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 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 dogcart 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 secondhand 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 naive 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!”
