Chapter II: Part 2

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."

"What royalty?" I asked.

"Five per cent.--on a three-and-six-penny book."

"Very well. Thank you!" I said.

"I'll give you fifteen per cent, after the sale of five thousand copies," he added kindly.

O ironist!

I emerged from the web of the spider triumphant, an accepted author. Exactly ten days had elapsed since I had first parted with my manuscript. Once again life was plagiarizing fiction. I could not believe that this thing was true. I simply could not believe it. "Oh!" I reflected, incredulous, "Something's bound to happen. It can't really come off. The publisher might die, and then----"

Protected by heaven on account of his good deeds, the publisher felicitously survived; and after a delay of twelve months (twelve centuries--during which I imagined that the universe hung motionless and expectant in the void!) he accomplished his destiny by really and truly publishing my book.

The impossible had occurred. I was no longer a mere journalist; I was an author.

"After all, it's nothing!" I said, with that intense and unoriginal humanity which distinguishes all of us. And in a blinding flash I saw that an author was in essence the same thing as a grocer or a duke.

IX

My novel, under a new title, was published both in England and America. I actually collected forty-one reviews, of it, and there must have been many that escaped me. Of these forty-one, four were unfavourable, eleven mingled praise and blame in about equal proportions, and twenty-six were unmistakably favourable, a few of them being enthusiastic.

Yet I had practically no friends on the press. One friend I had, a man of power, and he reviewed my book with an appreciation far too kind; but his article came as a complete surprise to me. Another friend I had, sub-editor of a society weekly, and he asked me for a copy of my book so that he might "look after it" in the paper. Here is part of the result:

"He has all the young novelist's faults. . . . These are glaring faults; for, given lack of interest, and unpleasant scenes, how can a book be expected to be popular?"

A third friend I had, who knew the chief fiction-reviewer on a great morning paper. He asked me for a special copy of my book, and quite on his own initiative, undertook to arrange the affair. Here is part of the result:

"There is not much to be said either for or against---- by Mr.----"

I had no other friends on the press, or friends who had friends on the press.

I might easily butcher the reviews for your amusement, but this practice is becoming trite. I will quote a single sentence which pleased me as much as any:--"What our hero's fate was let those who care to know find out, but let us assure them that in its discovery they will read of London life and labour as it is, not as the bulk of romances paint it." All the principal organs were surprisingly appreciative. And the majority of the reviewers agreed that my knowledge of human nature was exceptionally good, that my style was exceptionally good, that I had in me the makings of a novelist, and that my present subject was weak. My subject was not weak; but let that pass. When I reflect how my book flouted the accepted canons of English fiction, and how many aspects of it must have annoyed nine reviewers out of ten, I am compelled to the conclusion that reviewers are a very good-natured class of persons. I shall return to this interesting point later--after I have described how I became a reviewer myself. The fact to be asserted is that I, quite obscure and defenceless, was treated very well. I could afford to smile from a high latitude at the remark of "The New York----" that "the story and characters are commonplace in the extreme." I felt that I had not lived in vain, and that kindred spirits were abroad in the land.

My profits from this book with the exceptional style and the exceptional knowledge of human nature, exceeded the cost of having it typewritten by the sum of one sovereign. Nor was I, nor am I, disposed to grumble at this. Many a first book has cost its author a hundred pounds. I got a new hat out of mine.

What I did grumble at was the dishonour of the prophet in his own county. Here I must delicately recall that my novel was naturalistic, and that it described the career of a young man alone in London. It had no "realism" in the vulgar sense, as several critics admitted, but still it was desperately exact in places, and I never surrounded the head of a spade with the aureole of a sentimental implement. The organ of a great seaport remarked: "We do not consider the book a healthy one. We say no more." Now you must imagine this excessively modern novel put before a set of estimable people whose ideas on fiction had been formed under the influence of Dickens and Mrs. Henry Wood, and who had never changed those ideas. Some of them, perhaps, had not read a novel for ten years before they read mine. The result was appalling, frightful, tragical. For months I hesitated to visit the town which had the foresight to bear me, and which is going to be famous on that score. I was castigated in the local paper. My nearest and dearest played nervously with their bread when my novel was mentioned at dinner. A relative in a distant continent troubled himself to inform me that the book was fragmentary and absolutely worthless. The broader-minded merely wished that I had never written the book. The discreet received it in silence. One innocent person, for whom I have the warmest regard, thought that my novel might be a suitable birthday present for his adolescent son. By chance he perused the book himself on the birthday eve. I was told that neither on that night nor on the next did he get a wink of sleep. His adolescent son certainly never got my book.

Most authors, I have learnt on enquiry, have to suffer from this strange lack of appreciation in the very circle where appreciation should be kindest; if one fault isn't found, another is; but they draw a veil across that dark aspect of the bright auctorial career. I, however, am trying to do without veils, and hence I refer to the matter.

X

My chief resigned his position on the paper with intent to enliven other spheres of activity. The news of his resignation was a blow to me. It often happens that when an editor walks out of an office in the exercise of free-will, the staff follows him under compulsion. In Fleet Street there is no security of tenure unless one is ingenious enough to be the proprietor of one's paper.

"I shall never get on with any one as I have got on with you," I said to the chief.

"You needn't," he answered. "I'm sure they'll have the sense to give you my place if you ask for it." "They" were a board of directors.

And they had the sense; they even had the sense not to wait until I asked. I have before remarked that the thumb of my Fate has always been turned up. Still on the glorious side of thirty, still young, enthusiastic, and a prey to delightful illusions, I suddenly found myself the editor of a London weekly paper. It was not a leading organ, but it was a London weekly paper, and it had pretensions; at least I had. My name was inscribed in various annuals of reference. I dined as an editor with other editors. I remember one day sitting down to table in a populous haunt of journalists with no less than four editors. "Three years ago," I said to myself, "I should have deemed this an impossible fairy tale." I know now that there are hundreds of persons in London and elsewhere who regard even editors with gentle and condescending toleration. One learns.

I needed a sub-editor, and my first act was to acquire one. I had the whole world of struggling lady-journalists to select from: to choose was an almost sublime function. For some months previously we had been receiving paragraphs and articles from an outside contributor whose _flair_ in the discovery of subjects, whose direct simplicity of style and general tidiness of "copy," had always impressed me. I had never seen her, and I knew nothing about her; but I decided that, if she pleased, this lady should be my sub-editor. I wrote desiring her to call, and she called. Without much preface I offered her the situation; she accepted it.

"Who recommended me to you?" she asked.

"No one," I replied, in the rôle of Joseph Pulitzer; "I liked your stuff."

It was a romantic scene. I mention it because I derived a child-like enjoyment from that morning. Vanity was mixed up in it; but I argued--If you are an editor, be an editor imaginatively. I seemed to resemble Louis the Fifteenth beginning to reign after the death of the Regent, but with no troublesome Fleury in the background.

"Now," I cried, "up goes the circulation!"

But circulations are not to be bullied into ascension. They will only rise on the pinions of a carefully constructed policy. I thought I knew all about journalism for women, and I found that I knew scarcely the fringe of it. A man may be a sub-editor, or even an assistant-editor, for half a lifetime, and yet remain ignorant of the true significance of journalism. Those first months were months of experience in a very poignant sense. The proprietary desired certain modifications in the existing policy. O that mysterious "policy," which has to be created and built up out of articles, paragraphs, and pictures! That thrice-mysterious "public taste" which has to be aimed at in the dark and hit! I soon learnt the difference between legislature and executive. I could "execute" anything, from a eulogy of a philanthropic duchess to a Paris fashion letter. I could instruct a fashion-artist as though I knew what I was talking about. I could play Blucher at the Waterloo of the advertisement-manager. I could interview a beauty and make her say the things that a beauty must say in an interview. But to devise the contents of an issue, to plan them, to balance them; to sail with this wind and tack against that; to keep a sensitive cool finger on the faintly beating pulse of the terrible many-headed patron; to walk in a straight line through a forest black as midnight; to guess the riddle of the circulation-book week by week; to know by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat-order, or why Simpkins' was ten quires less; to keep one eye on the majestic march of the world, and the other on the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter who has forgotten the law of libel: these things, and seventy-seven others, are the real journalism. It is these things that make editors sardonic, grey, unapproachable.

Unique among all suspenses is the suspense that occupies the editorial mind between the moment of finally going to press and the moment of examining the issue on the morning of publication. Errors, appalling and disastrous errors, will creep in; and they are irremediable then. These mishaps occur to the most exalted papers, to all papers, except perhaps the "Voce della Verità," which, being the organ of the Pope, is presumably infallible. Tales circulate in Fleet Street that make the hair stand on end; and every editor says: "This might have happened to _me_." Subtle beyond all subtleties is the magic and sinister change that happens to your issue in the machine-room at the printers. You pass the final page and all seems fair, attractive, clever, well-designed. . . . Ah! But what you see is not what is on the paper; it is the reflection of the bright image in your mind of what you intended! When the last thousand is printed and the parcels are in the vans, then you gaze at the unalterable thing, and you see it coldly as it actually is. You see not what you intended, but what you have accomplished. And the difference! It is like the chill, steely dawn after the vague poetry of a moonlit night.

There is no peace for an editor. He may act the farce of taking a holiday, but the worm of apprehension is always gnawing at the root of pleasure. I once put my organ to bed and went off by a late train in a perfect delirium of joyous anticipation of my holiday. I was recalled by a telegram that a fire with a strong sense of ironic humour had burnt the printing office to the ground and destroyed five-sixths of my entire issue. In such crises something has to be done, and done quickly. You cannot say to your public next week: "Kindly excuse the absence of the last number, as there was a fire at the printers." Your public recks not of fires, no more than the General Post Office, in its attitude towards late clerks, recognizes the existence of fogs in winter. And herein lies, for the true journalist, one of the principal charms of Fleet Street. Herein lies the reason why an editor's life is at once insufferable and worth living. There are no excuses. Every one knows that if the crater of Highgate Hill were to burst and bury London in lava to-morrow, the newspapers would show no trace of the disaster except an account of it. That thought is fine, heroic, when an editor thinks of it.

And if an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want something and those who have something to bestow; those who are anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept a lunch; those who have an axe to grind and those who possess the grindstone. The change from the one position to the other was for me at first rather disconcerting; I could not understand it; there was an apparent unreality about it; I thought I must be mistaken; I said to myself: "Surely this unusual ingratiating affability has nothing to do with the accident that I am an editor." Then, like the rest of the owners of grindstones, I grew accustomed to the ownership, and cynical withal, cold, suspicious, and forbidding. I became bored by the excessive complaisance that had once tickled and flattered me. (Nevertheless, after I had ceased to be an editor I missed it; involuntarily I continued to expect it.) The situation of the editor of a ladies' paper is piquantly complicated, in this respect, by the fact that some women, not many--but a few, have an extraordinary belief in, and make unscrupulous use of, their feminine fascinations. The art of being "nice to editors" is diligently practised by these few; often, I know, with brilliant results. Sometimes I have sat in my office, with the charmer opposite, and sardonically reflected: "You think I am revolving round your little finger, madam, but you were never more mistaken in your life." And yet, breathes there the man with soul so uniformly cold that once or twice in such circumstances the woman was not right after all? I cannot tell. The whole subject, the subject of that strange, disturbing, distracting, emotional atmosphere of femininity which surrounds the male in command of a group of more or less talented women, is of a supreme delicacy. It could only be treated safely in a novel--one of the novels which it is my fixed intention never to write. This I know and affirm, that the average woman-journalist is the most loyal, earnest, and teachable person under the sun. I begin to feel sentimental when I think of her astounding earnestness, even in grasping the live coal of English syntax. Syntax, bane of writing-women, I have spent scores of ineffectual hours in trying to inoculate the ungrammatical sex against your terrors! And how seriously they frowned, and how seriously I talked; and all the while the eternal mystery of the origin and destiny of all life lay thick and unnoticed about us!

These syntax-sittings led indirectly to a new development of my activities. One day a man called on me with a letter of introduction. He was a colonial of literary tastes. I asked in what manner I might serve him.

"I want to know whether you would care to teach me journalism," he said.

"Teach you journalism!" I echoed, wondering by what unperceived alchemy I myself, but yesterday a tyro, had been metamorphosed into a professor of the most comprehensive of all crafts.

"I am told you are the best person to come to," he said.

"Why not?" I thought. "Why shouldn't I?" I have never refused work when the pay has been good. I named a fee that might have frightened him, but it did not. And so it fell out that I taught journalism to him, and to others, for a year or two. This vocation suited me; I had an aptitude for it; and my fame spread abroad. Some of the greatest experts in London complimented me on my methods and my results. Other and more ambitious schemes, however, induced me to abandon this lucrative field, which was threatening to grow tiresome.

XI