In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense

that literaryambition had never entered the world of his
imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite

an inexplicable event. In my own case I cannot trace it back to
any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and

hold to. The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity
for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational

stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen at any rate was there, and
there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps a pen (the

cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of
penny stamps and halfpenny postcards. In fact, this was the

epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made
the reputation of a novel or two. And I too had a pen rolling

about somewhere--the seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of
a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned

attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency permitted, of
letters begun with infinitereluctance and put off suddenly till

next day--tell next week as likely as not! The neglected,
uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and

under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm,
in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the

beastly thing gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It
might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so. My

landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed
it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner of

approaching her domestic duties. Or it might even be resting
delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and

when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which would have
discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me! "Never

mind. This will do."
O days without guile! If anybody had told me then that a devoted

household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the

fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had
touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never

deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief. There are
imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice, too wild for

indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile. Perhaps, had that
seer of the future been a friend, I should have been secretly

saddened. "Alas!" I would have thought, looking at him with an
unmoved face, "the poor fellow is going mad."

I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world
where the journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of

heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does so under the
prophetical management of the Meteorological Office, but where

the secret of human hearts cannot be captured either by prying or
praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my

friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I
should turn into a writer of tales.

To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a
fascinating pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the

surprises so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable but
curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not

weary easily of it. I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who
rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who

really never rest in this world, and when out of it go on
fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last

habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither
am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking

forward to some aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a
detached, impersonal glance upon themselves.

And that's a pity. They are unlucky. These two kinds, together
with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those

unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great
French writer has put it) "the whole universevanishes into blank

nothingness," miss, perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is
short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions. The

ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel
and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith,

hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish,
that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be

ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely
spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if

you like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for
despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end

in themselves. The rest is our affair--the laughter, the tears,
the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a

steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that's
our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every

phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may
be our appointed task on this earth. A task in which fate has

perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with
a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder,

the haunting terror, the infinitepassion and the illimitable
serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the

sublime spectacle.
Chi lo sa? It may be true. In this view there is room for every

religion except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and
cloak of arid despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every

fair dream, for every charitable hope. The great aim is to
remain true to the emotions called out of the deep encircled by

the firmament of stars, whose infinite numbers and awful
distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or

the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities of
sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter

nothing at all.
The casualquotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem

full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a
purelyspectacularuniverse, where inspiration of every sort has

a rationalexistence, the artist of every kind finds a natural
place; and amongst them the poet as the seer par excellence.

Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome
task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy of a

place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps
laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry. Yes! Even

he, the prose artist of fiction, which after all is but truth
often dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of

imaged phrases--even he has his place amongst kings, demagogues,
priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, Cabinet Ministers, Fabians,

bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, Kaffirs, soldiers,
sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and constellations

of a universe whose amazingspectacle is a moral end in itself.
Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a

subtle expression, as if the cat were out of the bag. I take the
novelist's freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the

exclamation, "That's it! The fellow talks pro domo."
Indeed it was not the intention! When I shouldered the bag I was

not aware of the cat inside. But, after all, why not? The fair
courtyards of the House of Art are thronged by many humble

retainers. And there is no retainer so devoted as he who is
allowed to sit on the doorstep. The fellows who have got inside

are apt to think too much of themselves. This last remark, I beg
to state, is not malicious within the definition of the law of

libel. It's fair comment on a matter of public interest. But
never mind. Pro domo. So be it. For his house tant que vous

voudrez. And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify
my existence. The attempt would have been not only needless and

absurd, but almost inconceivable, in a purelyspectacular
universe, where no such disagreeable necessity can possibly

arise. It is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at
some length in these pages): "J'ai vecu." I have existed,

obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe
Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to

exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of
the French Revolution. "J'ai vecu", as I apprehend most of us

manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms of
destruction by a hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear,

and perhaps my soul also, but not without some damage here and
there to the fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the

ages, of the race, of the group, of the family, colourable and
plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, and even by

the silences and abstentions surrounding one's childhood; tinged
in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the

inherited traditions, beliefs, or prejudices--unaccountable,
despotic, persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.

And often romantic!. . .The matter in hand, however, is to keep