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.
XVI
When I had settled down into the landscape, bought my live - stock, studied manuals on horses, riding, driving, hunting, dogs, poultry, and wild flowers, learnt to distinguish between wheat and barley and between a six-year-old and an aged screw, shot a sparrow on the fence only to find it was a redbreast, drunk the cherry-brandy of the Elizabethan inn, played in the village cricket team, and ceased to feel selfconscious in riding-breeches, I perceived with absolute certainty that I had made no error; I knew that, come poverty or the riches of Indian short stories, I should never again live permanently in London. I expanded, and in my expansion I felt rather sorry for Londoners. I perceived, too, that the country possessed commercial advantages which I had failed to appreciate before. When you live two and a half miles from a railway you can cut a dash on an income which in London spells omnibus instead of cab. For myself I have a profound belief in the efficacy of cutting a dash. You invite an influential friend down for the week-end. You meet him at the station with a nice little grey mare in a phaeton, and an unimpeachable Dalmatian running behind. The turn-out is nothing alone, but the pedigree printed in the pinkiness of that dog’s chaps and in the exiguity of his tail, spotted to the last inch, would give tone to a coster’s cart. You see that your influential friend wishes to comment, but as you gather up the reins you carefully begin to talk about the weather and prices per thousand. You rush him home in twelve minutes, skimming gate-posts. On Monday morning, purposely running it fine, you hurry him into a dog-cart behind a brown cob fresh from a pottle of beans, and you whirl him back to the station in ten minutes, uphill half the way. You fling him into the train, with ten seconds to spare. “This is how we do it in these parts,” your studiously nonchalant face says to him. He thinks. In a few hours Fleet Street becomes aware that young So-and-so, who lately buried himself in the country, is alive and lusty. Your stock rises. You go up one. You extort respect. You are ticketed in the retentive brains of literary shahs as a success. And you still have the dog left for another day.
In the country there is plenty of space and plenty of time, and no damnable fixed relation between these two; in other words, a particular hour does not imply a particular spot for you, and this is something to an author. I found my days succeeding each other with a leisurely and adorable monotony. I lingered over breakfast like a lord, perusing the previous evening’s papers with as much gusto as though they were hot from the Press. I looked sideways at my work, with a non-committal air, as if saying: “I may do you or I may not. I shall see how I feel.” I went out for a walk, followed by dogs less spectacular than the Dalmatian, to collect ideas. I had nothing to think about but my own direct productiveness. I stopped to examine the progress of trees, to discuss meteorology with road-menders, to wonder why lambs always waggled their tails during the act of taking sustenance. All was calmness, serenity. The embryo of the article or the chapter faintly adumbrated itself in my mind, assumed a form. One idea, then another; then an altercation with the dogs, ending in castigation, disillusion, and pessimism for them. Suddenly I exclaimed: “I think I’ve got enough to go on with!” And I turned back homewards. I reached my study and sat down. From my windows I beheld a magnificent panorama of hills. Now the contemplation of hills is uplifting to the soul; it leads to inspiration and induces nobility of character, but it has a tendency to interfere with actual composition. I stared long at those hills. Should I work, should I not work? A brief period always ensued when the odds were tremendous against any work being done that day. Then I seized the pen and wrote the title. Then another dreadful and disconcerting pause, all ideas having scuttled away like mice to their holes. Well, I must put something down, however ridiculous. I wrote a sentence, feeling first that it would not serve and then that it would have to serve, anyway. I glanced at the clock. Ten-twenty-five! I watched the clock in a sort of hypnotism that authors know of, till it showed ten-thirty. Then with a horrible wrench I put the pen in the ink again. . . . Jove! Eleven-forty-five, and I had written seven hundred words. Not bad stuff that! Indeed, very good! Time for a cigarette and a stroll round to hear wisdom from the gardener. I resumed at twelve, and then in about two minutes it was one o’clock and lunch-time. After lunch, rest for the weary and the digesting; slumber; another stroll. Arrival of the second post on a Russian pony that cost fifty shillings. Tea, and perusal of the morning paper. Then another spell of work, and the day was gone, vanished, distilled away. And about five days made a week, and forty-eight weeks a year.
No newspaper - proprietors, contributors, circulations, placards, tape-machines, theatres, operas, concerts, picture - galleries, clubs, restaurants, parties, Undergrounds! Nothing artificial, except myself and my work! And nothing, save the fear of rent-day, to come between myself and my work!
It was dull, you will tell me. But I tell you it was magnificent. Monotony, solitude, are essential to the full activity of the artist. Just as a horse is seen best when coursing alone over a great plain, so the fierce and callous egotism of the artist comes to its perfection in a vast expanse of custom, leisure, and apparently vacuous reverie. To insist on forgetting his work, to keep his mind a blank until the work, no longer to be held in check, rushes into that emptiness and fills it up—that is one of the secrets of imaginative creation. Of course it is not a recipe for every artist. I have known artists, and genuine ones, who could keep their minds empty and suck in the beauty of the world for evermore without the slightest difficulty; who only wrote, as the early Britons hunted, when they were hungry and there was nothing in the pot. But I was not of that species. On the contrary, the incurable habit of industry, the itch for the pen, was my chiefest curse. To be unproductive for more than a couple of days or so was to be miserable. Like most writers I was frequently the victim of an illogical, indefensible and causeless melancholy; but one kind of melancholy could always be explained, and that was the melancholy of idleness. I could never divert myself with hobbies. I did not read much, except in the way of business. Two hours’ reading, even of Turgenev or Balzac or Montaigne, wearied me out. An author once remarked to me: “I know enough. I don't read books, I write 'em." It was a haughty and arrogant saying, but there is a sense in which it was true. Often I have felt like that: “I know enough, I feel enough. If my future is as long as my past, I shall still not be able to put down the tenth part of what I have already acquired.” The consciousness of this, of what an extraordinary and wonderful museum of perceptions and emotions my brain was, sustained me many a time against the chagrins, the delays, and the defeats of the artistic career. Often have I said inwardly: “World, when I talk with you, dine with you, wrangle with you, love you, and hate you, I condescend!” Every artist has said that. People call it conceit; people may call it what they please. One of the greatest things a great man said, is:—
I know I am august.
I do not trouble my spirit to indicate itself or to be understood. . . .
I exist as I am, that is enough.
If no other in the world be aware I sit content.
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
Nevertheless,
