Chapter I: Part 1

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.

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!