LITMIR.BIZ

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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, for me, the contentment of the ultimate line surpassed the contentment of the penultimate. And therefore it was, perhaps, that I descended on London from time to time like a wolf on the fold, and made the world aware, and snatched its feverish joys for a space, and then, surfeited and advertised, went back and relapsed into my long monotony. And sometimes I would suddenly halt and address myself:

      “You may be richer or you may be poorer; you may live in greater pomp and luxury, or in less. The point is that you will always be, essentially, what you are now. You have no real satisfaction to look forward to except the satisfaction of continually inventing, fancying, imagining scribbling. Say another thirty years of these emotional ingenuities, these interminable variations on the theme of beauty. Is it good enough?”

      And I answered: Yes.

      But who knows? Who can preclude the regrets of the dying couch?

      How to Become an Author

       Table of Contents

       Chapter I. The Literary Career

       Chapter II. The Formation of Style

       Chapter III. Journalism

       Chapter IV. Short Stories

       Chapter V. Sensational and Other Serials

       Chapter VI. The Novel

       Chapter VII. Non-fictional Writing

       Chapter VIII. The Business Side of Books

       Chapter IX. The Occasional Author

       Chapter X. Playwriting

      Chapter I

       The Literary Career

       Table of Contents

      Divisions of literature.

      In the year 1902 there were published 1743 volumes of fiction, 504 educational works, 480 historical and biographical works, 567 volumes of theology and sermons, 463 political and economical works, and 227 books of criticism and belles-lettres. These were the principal divisions of the grand army of 5839 new books issued during the year, and it will be seen that fiction is handsomely entitled to the first place. And the position of fiction is even loftier than appears from the above figures; for, with the exception of a few school-books which enjoy a popularity far exceeding all other popularities, and a few theological works, no class of book can claim as high a circulation per volume as the novel. More writers are engaged in fiction than in any other branch of literature, and their remuneration is better and perhaps surer than can be obtained in other literary markets. In esteem, influence, renown, and notoriety the novelists are also paramount.

      Therefore in the present volume it will be proper for me to deal chiefly with the art and craft of fiction. For practical purposes I shall simply cut the whole of literature into two parts, fictional and non-fictional; and under the latter head I shall perforce crowd together the sublime and reverend muses of poetry, history, biography, theology, economy—everything, in short, that is not prose-fiction, save only plays; having regard to the extraordinary financial and artistic condition of the British stage and the British playwright at the dawn of the twentieth century, I propose to discuss the great “How” of the drama in a separate chapter unrelated to the general scheme of the book. As for journalism, though a journalist is not usually held to rank as an author, it is a. fact that very many, if not most, authors begin by being journalists. Accordingly

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