. There was no discipline, and no need of discipline, since the indoor staff consisted only of the editor, myself, and the editor's lady-secretary. The contrast between this and the exact ritual of a solicitor's office was marked and delightful. In an adjoining suite on the same floor an eminent actress resided, and an eminent actor strolled in to us, grandiosely, during the morning, accepted a cigar and offered a cigarette (according to his frugal custom), chatted grandiosely, and grandiosely departed. Parcels were constantly arriving—books, proofs, process-blocks, samples of soap and of corsets: this continuous procession of parcels impressed me as much as anything. From time to time well-dressed and alert women called, to correct proofs, to submit drawings, or to scatter excuses. This was "Evadne," who wrote about the toilet; that was "Angélique," who did the cookery; the other was "Enid," the well-known fashion artist. In each case I was of course introduced as the new assistant-editor; they were adorable, without exception. At one o'clock, having apparently done little but talk and smoke, we went out, the Editor and I, to lunch at the Cri.

"This," I said to myself quite privately, "this may be a novel by Balzac, but it is not my notion of journalism."

The doings of the afternoon, however, bore a closer resemblance to my notion of journalism. That day happened to be press-day, and I perceived that we gradually became very busy. Messenger-boys waited while I wrote paragraphs to accompany portraits, or while I regularized the syntax of a recipe for sole à la Normande, or while I ornamented two naked lines from the "Morning Post" with four lines of embroidery. The editor was enchanted with my social paragraphs; he said I was born to it, and perhaps I was. I innocently asked in what part of the paper they were to shine.

"Gwendolen's column," he replied.

"Who is Gwendolen?" I demanded. Weeks before, I had admired Gwendolen's breadth of view and worldly grasp of things, qualities rare in a woman.

"You are," he said, "and I am. It's only an office signature."

Now, that was what I called journalism. I had been taken in, but I was glad to have been taken in.

At four o'clock he began frantically to dictate the weekly London Letter which he contributed to an Indian newspaper; the copy caught the Indian mail at six. And this too was what I called journalism. I felt myself to be in my element; I lived. At an hour which I forget we departed together to the printers, and finished off. It was late when the paper "went down." The next morning the lady-secretary handed to me the first rough folded "pull" of the issue, and I gazed at it as a mother might gaze at her firstborn.

"But is this all?" ran my thoughts. The fact was, I had expected some process of initiation. I had looked on "journalism" as a sort of temple of mysteries into which, duly impressed, I should be ceremoniously guided. I was called assistant-editor for the sake of grandiloquence, but of course I knew I was chiefly a mere sub-editor, and I had anticipated that the sub-editorial craft would be a complex technical business requiring long study and practice. On the contrary, there seemed to me to be almost nothing in its technique. The tricks of making-up, making-ready, measuring blocks, running-round, cutting, saving a line, and so on: my chief assumed in the main that I understood all these, and I certainly did grasp them instinctively; they appeared childishly simple. Years afterwards, a contributor confided to me that the editor had told her that he taught me nothing after the first day, and that I was a born journalist. I do not seriously think that I was a born journalist, and I mention this detail, not from any vain-glory over a trifle, but to show that the arcana of journalism partake of the nature of an imposture. The same may be said of all professional arcana, even those of politics or of the swell-mob.

In a word, I was a journalist—but I felt just the same as before.

I vaguely indicated my feelings on this point to the chief.

"Ah!" he said. "But you know you'd been through the mill before you came here."

So I had been through the mill! Writing articles at night and getting them back the next morning but one, for a year or two—that was going through the mill! Let it be so, then. When other men envied my position, and expressed their opinion that I had "got on to a soft thing," I indicated that the present was the fruit of the past, and that I had been through the mill.

Journalism for women, by women under the direction of men, is an affair at once anxious, agreeable and delicate for the men who direct. It is a journalism by itself, apart from other journalisms. And it is the only journalism that I intimately know. The commercial side of it, the queer financial basis of it, have a peculiar interest, but my scheme does not by any means include the withdrawal of those curtains. I am concerned with letters, and letters, I fear, have little connection with women's journalism. I learnt nothing of letters in that office, save a few of the more obvious journalistic devices, but I learnt a good deal about frocks, household management, and the secret nature of women, especially the secret nature of women. As for frocks, I have sincerely tried to forget that branch of human knowledge; nevertheless the habit, acquired then, of glancing first at a woman's skirt and her shoes, has never left me. My apprenticeship to frocks was studded with embarrassing situations, of which I will mention only one. It turns upon some designs for a layette. A layette, perhaps I ought to explain, is an outfit for a new-born babe, and naturally it is prepared in advance of the stranger's arrival. Underneath a page of layette illustrations I once put the legend, correct in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand—but this was the thousandth—Cut-to-measure patterns supplied. The solecism stands to all eternity against me on the file of the paper; and the recollection of it, like the recollection of a gaucherie, is persistently haunting.

And here I shall quit for a time the feminine atmosphere, and the path which I began by calling dusty, but which is better called flowery. My activity in that path showed no further development until after I had written my first novel.

VII

"By heaven!" I said, "I will write a novel!"

And I sat down to my oaken bureau with the air of a man who has resolved to commit a stupendous crime. Perhaps indeed it was a crime, this my first serious challenge to a neglectful and careless world. At any rate it was meant to be the beginning of the end, the end being twofold—fame and a thousand a year. You must bear well in mind that I was by no means the ordinary person, and my novel was by no means to be the ordinary novel. In these cases the very essence of the situation is always that one is not ordinary. I had just discovered that I could write—and when I use the term "write" here, I use it in a special sense, to be appreciated only by those elect who can themselves "write," and difficult of comprehension by all others. I had had a conte—exquisitely Gallic as to spirit and form—in the "Yellow Book," and that conte had been lauded in the "South Audley Street Gazette" or some organ of destructive criticism. My friends believed in Art, themselves, and me. I believed in myself, Art, and them. Could any factor be lacking to render the scene sublime and historic?

So I sat down to write my first novel, under the sweet influences of the de Goncourts, Turgenev, Flaubert, and de Maupassant. It was to be entirely unlike all English novels except those of one author, whose name I shall not mention now, for the reason that I have afore-time made my admiration of that author very public. I clearly remember that the purpose uppermost in my mind was to imitate what I may call the physical characteristics of French novels. There were to be no poetical quotations in my novel, no titles to the chapters; the narrative was to be divided irregularly into sections by Roman numerals only; and it was indispensable that a certain proportion of these sections should begin or end abruptly. As thus, for a beginning:—"Gerald suddenly changed the conversation, and taking the final match from his match-box at last agreed to light a cigar." And for an ending:—"Her tremulous eyes sought his; breathing a sigh she murmured . . ." O succession of dots, charged with significance vague but tremendous, there were to be hundreds of you in my novel, because you play so important a part in the literature of the country of Victor Hugo and M. Loubet! So much for the physical characteristics. To come nearer to the soul of it, my novel was to be a mosaic consisting exclusively of Flaubert's mots justes—it was to be mots justes composed into the famous écriture artiste of the de Goncourts. The sentences were to perform the trick of "the rise and fall." The adjectives were to have colour, the verbs were to have colour, and perhaps it was a sine qua non that even the pronouns should be prismatic—I forget. And all these effects were to be obtained without the most trifling sacrifice of truth. There was to be no bowing in the house of the Rimmon of sentimentality. Life being grey, sinister, and melancholy, my novel must be grey, sinister, and melancholy. As a matter of strict fact, life deserved none of these epithets; I was having a very good time; but at twenty-seven one is captious, and liable to err in judgment—a liability which fortunately disappears at thirty-five or so. No startling events were to occur in my novel, nor anything out of the way that might bring the blush of shame to the modesty of nature; no ingenious combinations, no dramatic surprises, and above all no coincidences. It was to be the Usual miraculously transformed by Art into the Sublime.