The coming of Conrad into my life forced my nose hard down again on the grindstone of writing. At Bonnington and the Pent I had dug and hedged and thatched. When my oncle de l’Amerique had performed as American uncles should I added golf to my occupations. I became in a small way very proficient in that game which was then little played in England. My cousin, George Wilkes of Hythe had just started a links there. The Pent was five miles from that Cinque Port. I played there a good deal with Dr Macnamara the Liberal Minister for Education and with Charles Masterman with whom I was afterwards very intimate.

I made a great many notes for a life of Henry VIII which I never published and for my history of the Cinque Ports which I did publish in 1903. I wrote also some verse. I suppose I became tired of a life of leisure and golf and went to Limpsfield to be reformed by Mr Edward Garnett and his friends. Limpsfield however disgusted me with the life of the Intelligentsia as lived in the London suburbs. So back I went to the Pent. I daresay I should have become finally a country-gentleman-historian. But a curious coincidence prevented that. I had got together all my material for the life of Henry VIII and had made a synopsis of the chapters and even a list of the illustrations. And I had chosen my publishers. The book was to be heavily illustrated with reproductions of Holbein and the like. There was only one publisher in London then for finely illustrated books. That was the house of Virtue. I went up to London with my synopsis and specimen reproductions. I saw one of the partners of the firm and laid my plan before him. He said:

‘You saw the gentleman who just went out. Do you know who that was?’ I didn’t and he said:

‘That was Mr Pollard of the British Museum. Just before you entered we signed an agreement for a Life of Henry VIII by him.’ Mr Pollard’s synopsis allowing for difference in idiosyncrasies was almost word for word the same as mine. His list of illustrations was identical.

The coincidence is not as surprising as it sounds, but the blow was none the less severe. It was not to be thought of that two books on exactly the same lines could appear almost simultaneously – I had worked on my plan for a number of years. Now I had to drop it dead.

The coincidence was not so surprising because the great compilation called the Catalogue of State Papers of Henry VIII Foreign and Domestic had been appearing for a number of years. It had just reached Vol. XIII. I suppose Mr Pollard and I had been working on the documents thus indexed for just the same number of years and with the publication of that volume had arrived simultaneously at the idea that we might begin writing our books. I felt stunned.

I should not have said that I cared much whether I wrote a life of Henry VIII or not or even whether I ever wrote anything at all except now and then for a verse or two. The physical side of life had at that time gripped me. I wanted to hunt, to hit a ball, and to make things grow. Writing seemed to me an unmanly sort of occupation. I still want to make things grow and indeed now again have my little plot of ground. But I no longer regard writing as an unmanly occupation though I much dislike doing it. Nevertheless the idea of putting tiny dark objects into the ground fascinates me. Over their germination and growth there is something mysterious and exciting. It is the only clean way of attaining the world’s desire. You get something for nothing. Yes: it is the only clean way of adding to your store: the only way by which you can eat your bread without taking it out of another’s mouth. I used to think that the arts and letters were also not only creative but non-competitive. An author – auctor – added to things and took nothing from anyone. But during the first battle of the Somme it was rumoured in my London Clubs that I was killed or dead of drink or court-martialled and shot. Non-combatants said cheerful things like that of people in the line. A brother author on hearing this said:

‘H– killed! Good! I shall be able to afford a second lump of sugar in my tea!’ The gentleman who reported this to me pointed out that it was not even an original sentiment. It had been uttered on a similar occasion by Theodore Hook or Douglas Jerrold or someone of the sort. So there must be authors who regard their Art as means to a competitive scramble.

In any case I was slightly stunned at hearing that Mr Pollard was writing my life of Henry VIII. I drifted, as one did in those days, round to the British Museum to pour my woes into Dr Garnett’s ear. It was really like that. Dr Garnett never looked at you. He presented his ear. He suggested that I should turn the fruits of my studies into novels. I didn’t want to write novels – and particularly not historical novels. I knew he thought Mr Pollard, who was one of his assistants, would be a more serious historian than I. He said: why not write a novel about pussies? – pronouncing it to rhyme with buses. The amiable and cultivated Egyptians when their houses were on fire put a cordon round them to prevent their pusses dashing into the flames. There was a subject. I said I should hate to write a novel about pusses. He said: then why not pirates?

I ejaculated: ‘Good God: Pirates! Why not palmistry?’ Palmistry, as I have said, was along with pusses one of that great scholar’s infatuations.

We were standing in the embrasure of one of the windows in the Garnetts’ great drawing-room. It was in the East wing of the Museum. The Garnetts had a tea-party every day and an immense one every Thursday. The room was full of people. I knew I ought not to have monopolised the attention of their host. I was also aware that Dr Garnett was lecturing me for my good. He had turned his spectacles towards the carpet and was speaking with his absent deference, fingering the revers of his frock coat.

Pirates, he was saying, were always very much in the public eye. Any details as to their lives and careers always attracted attention. Treasure Island was tremendously to the fore then. I knew he considered me an idle and presumptuous young fellow. He was intimate with all the elder members of my family. My grandfather and my Uncle William Rossetti always spoke of him as ‘young Garnett’ – a stripling of promise. He was then perhaps fifty. My father and Mr Gosse had done most of their courting in his hospitable drawing-room, neither of their parents-in-law much approving of them. So he was trying to give me good advice as to how to make a living with my pen. This annoyed me because I did not consider that I had to make a living.

He suggested that I should go into the Reading Room. There I should find the trial of Aaron Smith.

I saw Samuel Butler bearing down on us. I disliked Samuel Butler more than anyone I knew. He was intolerant and extraordinarily rude in conversation – particularly to old ladies and young persons. He had perhaps cause to be for he was conscious of great gifts and of being altogether neglected. In those days he was almost unknown. Erewhon was nearly forgotten, The Way of All Flesh unpublished and not even written. Otherwise he was unfavourably known as having pirated the ideas of Darwin and as having behaved with extraordinary rudeness to that great and aged scientist. It struck me that, as he was bearing down on us, he had the air of a pirate. His complexion was fresh, his hair and torpedo beard of silver grey, he kept his hands usually in his coat pockets. His coat was a square blue reefer, his red necktie was confined in a gold scarf ring. It is one of the regrets of my life that I made nothing at all of two of the most remarkable men I ever met casually and fairly frequently. Butler was too arrogant, Synge too modest. I saw Synge rather often when he was a journalist in Paris. He said very little and seemed to be merely another florid, tuberculous Irishman. Yet I suppose that The Way of All Flesh and The Playboy of the Western World are the two great milestones on the road of purely English letters between Gulliver’s Travels and Joyce’s Ulysses.

At any rate, as Butler drew towards that alcove I prepared to leave it.

As I was going, Dr Garnett with his mild obstinacy again advised me to read the trial of Aaron Smith. He said it concerned the last pirate who was ever tried at the Old Bailey. The man had been acquitted but his case had caused a great deal of controversy because party politics had come into it and it still had elements of mystery. For himself he was inclined to think that Smith actually had been the victim of Governmental hard usage. Mr Butler said that if there had ever been a scoundrel who deserved hanging it was Smith. It occurs to me now that that speech settled my fate. It seemed to me odd that anyone so aged as Butler should take passionate sides in a trial of a pirate sixty years ago. Butler then appeared to me aged. I suppose I am older now than he was then and I don’t feel old.

It occurred to me in the course of a sleepless night to wonder how an aged fellow like Butler would regard his past, supposing him to have been a pirate as a boy. I was sleepless because the ceasing of my aspiration to write the Life of Henry VIII had left me at a loose end. I was accustomed to reflect on that Protestant Hero just before I went to sleep. I had nothing else to reflect upon. So Butler and the pirate replaced the monarch. I wanted something controversial to tackle if not with my pen then at least in my half-waking thoughts. Smith was not so important as Henry VIII. But Henry VIII was not attacked by Butler. I wanted to defend anyone from Darwin to a pirate who was attacked by that fellow who himself looked and behaved in conversation like a pirate. So I began to wonder how Smith, when he was an old man, would have regarded his life. And I had to make him a nice old man because Butler was a nasty one.

I suppose I then fell asleep. Nothing further of that night comes back to me. But I will add a detail of literary life of that day. I had then a small apartment in John Street, Bloomsbury. It consisted of a living-room, a bedroom and a tiny kitchen at the top of an eighteenth century house. I paid for it £30 a year and as I shared it with the architect who built Edward Garnett’s cottage at Limpsfield it cost me only £15 a year to have that London pied à terre.

Having then slept I awoke to a feeling of uneasy conscience. I thought I had been grossly rude and ungrateful to Dr Garnett. The least I could do was to feign an interest in Pirate Smith. I went therefore to his intriguing private room in the Museum Library and asked him where I could find record of the Smith trials. When you visited him there you pressed on a button in one of the Museum walls. A section swung out towards you and there was a passage leading to his room. He told me that I should find the record in State Trials; Volume So and So, Page So and So. But I could find a condensation in Dickens’ All the Year Round for such and such a date. That was another coincidence. I do not suppose that I should ever have taken the trouble to look up the State Trial. But I was going to write an article about my grandfather’s woodcuts and several of these had been printed in All the Year Round. I was actually in the Museum with the purpose of taking out all the volumes of that periodical. So, as it were against the grain, I read the trial of Aaron Smith. In that way I came to work with Conrad – and to write novels of my own! I may add, as another coincidence, that last year I was recommended to read and did read with enormous enjoyment Mr Richard Hughes’ High Wind in Jamaica. It seemed to me the best thing that had come out of Wales or the British Empire since the War. I had not been reading very long before I discovered that Mr Hughes also had based his book on the trial of Aaron Smith. But whereas I made him an agreeable person who ended up as a country gentleman Mr Hughes made him a lousy and lachrymose scoundrel who was duly hanged in chains on Thames Bank at Gallions Reach. That shows probably the difference between the pure Welch and the Polono-Cymric imagination.

I shall probably not be mentioning Dr Garnett again. I should like to round off what I hope has been a tribute of gratitude and affection to that great scholar. He was, as I have said, famous the world over for his Catalogue and is I hope still so famous. But alas for the imaginative writer that was so lost! His industry was prodigious. He worked in the Museum day in day out from nine o’clock till four. At that hour he attended his wife’s tea parties. Then he wrote till dinner time. He usually went to some official, or City Company, dinner. On his return he worked again till far in the night. But every morning towards six he went to Covent Garden market to buy the family fruit and vegetables. He worked on the Catalogue, he reviewed endless dull books, he collaborated on Histories of Literature, he contributed serious articles to the heavy monthlies. The actual body of his writing must be tremendous. But, again alas! he wrote only one Twilight of the Gods. That volume comes back to me as the most delightful of collections of learned-whimsical stories. His verse also was dainty and skilled. So, to gain an illustrious scholar, the world lost an Anatole France who should have been without mournful rancour and jejune cynicism. Destiny led him to sink his imaginative gift in the career of the bon père de famille who appears in French leases. For, when you sign a French lease, you have to undertake that you will conduct no business in your premises and will there cause no scandal. But you will occupy them like a good father of a family. I think Dr Garnett felt some bitterness about it towards the end of his life. Imaginative work then came to have for him an aspect of far greater weight and certainly of vastly greater permanence.

He was a man of iron physique and was never ill till almost the day of his death. Once, as I have said, going to buy his morning fruit he was set upon by three roughs who tried to go through his pockets. He put his back against the market railings and beat them all off with his umbrella without calling for the police. He wrote a work called Alms for Oblivion – about the forgotten great!

I think he was the great literary-scholastic figure of London of those just-after-gaslit days. He certainly was if to be great is to be one to whom one’s whole world resorts for assistance in technical troubles. His position was almost unassailable, but I think he had one enemy. This was Mr John Cordy Jeaffreson, a man of general letters of boisterous and combative tendencies. I don’t know how far the feud went but it must have been bitterish. Dr Garnett had written a monograph on Byron which essayed to prove that Byron was a relatively respectable person. Mr Cordy Jeaffreson replied with a violent monograph to prove that Byron wasn’t. It was called The Real Lord Byron, and made many personal attacks on the Keeper of Printed Books. Dr Garnett preserved a dignified silence. But looking through Mrs Garnett’s album soon after I came across a picture of an owl screeching from above a bust of the poet. It was labelled ‘The Real Cordy Jeaffreson’. So I suppose there had been subterranean irritation.

The other literary popes of London were, in the realms of what was then called ‘Pure Literature,’ Mr Norman Maccoll of the Athenaeum. In mixed literature it was Mr W. L. Courtney, the agreeable and rather rigolo figure who edited the Fortnightly Review and was the Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph. The Imaginative-Literary Pope was my guardian, Mr Theodore Watts Dunton, who was the Literary Editor of the Athenaeum and lived with Swinburne at a Putney villa called the Pines. There were also Literary-Religious Popes of varying denominations. Dean Farrar who wrote with the aid of Dr Garnett a Life of Christ stood for Establishment. Mr Frederick Harrison dominated Positivism, Dr Robertson Nicoll, Nonconformity. Newman I suppose still dominated Literary Catholicism.

All these people for me were sixtyish, bad-tempered, formidable, and all, with the exception of Dr Garnett, of the sort I did not like. They were united by contempt for novel writing which was perhaps why I insensibly disliked them. And the curious symptom of the time was that nearly all of them with the exception of Mr Maccoll wrote novels before they died. Mr Harrison’s contribution to fiction was a portentous classical-historical composition whose name I have forgotten, Mr Courtney’s also I have forgotten. Dean Farrar caused misery to a whole generation of schoolboys by writing a lugubrious piece of fiction called Eric, or Little by Little. Mr Watts Dunton very late in life produced Aylwin, a roman à clef, introducing most of the characters of D. G. Rossetti’s circle. It had a prodigious success. It was as if, with dying hands, they clasped at immortality.

But they were tremendously excitable. The appearance of the Athenaeum every Thursday set them scurrying to the bookstalls as today we run for news of the latest phase of a considerable murder. At every gas-lit literary tea excited whispers went round as to how in its columns one bearded and disagreeable pundit had flagellated another. And as every London Literary man had – and very likely has – no one but himself for a friend amongst his confrères, the Athenaeum was a popular journal. Its flailings might cause consternation in one poor lion’s home but it brought joy to the dens of a hundred jackals.

I did my best to destroy it and, in my more sanguine moments, have imagined that with my friends I helped it towards its disappearance. But I don’t know that I don’t regret it or that its successors have added gaiety to the literary landscape. I suppose, after having studied the matter all my life, that what is most necessary for Literature – or for any art or for any human pursuit! – is a standard. That is something to kick off from or to kick. If it is good you work according to its dictates. If it is bad you gain inspiration from fighting it.

A body like the French Academy is probably more detrimental than not to the production of any of the arts or even the sciences. But its existence does this much good, that it shows the State as honouring thought. The position of a writer, an artist, or a pure scientist is one of some dignity in France. I hear the Anglo-Saxon reader gasping with astonishment. Yet just above where I sit now writing lives a French naval officer of the rank of Vice-Admiral. The day before yesterday somebody told him I was a poet. Yesterday he got out his Panhard and drove a hundred miles or so to a forest in Savoy and with great labour of his hands and a tyre-wrench, dug up a root of asphodel. This he brought back to me that I might plant it in my garden. He said that poets ought to have asphodels in their gardens. I cannot quite figure any American admiral thinking that my friend Ezra Pound ought by the Navy to be supplied with fabulous classical plants or any British one doing as much for that distinguished British poet, Mr T. S. Eliot… But then French Academicians wear swords.

England and America have no Academies or none that you would notice. But in England of the ’nineties the body of contributors to the Athenaeum over whom ruled Mr Maccoll supplied something very similar. They wore no swords but they dipped their pens in gall when they wrote of outsiders and newcomers and in honey mixed with hyssop when they discussed the works of their confrères of the Heavies, the Quarterly or the Edinburgh Review.

As compared with the Athenaeum and the two quarterlies, the XIXth Century and the Fortnightly Review were light reading. The first was then conducted, I think, by Knowles, the second by W. L. Courtney. Knowles’ hand was heavy. Courtney’s rather light. Knowles was Olympian. I didn’t know him and never knew anyone who did. Courtney I knew fairly well. He was accessible, a bon vivant, mixed freely with gayer literati and the Smart Set, wore evening clothes well and gave admirable lunches. I don’t know that his Fortnightly did much harm to literature. It sometimes printed my poems and paid very well for them. But the harm done by Mr Courtney’s literary pages in the Daily Telegraph must have been incalculable. It heralded mediocrity to the sound of shawms and oboes: it never praised any writer of merit and originality until he had grown old and imbecile. Its influence amongst the middle classes was tremendous. The manager of Mudie’s Circulating Library in the City told me that every Friday at lunch time he was inundated by the warmer inhabitants of the Square Mile. These chief city-men of the Empire would remove their silk hats. Inside the leather linings their careful spouses would have placed the list of books they desired to read during the ensuing week. Almost invariably these lists consisted of a clipping from the Daily Telegraph, made up of the names of books recommended on Mr Courtney’s Literary Page.

It is goodwill that is needed if the Humaner Letters are to come into their own. No amount of praise from Academicians will make a bad book have a permanent life whilst ill-natured comment on a good one will delay its entry into its kingdom. Thus people die without having read it and the writer is discouraged. These are the two worst things that can happen to humanity. You may die reconciled to your fate without having seen Carcassonne but what would it be like to leave the world without having read … oh, The Playboy of the Western World? And what is the place in the hereafter reserved for the gentleman who checked the activities of Keats? For myself I would rather see the worst popular writer roll in gold than a fraudulent pill maker or a Wall Street bear. He at least is only doing what Shakespeare tried to do.

The only human activity that has always been of extreme importance to the world is imaginative literature. It is of supreme importance because it is the only means by which humanity can express at once emotions and ideas. To avoid controversy I am perfectly ready to concede that the other arts are of equal importance. But nothing that is not an art is of any lasting importance at all, the meanest novel being humanly more valuable than the most pompous of factual works, the most formidable of material achievements or the most carefully thought out of legal codes. Samuel Butler wrote an immense number of wasted words in the attempt to avenge himself for some fancied slight at the hands of Darwin. But, in spite of these follies The Way of All Flesh is of vastly more use to us today than is The Origin of Species. Darwin as scientist is as superseded as the poor alchemist in the Spessart inn: so is Butler in the same department of human futility. But The Way of All Flesh cannot be superseded because it is a record of humanity. Science changes its aspect as every new investigator gains sufficient publicity to discredit his predecessors. The stuff of humanity is unchangeable. I do not expect the lay reader to agree with me in this pronouncement but it would be better for him if he did. The world would be a clearer place to him.

From that point of view the activities of the old Athenaeum under Maccoll were unmitigatedly harmful – and singularly adroit. Mr Maccoll was to all appearances, a nearly imbecile, blond, bald, whiskered individual. He wore black gloves on every occasion indoors or out, and if you addressed him his eyes wandered round the cornice of the ceiling as if the mere fact of being spoken to had driven him into a panic. As far as I know he never wrote anything except perhaps the biography of some obscure theologian or diplomatist but his bulky figure with its black kid gloves – and its hand in addition always in the pockets of his reefer jacket as if he had doubly to hide some grotesque and shameful disease – his panic-stricken and bulky figure comes back to me as containing one of the most potent and disastrous forces of his day.

He had got his job, I think, from having been the travelling tutor of Sir Charles Dilke, the politician and owner of the journal. But having made his singular and bemused apparition at a public or private function he would return to his office and with unerring and diabolical skill would send out books to the reviewers for whom they were exactly unsuited. The policy of his journal was to regard all novels as tawdry trifles to be dismissed in a few notes. It considered that no poetry had been written or could have been written by persons born after 1820, except when Mr Watts Dunton got hold of a volume by D. G. Rossetti whose solicitor he was or by Swinburne to whom he acted as keeper. The body of the paper was given up to tremendous and sesquipidalian reviews of works with titles like: The Walcheren Expedition and the Manoeuvres in the Low Countries in three volumes, post quarto. If its reviewer could discover three misprints, the name of a Dutch village spelt wrong, two real inaccuracies and a nine which the printer had inverted in a date so that it looked like a six – then the joy of the journal was unmeasured. It pronounced in Olympian tones that this immense undertaking was completely worthless to the student of the subject and nothing could better display its infallibility. It once received a novel of mine with the words:

‘From the fact that on page 276 Mr Hueffer misspells the word herasia the reader will be able to judge of the value of his piece of fiction,’ and most novels received as summary treatment at its hands.

No: certainly if an attitude of friendship is productive of good literature the Athenaeum did little to help things. I remember hearing an immensely popular novelist recount how he paid a visit of reconciliation to Watts Dunton at the Pines, Putney. I do not think there were many pine trees there. The immensely popular novelist had once served D. G. Rossetti as factotum and bodyservant. As soon as the breath was out of Rossetti’s body Mr Watts Dunton as solicitor and executor had turned the novelist out of the house. The novelist had avenged himself by forestalling all the Athenaeum reviewers by a volume of personal recollections of the painter poet. All the reviewers of the Athenaeum had wanted to write volumes about Rossetti and all had wanted to be the first. They all eventually wrote their volumes but the novelist’s effusion took the cream off the market and established him in the public mind as being Rossetti’s best friend. I daresay he really had been. Towards the end of his life Rossetti was a pretty forlorn figure.

Well, there was a devil of a bobbery over that volume. Every Athenaeum reviewer and all poor Rossetti’s parasites and bottle washers fell on it. When Mr Maccoll thought he had given space enough to the attacks they overflowed into the most ill-assorted journals. I remember reading an attack on it in the correspondence column of the Farmers’ and Stockbreeders’ Gazette all of ten years later.

Mr Watts Dunton bided his time. The attacks on the novelist had the effect of conferring on him an extraordinary popularity. Every volume he wrote was received as if with salutes of a hundred guns by the circulating libraries. He was at once the greatest romanticist, the greatest moralist and the public figure who physically most resembled Shakespeare.

At last Mr Watts Dunton produced Aylwin. It must have had the largest sale of any novel published up to that date and for twenty years later. Its fame resounded round the world and back again and then back again. Then Mr Watts Dunton found himself secure.

He wrote to the novelist and invited him to visit the Pines in a pilgrimage of reconciliation. It was not a success.

Said the novelist, speaking very slowly as he always did, but with tones of bitterness and contempt that can seldom have been surpassed:

‘I … went … to Putney!’ I was born about two miles from there. But from the tones of the novelist’s voice you would have taken it to be an open sewer and contemptible at that. ‘I … took … a …yellow bus! … and a red … bus! … and I changed … into … a green … bus!’ All this to indicate how remote and unfashionable was Mr Watts Dunton’s residence, the novelist inhabiting a feudal castle, nothing less! … ‘I asked … a po … liceman! … And a fish … monger! … And at a cheese … shop! … And at last in a dreary … dilapidated … forbidding … Victorian villa … in a dark … gloomy … obscure … back room … poring over a … crabbed … manuscript … I saw an … ugly … yellow … little … evil … crabbed … hateful … toad … of a … hunchback… And it looked up at me and said:

‘“Blank … you left us … you left … Gabriel and me … thirty … years … ago… And since then I see from the … public … prints … that you have written a book!”

‘So,’ said the novelist; ‘I left that … little … ugly … yellow …’ and he went through all his epithets and the vicissitudes of his return journey in inverse order.

That was how they managed things, Victoria being queen.

Amongst such people the conception of the novel as a work of Art was unthinkable. Nor can I claim any greater enlightenment for myself. It was difficult in the England of those days to strike out on that path alone. I owe a great deal to Conrad. But most of all I owe to him that strong faith – that in our day and hour the writing of novels is the only pursuit worth while for a proper man. That was his strong faith and certainly it communicated itself to me.

Nothing was further from English belief in the dying years of the reign. The novel then was ‘fiction’. It had sometimes a purpose, sometimes a key. But those very facts made it by so much the less a work of art. A gentleman who wishes to enforce a moral by means of fiction colours his facts and underlines his inferences. An art is unbiased rendering.

In the days of which I am writing Meredith was writing probably Lord Amant and His Aminta at Box Hill; Thomas Hardy thinking of Tess of the d’Urbervilles at Dorchester; Mr Kipling was contributing ‘Badalia Herodsfoot’ to the Detroit Free Press and, amongst the quite young, Mr H. G. Wells was turning from his marvellous semi-scientific short stories to the consideration of social injustices and writing ‘The Wheels of Chance’ for a journal called Today. Conrad had as yet published nothing but Almayer’s Folly was about to appear. Mr Arnold Bennett was still a hack-writer of appalling and obscure energy. Mr Galsworthy, having met Conrad during a voyage to the Cape, was meditating the modest and amiable short stories and the charming novel which he eventually published under the titles respectively of A Man of Devon and The Villa Rubein – both by ‘John Sinjon’. James was accepted as a moral prodigy by moralists among the Intelligentsia: Crane was about to appear. Henry Harland was just publishing an agreeable pastiche called The Cardinal’s Snuffbox.

To say that none of these writers save Conrad and the three last named Americans had any artistic selfconsciousness at all would be to exaggerate. Certainly Mr Arnold Bennett united to an amazing business facility a really deep knowledge of French technical methods. I remember going to lunch at his Paris apartment – in 1909, I should say. He was then relatively unknown. But the leg of mutton – with the clove of garlic properly tucked into the knuckle, which Mrs Bennett cooked for my benefit in the pretty little place near the Odéon is not more clear in my memory than poor Bennett’s conversation. At first view he was queerly cockney in appearance with the cowlick at the back of his hair, his ready-made bow riding up over his collar and his protruding front teeth. But, when he spoke he immediately – and again and again – gave me the impression that he was the wisest man not only that there ever was, but that there possibly could be. And his pronouncements about writing – at any rate in conversation – seemed to me of an astounding justness. He disliked, it is true, the French from whom he had learned everything. But that seemed to be inevitable in the English Intelligentsia of his generation. Nevertheless his Old Wives’ Tale is one of the best artistic presentations of life in Paris that I have ever read.

I write thus at this point because I was only yesterday shocked to read in an English paper that I very rarely see, that his will had been proved. He must therefore be dead. I think that posterity will not willingly let his work die.

I think he was the only Englishman who ever talked to me about how books should be written though I have talked to several with singular unsuccess in awakening interest in the subject. At that date the triumphant English slogan as to writing found bent in Mr Kipling’s verse:

That is true enough as far as it goes – but the corollary should be considered. The corollary is more important than the proposition. It is that for every subject there is only one best treatment.

There was of course, even in the late ’nineties, a group of writers, mostly women, who by the shrillness of their voices or the exaggeration of their methods conferred on the Nuvvle – for you could not call it the Novel – a certain fictitious prominence. There was Mrs Mannington Caffyn who wrote as ‘Iota’ a book called, I think, The Yellow Aster and Mme Sarah Grand whose name I remember but whose titles refuse to come back to me. I think she wrote The Heavenly Twins. There was also a lady who wrote as ‘George Egerton’ a book called Keynotes. She had real talent but a tendency towards bitterness enhanced by real or fancied slights made her give up writing. Mrs Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm was also immensely read by the more serious. I could not say if it had any merit. There was also – more monumentally, Henry James’ friend, Mrs Humphry Ward – an Arnold who made you very aware of the fact.

This sudden appearance of women was an omen. The novel was a field in which till then they had made only solitary appearances. Sarah Fielding, Miss Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot occupied in the public estimation of that day about the positions of Mesdames Vigée Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann and Rosa Bonheur in painting. They were patronised and hardly regarded askance.

But the appearance of this cloud of active and energetic sisters, with their instinct for publicity, their pertinacious pronouncement of equal rights, their doctrines of liberty for the sex that till then had been calmly ignored – that was a very different pair of shoes. Rhoda Broughton, Mrs Lynn Lynton, Mrs Mona Caird, advocated in Novels, unheard of things. Miss Broughton even proclaimed that women – even young girls – should have latchkeys. You have no idea of the sensation that caused. To top it all Miss Fawcett was proclaimed Senior Wrangler – and her mother, Mrs Fawcett, the wife of the blind Postmaster-General, began the process of sitting in drawing-rooms and giving mildly as her opinion that the franchise ought to be conferred on women. Her more energetic ally, Miss Garvett Anderson even proclaimed the same doctrine more loudly in semi-public meetings. The cat was out of the bag and the epithet, the Shrieking Sisterhood, became sanctified in English Middle Class vernacular.

The result was the formidable movement which twenty years afterwards brought English public life to a deadlock. That I shall talk of when I come to it. I played in that a certain part – all that my energies and passions for the cause of the stupidly oppressed would let me. For the moment I am only concerned to point out that the despised Novel – and the Nuvvle at that! – played a very great part in giving public prominence to the movement.

That then was the general aspect of things literary at about the time when Conrad asked me to be allowed to collaborate in the novel I was then writing. It was the novel about Aaron Smith. I must have told him the plot when he came to see me at Limpsfield. I had forgotten the fact and his letter to me making the proposition seemed to come to me out of a clear sky. I can remember to this day its aspect and how I read it in bed at the Pent with the robin that always accompanied the morning tray up the stairs, sitting on a comb on the dressing table.