many years ago, we are never to meet again in this world.

V
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 post-cards. 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--till next week, as like 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 anemic 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" target="_blank" title="ad.精美地；微妙地">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 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 aggrandizement, can spare no time for a
detached, impersonal glance upon them selves.

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 among 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 imagined

phrases--even he has his place among kings, demagogues, priests,
charlatans, dukes, giraffes, cabinet ministers, Fabians,

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

constellations of a universe whose amazingspectacle is a moral
end in itself.

Here I perceive (without speaking offense) 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
among 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