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When I had been in London a decade, I stood aside from myself and reviewed my situation with the godlike and detached impartiality of a trained artistic observer. And what I saw was a young man who pre-eminently knew his way about, and who was apt to be rather too complacent over this fact; a young man with some brilliance but far more shrewdness; a young man with a highly developed faculty for making a little go a long way; a young man who was accustomed to be listened to when he thought fit to speak, and who was decidedly more inclined to settle questions than to raise them.

This young man had invaded the town as a clerk at twenty-five shillings a week, paying six shillings a week for a bed-sitting-room, threepence for his breakfast, and sixpence for his vegetarian dinner. The curtain falls on the prologue. Ten years elapse. The curtain rises on the figure of an editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all arts. See him in his suburban residence, with its poplar-shaded garden, its bicycle-house at the extremity thereof, and its horizon composed of the District Railway Line. See the study, lined with two thousand books, garnished with photogravures, and furnished with a writing-bureau and a chair and nothing else. See the drawing-room with its artistic wall-paper, its Kelmscotts, its water-colours of a pallid but indubitable distinction, its grand piano on which are a Wagnerian score and Bach’s Two-part Inventions. See the bachelor’s bedroom, so austere and precise, wherein Boswell’s Johnson and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal exist peaceably together on the night-table. The entire machine speaks with one voice, and it tells you that there are no flies on that young man, that that young man never gives the wrong change. He is in the movement, he is correct; but at the same time he is not so simple as not to smile with contemptuous toleration at all movements and all correctness. He knows. He is a complete guide to art and life. His innocent foible is never to be at a loss, and never to be carried away—save now and then, because an occasional ecstasy is good for the soul. His knowledge of the coulisses of the various arts is wonderful. He numbers painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, among his intimate friends; and no artistic manifestation can possibly occur that he is unable within twenty-four hours to assess at its true value. He is terrible against cabotins, no matter where he finds them, and this seems to be his hobby: to expose cabotins.

He is a young man of method; young men do not arrive without method at the condition of being encyclopaedias; his watch is as correct as his judgments. He breakfasts at eight sharp, and his housekeeper sets the kitchen clock five minutes fast, for he is a terrible Ivan at breakfast. He glances at a couple of newspapers, first at the list of “publications received,” and then at the news. Of course he is not hoodwinked by newspapers. He will meet the foreign editor of the Daily — at lunch and will learn the true inwardness of that exploded canard from Berlin. Having assessed the newspapers, he may interpret to his own satisfaction a movement from a Mozart piano sonata, and then he will brush his hat, pick up sundry books, and pass sedately to the station. The stationmaster is respectfully cordial, and quite ready to explain to him the secret causation of delays, for his season-ticket is a white one. He gets into a compartment with a stockbroker, a lawyer, or a tea-merchant, and immediately falls to work; he does his minor reviewing in the train, fostering or annihilating reputations while the antique engine burrows beneath the squares of the West End; but his brain is not so fully occupied that he cannot spare a corner of it to meditate upon the extraordinary ignorance and simplicity of stockbrokers, lawyers, and tea-merchants. He reaches his office, and for two or three hours practises that occupation of watching other people work which is called editing: a process always of ordering, of rectifying, of laying down the law, of being looked up to, of showing how a thing ought to be done and can be done, of being flattered and cajoled, of dispensing joy or gloom—in short, the Jupiter and Shah of Persia business. He then departs, as to church, to his grillroom, where for a few moments himself and the cook hold an anxious consultation to decide which particular chop or which particular steak out of a mass of chops and steaks shall have the honour of sustaining him till tea-time. The place is full of literary shahs and those about to be shahs. They are all in the movement; they constitute the movement. They ride the comic-opera whirlwinds of public opinion and direct the teacup storms of popularity. The young man classes most of them with the stockbroker, the lawyer, and the tea-merchant. With a few he fraternises, and these few save their faces by appreciating the humour of the thing. Soon afterwards he goes home, digging en route the graves of more reputations, and, surrounded by the two thousand volumes, he works in seclusion at his various activities that he may triumph openly. He descends to dinner stating that he has written so many thousand words, and excellent words too — stylistic, dramatic, tender, witty. There may be a theatrical first-night toward, in which case he returns to town and sits in the seat of the languid for a space. Or he stays within doors and discusses with excessively sophisticated friends the longevity of illusions in ordinary people. At length he retires and reads himself to sleep. His last thoughts are the long, long thoughts of his perfect taste and tireless industry, and of the aesthetic darkness which covers the earth. . . .

Such was the young man I inimically beheld. And I was not satisfied with him. He was gorgeous, but not sufficiently gorgeous. He had done much in ten years, and I excused his facile pride, but he had not done enough. The curtain had risen on the first act of the drama of life, but the action, the intrigue, the passion seemed to hesitate and halt. Was this the artistic and creative life, this daily round? Was this the reality of that which I had dreamed? Where was the sense of romance, the consciousness of felicity? I felt that I had slipped into a groove which wore deeper every day. It seemed to me that I was fettered and tied down. I had grown weary of journalism. The necessity of being at a certain place at a certain hour on so many days of the week grew irksome to me; I regarded it as invasive of my rights as a freeborn Englishman, as shameful and scarcely tolerable. Was I a horse that I should be ridden on the curb by a Board of Directors? I objected to the theory of proprietors. The occasional conferences with the Board, though conducted with all the ritual of an extreme punctilio, were an indignity. The suave requests of the chairman: “Will you kindly tell us—?” And my defensive replies, and then the dismissal: “Thank you, Mr.—, I think we need trouble you no further this morning.” And my exit, irritated by the thought that I was about to be discussed with the freedom that Boards in conclave permit themselves. It was as bad as being bullied by London University at an examination. I longed to tell this Board, with whom I was so amicable on unofficial occasions, that they were using a razor to cut firewood. I longed to tell them that the nursing of their excellent and precious organ was seriously interfering with the composition of great works and the manufacture of a dazzling reputation. I longed to point out to them that the time would come when they would mention to their friends with elaborate casualness and covert pride that they had once employed me, the unique me, at a salary measurable in hundreds.

Further, I was ill-pleased with literary London. “You have a literary life here,” an American editor once said to me. “There is a literary circle, an atmosphere. . . . We have no such thing in New York.” I answered that no doubt we had; but I spoke without enthusiasm. I suppose that if any one “moved in literary circles,” I did, then. Yet I derived small satisfaction from my inclusion within those circumferences. To me there was a lack of ozone in the atmosphere which the American editor found so invigorating. Be it understood that when I say “literary circles,” I do not in the least mean genteel Bohemia, the world of informal At-Homes that are all formality, where the little lions growl on their chains in a row against a drawing-room wall, and the hostess congratulates herself that every single captive in the salon has “done something Such polite racketing, such discreet orgies of the higher intellectuality, may suit the elegant triflers, the authors of monographs on Velasquez, golf, Dante, asparagus, royalties, ping-pong, and Empire; but the business men who write from ten to fifty thousand words a week without chattering about it, have no use for the literary menagerie. I lived among the real business men—and even so I was dissatisfied. I believe too that they were dissatisfied, most of them. There is an infection in the air of London, a zymotic influence which is the mysterious cause of unnaturalness, pose, affectation, artificiality, moral neuritis, and satiety. One loses grasp of the essentials in an undue preoccupation with the vacuities which society has invented. The distractions are too multiform. One never gets a chance to talk common sense with one’s soul.

Thirdly, the rate at which I was making headway did not please me. My reputation was growing, but only like a coral-reef. Many people had an eye on me, as on one for whom the future held big things. Many people took care to read almost all that I wrote. But my name had no significance for the general public. The mention of my name would have brought no recognizing smile to the average person who is “fond of reading.” I wanted to do something large, arresting, and decisive. And I saw no chance of doing this. I had too many irons in the fire. I was frittering myself away in a multitude of diverse activities of the pen.

I pondered upon these considerations for a long while. I saw only one way out, and, at last, circumstances appearing to conspire to lead me into that way, I wrote a letter to my Board of Directors and resigned my editorial post. I had decided to abandon London, that delectable paradise of my youthful desires. A To-let notice flourished suddenly in my front-garden, and my world became aware that I was going to desert it. The majority thought me rash and unwise, and predicted an ignominious return to Fleet Street. But the minority upheld my resolution. I reached down a map of England, and said that I must live on a certain mainline at a certain minimum distance from London. This fixed the neighbourhood of my future home. The next thing was to find that home, and with the aid of friends and a bicycle I soon found it. One fine wet day I stole out of London in a new quest of romance. No one seemed to be fundamentally disturbed over my exodus. I remarked to myself: “Either you are a far-seeing and bold fellow, or you are a fool. Time will show which.” And that night I slept, or failed to sleep, in a house that was half a mile from the next house, three miles from a station, and three miles from a town. I had left the haunts of men with a vengeance, and incidentally I had left a regular income.

I ran over the list of our foremost writers: they nearly all lived in the country.