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 freelance. I remember I tried to feel what a glorious thing it was to be a free-lance, dependent on none (but dependent on all), relying always on one’s own invention and ingenuity, poised always to seize the psychological moment, and gambling for success with the calm (so spurious) of a dicer in the eighteenth century. Sometimes I deceived myself into complacency, but far more often I realized the true nature of the enterprise and set my teeth to endure the spiritual shame of it. The free-lance is a tramp touting for odd jobs; a pedlar crying stuff which is bought usually in default of better; a producer endeavouring to supply a market of whose conditions he is in ignorance more or less complete; a commercial traveller liable constantly to the insolence of an elegant West End draper’s “buyer.” His attitude is in essence a fawning attitude; it must be so; he is the poor relation, the doff-hat, the ready-for-anything. He picks up the crumbs that fall from the table of the “staff”— the salaried, jealous, intriguing staff—or he sits down, honoured, when the staff has finished. He never goes to bed; he dares not; if he did, a crumb would fall. His experience is as degrading as a competitive examination, and only less degrading than that of the black-and-white artist who trudges Fleet Street with a portfolio under his arm. And the shame of the free-lance is none the less real because he alone witnesses it—he and the postman, that postman with elongated missive, that herald of ignominy, that dismaying process-server, who raps the rap of apprehension and probable doom six, eight, and even twelve times per diem!
The popular paper that had paid me twenty guineas for being facetious expressed a polite willingness to consider my articles, and I began to turn the life of a law office into literature; my provincial experience had taught me the trick. Here was I engaged all day in drawing up bills of costs that would impose on a taxing-master to the very last three-and-fourpence; and there was the public in whose chaotic mind a lawyer’s bill existed as a sort of legend, hieroglyphic and undecipherable. What more natural than a brief article—“How a bill of costs is drawn up,” a trifling essay of three hundred words over which I laboured for a couple of evenings? It was accepted, printed, and with a postal order for ten shillings on the ensuing Thursday I saw the world opening before me like a flower. The pathos of my sanguine ignorance! I followed up this startling success with a careful imitation of it—“How a case is prepared for trial,” and that too brought its ten shillings. But the vein suddenly ceased. My fledgling fancy could do no more with law, and I cast about in futile blindness for other subjects. I grew conscious for the first time of my lack of technical skill. My facility seemed to leave me, and my selfconfidence. 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 naively 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,