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.

Let this old woe step on the stage again!

Act itself o'er anew for men to judge.

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--

A little ship was on the sea,

It was a pretty sight;

It sailed along so pleasantly

And all was calm and bright

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.

[Footnote 1: Written in 1900.]

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.

The sole liberty that I might permit myself in handling the Usual was to

give it a rhythmic contour--a precious distinction in those Yeller-bocky

days.

All these cardinal points being settled, I passed to the business of

choosing a subject. Need I say that I chose myself? But, in obedience to

my philosophy, I made myself a failure. I regarded my hero with an air

of "There, but for the grace of God, goes me!" I decided that he should

go through most of my own experiences, but that instead of fame and a

thousand a year he should arrive ultimately at disillusion and a

desolating suburban domesticity. I said I would call my novel "In the

Shadow," a title suggested to me by the motto of Balzac's "Country

Doctor"--"For a wounded heart, shadow and silence." It was to be all

very dolorous, this Odyssey of a London clerk who---- But I must not

disclose any detail of the plot.

So I sat down, and wrote on a fair quarto sheet, "In the Shadow," and

under that, "I." It was a religious rite, an august and imposing

ceremonial; and I was the officiating priest. In the few fleeting

instants between the tracing of the "I" and the tracing of the first

word of the narrative, I felt happy and proud; but immediately the

fundamental brain-work began, I lost nearly all my confidence. With

every stroke the illusion grew thinner, more remote. I perceived that I

could not become Flaubert by taking thought, and this rather obvious

truth rushed over me as a surprise. I knew what I wanted to do, and I

could not do it. I felt, but I could not express. My sentences would

persist in being damnably Mudiesque. The _mots justes_ hid themselves

exasperatingly behind a cloud. The successions of dots looked merely

fatuous. The charm, the poetry, the distinction, the inevitableness, the

originality, the force, and the invaluable rhythmic contour--these were

anywhere save on my page. All writers are familiar with the dreadful

despair that ensues when a composition, on perusal, obstinately presents

itself as a series of little systems of words joined by conjunctions and

so forth, something like this--subject, predicate, object, _but_,

subject, predicate, object. Pronoun, _however_, predicate, negative,

infinitive verb. _Nevertheless_, participle, accusative, subject,

predicate, etc., etc., etc., for evermore. I suffered that despair. The

proper remedy is to go to the nearest bar and have a drink, or to read a

bit of "Comus" or "Urn-Burial," but at that time I had no skill in

weathering anti-cyclones, and I drove forward like a sinking steamer in

a heavy sea.

And this was what it was, in serious earnest, to be an author! For I

reckon that in writing the first chapter of my naturalistic novel, I

formally became an author; I had undergone a certain apprenticeship. I

didn't feel like an author, no more than I had felt like a journalist on

a similar occasion. Indeed, far less: I felt like a fool, an incompetent

ass. I seemed to have an idea that there was no such thing as

literature, that literature was a mirage, or an effect of hypnotism, or

a concerted fraud. After all, I thought, what in the name of common

sense is the use of telling this silly ordinary story of everyday life?

Where is the point? What _is_ art, anyway, and all this chatter about

truth to life, and all this rigmarole of canons?

I finished the chapter that night, hurriedly, perfunctorily, and only

because I had sworn to finish it. Then, in obedience to an instinct

which all Grub Street has felt, I picked out the correct "Yellow Book"

from a shelf and read my beautiful story again. That enheartened me a

little, restored my faith in the existence of art, and suggested the

comfortable belief that things were not perhaps as bad as they seemed.

"Well, how's the novel getting on?" my friend the wall-paper enthusiast

inquired jovially at supper.

"Oh, fine!" I said. "It's going to be immense."

Why one should utter these frightful and senseless lies, I cannot guess.

I might just as well have spoken the precise truth to him, for his was a

soul designed by providence for the encouragement of others. Still,

having made that remark, I added in my private ear that either the novel

must be immense or I must perish in the attempt to make it so.

In six months I had written only about thirty thousand words, and I felt

the sort of elation that probably succeeds six months on a treadmill.

But one evening, in the midst of a chapter, a sudden and mysterious

satisfaction began to warm my inmost being. I knew that chapter was

good and going to be good. I experienced happiness in the very act of

work. Emotion and technique were reconciled. It was as if I had

surprisingly come upon the chart with the blood-red cross showing where

the Spanish treasure was buried. I dropped my pen, and went out for a

walk, and decided to give the book an entirely fresh start. I carefully

read through all that I had written. It was bad, but viewed in the mass

it produced on me a sort of culminating effect which I had not

anticipated. Conceive the poor Usual at the bottom of a flight of

stairs, and the region of the Sublime at the top: it seemed to me that I

had dragged the haggard thing halfway up, and that it lay there, inert

but safe, awaiting my second effort. The next night I braced myself to

this second effort, and I thought that I succeeded.

"We're doing the trick, Charlie," Edmund Kean whispered into the ear of

his son during a poignant scene of "Brutus." And in the very crisis of

my emotional chapters, while my hero was rushing fatally to the nether

greyness of the suburbs and all the world was at its most sinister and

most melancholy, I said to myself with glee: "We're doing the trick." My

moods have always been a series of violent contrasts, and I was now just

as uplifted as I had before been depressed. There were interludes of

doubt and difficulty, but on the whole I was charmed with my novel. It

would be a despicable affectation to disguise the fact that I deemed it

a truly distinguished piece of literature, idiosyncratic, finely

imaginative, and of rhythmic contour. As I approached the end, my

self-esteem developed in a _crescendo_. I finished the tale, having

sentenced my hero to a marriage infallibly disastrous, at three o'clock

one morning. I had laboured for twelve hours without intermission. It

was great, this spell; it was histrionic. It was Dumas over again, and

the roaring French forties.

Nevertheless, to myself I did not yet dare to call myself an artist. I

lacked the courage to believe that I had the sacred fire, the inborn and

not-to-be-acquired vision. It seemed impossible that this should be so.

I have ridiculed the whole artist tribe, and, in the pursuit of my

vocation, I shall doubtless ridicule them again; but never seriously.

Nothing is more deeply rooted in me than my reverence for the artistic

faculty. And whenever I say, "The man's an artist," I say it with an

instinctive solemnity that so far as I am concerned ends all discussion.

Dared I utter this great saying to my shaving-mirror? No, I repeat that

I dared not. More than a year elapsed before the little incident

described at the commencement of these memoirs provided me with the

audacity to inform the author of "In the Shadow" that he too belonged to

the weird tribe of Benjamin.

When my novel had been typewritten and I read it in cold blood, I was

absolutely unable to decide whether it was very good, good, medium, bad,

or very bad. I could not criticize it. All I knew was that certain

sentences, in the vein of the _écriture artiste_, persisted beautifully

in my mind, like fine lines from a favourite poet. I loosed the brave

poor thing into the world over a post-office counter. "What chance _has_

it, in the fray?" I exclaimed. My novel had become nothing but a parcel.

Thus it went in search of its fate.

I have described the composition of my first book in detail as realistic

as I can make it, partly because a few years ago the leading novelists

of the day seemed to enter into a conspiracy to sentimentalize the

first book episode in their brilliant careers.

VIII

"Will you step this way?" said the publisher's manager, and after

coasting by many shelves loaded with scores of copies of the same book

laid flat in piles--to an author the most depressing sight in the

world--I was ushered into the sanctum, the star-chamber, the den, the

web of the spider.

I beheld the publisher, whose name is a household word wherever the

English language is written for posterity. Even at that time his imprint

flamed on the title-pages of one or two works of a deathless nature. My

manuscript lay on an occasional table by his side, and I had the curious

illusion that he was posing for his photograph with my manuscript. As I

glanced at it I could not help thinking that its presence there bordered

on the miraculous. I had parted with it at a post-office. It had been

stamped, sorted, chucked into a van, whirled through the perilous

traffic of London's centre, chucked out of a van, sorted again, and

delivered with many other similar parcels at the publisher's. The

publisher had said: "Send this to So-and-so to read." Then more perils

by road and rail, more risks of extinction and disorientation. Then

So-and-so, probably a curt man, with a palate cloyed by the sickliness

of many manuscripts, and a short way with new authors, had read it or

pretended to read it. Then finally the third ordeal of locomotion. And

there it was, I saw it once more, safe!

We discussed the weather and new reputations. I was nervous, and I think

the publisher was nervous, too. At length, in a manner mysterious and

inexplicable, the talk shifted to my manuscript. The publisher permitted

himself a few compliments of the guarded sort.

"But there's no money in it, you know," he said.

"I suppose not," I assented. ("You are an ass for assenting to that," I

said to myself.)

"I invariably lose money over new authors," he remarked, as if I was to

blame.

"You didn't lose much over Mrs.----," I replied, naming one of his

notorious successes.

"Oh, _well_!" he said, "of course----. But I didn't make so much as you

think, perhaps. Publishing is a very funny business." And then he added:

"Do you think your novel will succeed like Mrs.----'s?"

I said that I hoped it would.

"I'll be perfectly frank with you," the publisher exclaimed, smiling

beneficently. "My reader likes your book. I'll tell you what he says."

He took a sheet of paper that lay on the top of the manuscript and read.

I was enchanted, spell-bound. The nameless literary adviser used phrases

of which the following are specimens (I am recording with exactitude):

"Written with great knowledge and a good deal of insight." "Character

delineated by a succession of rare and subtle touches." "Living,

convincing." "Vigour and accuracy." "The style is good."

I had no idea that publishers' readers were capable of such laudation.

The publisher read on: "I do not think it likely to be a striking

success!"

"Oh!" I murmured, shocked by this bluntness.

"There's no money in it," the publisher repeated, firmly. "First books

are too risky. . . . I should like to publish it."

"Well?" I said, and paused. I felt that he had withdrawn within himself

in order to ponder upon the chances of this terrible risk. So as not to

incommode him with my gaze, I examined the office, which resembled a

small drawing-room rather than an office. I saw around me signed

portraits of all the roaring lions on the sunny side of Grub Street.

"I'll publish it," said the publisher, and I believe he made an honest

attempt not to look like a philanthropist; however, the attempt failed.

"I'll publish it. But of course I can only give you a small royalty."