IF the majority of one’s friends live in Kensington and Bloomsbury, and if one is fond of going out to parties in the evening, then one should live somewhere midway between these two extremities of charm and culture. With the acceptance of each fresh invitation, I am led increasingly to appreciate that there is no stronger deterrent to one’s enjoyment of an evening than the knowledge that one has at the end of it to get to Golders Green. However agreeable the company, however profuse the hospitality, there must always come that moment when one is forced to weigh the expense of a taxi against the degree of entertainment likely to be derived from a refusal to be disturbed by the sirens of the last tube.

It is twenty-five minutes past twelve; in thirteen minutes the shutters of Warren Street Station will be down. You rise from your cushioned comfort. You inform your hostess that it is very late, that you are very busy just now, that you have to be up early in the morning, that you really feel that the time has come. But you rarely complete your explanations. “Oh, but no, really; must you?” she says. “Surely you can stay a little longer. I’m expecting ‘so-and-so’ and ‘so-and-so’ any moment now. They promised faithfully they would come. They’ll be frightfully disappointed if they find you have gone.” Your vanity arrays itself before your prudence. You remind yourself that a taxi will only cost ten shillings; you consider with what speed, with the writing of how few extra words you will be able to earn that sum next morning; you remember a copy-book platitude about a ship and a small amount of tar; you vacillate; and whichever way you decide, eventually you will come to regret your choice. If you stay it is more than likely that the owners of the distinguished names that were dangled as a bait in front of you will never come at all; or, if they do, they will arrive exhausted from some previous entertainment, and will sit silent and unapproachable in a corner. There is a strong probability that the last syphon will be discovered to be finished. Certainly by half-past one you will be in no humour to exchange with the taxi-driver those formalities of reluctance and solicitation that are forced on everyone who lives north of the Marlborough Road.

Wearily will you say to him “145 North End Road.” “Fulham?” will be his answer. “Golders Green,” will you snap back at him. “Oh, sir!” and he will tell you how late it is, how cold he is, and that he has got to get back to Balham or Brixton or Upper Clapton. One day I think I shall say “Fulham” for the mere pleasure of learning that taximeter cabriolets can be parked at Barnet or Finchley or St Albans. In the end, as always, you assure him that you will make it worth his while; and as you sink back into the ill-sprung, ill-cushioned seat you wonder what folly has persuaded you to stay that extra hour; you reflect on the disinclination with which you will settle down to work next morning; you ponder the slump of the literary market and the extreme difficulty of making it yield sustenance; you ask yourself by what right you chose to spend ten shillings on a journey that you could have made for fourpence; thus you remind yourself did the hero of your last story set in motion that process of reckless degeneration the details of which you so masterfully exposed.

Nor, though you will be the richer by nine and eightpence, will you be any less the victim of self-criticism, should you catch the 12.38 from Warren Street. As you pull wearily up the North End Road, you will be assailed by all those arguments that, had you stayed, you would in the taxi have exposed to high derision.

And it was in such a mood, after such a decision, on a wet, breathless January evening that I walked homewards past the few melancholy trees that were once part of the proud avenue down which Dick Turpin cantered plunderwards. Why, I asked myself, had I yielded to those instincts of economy that are the only heritage with which my Scots ancestry has thought prudent to endow me; why, for the sake of a few pennies had I deserted the party at the very moment when it was about to become genuinely amusing. Parties are like bonfires: they smoulder wretchedly for a couple of hours; they emit columns of malodorous, unsightly smoke; then suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly, they burst into a splendour of leaping flame. Such a transformation had been, I now felt, about to enshrine that party for all time in the memory of those present at the very moment when I had decided to desert it. Harold Scott had just arrived from the Everyman Theatre. And than Harold Scott there are few persons who can be, when he so desires, more cheering and more exhilarating. He had regaled himself, not inappropriately, as he had been that evening impersonating Feste, with a stoup of wine, had been led to the piano, and had struck the first chords of “Another Little Job for the Tombstone Maker.” It was a song of which the fame and the refrain had often reached me, the words never: and why, I asked myself, had I allowed to pass so agreeable an opportunity of making their acquaintance. In a mood, therefore, of uncomfortable self-depreciation, cautiously, so that the dog might not bark and awake the household, I opened the front door, to find on the hat cupboard below the window a letter addressed to me in a bright green envelope.

There is only one person who writes to me in bright green envelopes, and I never see that handwriting without a thrill. Whatever else may in time pass from memory, it is improbable that I shall ever forget the excitement which I felt when, for the first time, I saw that handwriting, and read in the left hand of the envelope the words “Grant Richards Ltd.” I was at Sandhurst at the time, and the day had begun unfortunately. I had appeared on early parade without a lanyard, and had been requested to appear after breakfast at Company Office. I was, indeed, waiting in the passage to be marched before the Major when the mail arrived, and among the letters flung haphazardly on the table of the ante-room was the one telling me that my first book had found a publisher. At such a moment I should with equanimity have accepted any punishment with which the authorities might have thought well to chasten me; but even then I could not help reading into my dismissal, without the reprimand that would have suspended my week-end leave, a happy augury for my book. And after six years a green envelope is still for me a symbol of romance; the miracle may be repeated. I am not of a particularly credulous nature, but I always half expect to find there some equally sensational announcement; and on this grey January evening my dissatisfaction was by the sight of it instantly and marvellously removed.

The letter contained, however, no reckless offer for film rights from America; merely an encouraging inquiry about my new novel. “Soon,” it said, “we shall be preparing our spring and summer list. Can you not at least give us the title of your book?” My dissatisfaction returned. My novel was little nearer its last chapter than it had been when I had discussed its prospects three months earlier with Grant Richards. That is the worst of a creative as opposed to a routine publisher. You have had an admirable lunch; you sit back in a deep and comfortable arm-chair; you smoke a good Egyptian cigarette; a fire is blazing merrily in front of you; your eyes are wooed pleasantly by Sancha’s frescoed decoration, by the photographs on the mantelpiece and walls of those whose names have from time to time appeared among your publisher’s announcements, and among which you are pleased to observe your own conspicuously displayed: you feel content, in harmony, reassured. You begin to talk of your new novel. In this pleasant atmosphere it becomes suddenly very real to you.

“Splendid! splendid!” says Grant Richards; “now, you’ll let me have that in time for the spring, won’t you?” He stands with his back to the fireplace, adjusts his monocle, and begins to tell you of the artist who will design the wrapper, of the cloth in which it will be bound, of the type in which it will be printed, of the special instructions he will give his travellers. You leave his study feeling that your book is finished; that in a few days it will be presented to an enraptured world. Your imagination is already carrying you to your club and opening newspaper after newspaper over which you bow before a volley of critical applause. You discover through fuddled channels of mental mathematics the extent of the fortune that is to be yours, and, on the strength of it, you proceed to order two new suits of clothes. Then you go home, and you accept an invitation to a party, and you play football, and you review a book, and you read a few manuscripts at your office, and you turn into a short story an anecdote you overheard at your club; and in six months’ time you find your novel where you left it, your tailor’s bill in front of you, and your royalties account crippled by a process of diminishing returns.

Regretfully I replaced the letter in its bright green envelope. There were still a few coals glowing in my study grate; the room was warm and kindly and sympathetic. The sky-blue walls with the deep black line running round the door and beneath the ceiling, the long low tier of bookshelves which had wooed me so often from my work, the black framed etchings of Nevinson and Wadsworth, the two water colours by Prout, the patterned tiling of the fireplace, and that dazzling screen by Roger Fry which I had bought at the Omega workshop sale with such thrilled misgiving and which has since taken its place so unobtrusively against a background of many coloured volumes; every book and ornament and picture in the room where I had wasted so many hours seemed to welcome me with a smile of affectionate indulgence. “It does not matter,” they seemed to say. “You have been very happy among us—all those hours passing from one book to another, from one chain of memories to another. You have idled away, doubtless, a deal of time in our company, but it was so that we would have you be, and for all we know you may be the richer for that idleness, richer than if you had pursued, as you had intended, with eyes riveted on the green baize of your desk, the fortunes of your really rather dismal heroine!”

Our study, because it is an expression of ourself, our taste, our personality, becomes at times as reassuring, as persuasive, as that rascally confidante of introspection—a friend whom we can persuade to view our failings through our own eyes and in terms of our own conscience.

I made up the fire, turned up the switch of my electric-lamp, drew my arm-chair within the narrow circle of its light, and paused to wonder with what book, with what companion, I should spend the hour or so before I should be tired enough to go to bed. At such an hour one cannot choose a book from the shelves haphazardly and allow it to evoke its own particular series of emotions. The book must suit the mood, must fit it as the words of a song fit the accompaniment. The varied incidents of the day, the people we have seen and spoken to, the words we have written and read, have created little by little the nature and intensity of the state of mind that is upon us at this late hour.

Slowly I ran my eye along the shelves. There in the corner of the wall were the novels, marshalled like soldiers on parade, an even row, with their plain cloth bindings and ink lettering—serviceable stuff for the most part; fashioned to supply a want; strong enough to resist a six months’ battery on the shelves of Smith’s and Boot’s and Mudie’s, and flimsy enough to sink afterwards, without too great resistance, into coverless, dog-eared decomposition. Next to them the taller, prouder, more exclusive demy octavos; the gleaming white backs of the George Moore limited edition; the slim, calf-bound Maupassants; the heavy, formidable works of reference and criticism; and beyond them the gay adventurers; the many sized, the many coloured, the many covered; plays and books of verse, and volumes of essays; “Jurgen,” Max Beerbohm, and Petronius; anthologies, large and square and squat and oblong; personal books whose shape and format have been the result of much thought; for whose sake many specimen pages, many bindings have been returned to their artificer; and on the extreme left, in the shadow of the screen, the cricket books, a shelf of reminiscence and exhortation; and below it a long row of battered Wisden’s, and beside them the faded rust-red Lillywhite’s. A small library, not more than a thousand books probably; but I would rather have a few friends than many acquaintances, and there is hardly a book there that has not some personal significance.

And yet on this particular evening I found the choice of a book by no means easy. I felt in no mood for a book that should deal exclusively with any one subject; and I searched unsuccessfully for the book that should pass casually, irresponsibly as conversation does, from one theme to another. I recalled the many evenings I have spent, tired after a day’s work or an afternoon’s football, talking, in a studio in Edwardes Square, of cricket and poetry, of life and literature and love; thinking how quickly the hours had passed as I lingered talking there. And there came back to me the memory of one particular evening when we had discussed the prospects of a new paper shortly to be presented to the world, in which we were jointly interested: Clifford Bax as editor, myself as publisher; I had been asked how happy I considered to be its prospects. But I disclaimed the rÔle of prophet.

“One can’t begin to guess,” I said; “a magazine is like a novel: it’s the expression of the editor’s personal taste. If the editor starts to include work he doesn’t like because he thinks it may succeed, he will fail as surely as the good novelist would fail if he tried to write a pot-boiler. It would be insincere. Think of Tit-Bits. There was a paper produced by a man who stated a fact and asked himself a question. A paper, he said, is a thing that a man wants to read when he’s tired at the end of the day. And the question he set himself was this: ‘What should I myself like to read under similar circumstances?’ He decided that Tit-Bits was the sort of thing that he would like to read; and as he was the average man to the extent that he was miraculously in tune with the taste of the average man, Tit-Bits was a big success. In the same way the success or failure of your paper will depend on the number of people who are sufficiently in harmony with your standard of taste to be prepared to increase their annual expenditure to the extent of one guinea. It is, it must always be, a pure gamble.”

And I remember thinking that it was doubtless for this reason that the career of the literary periodical is so invariably short-lived. It is always the same thing. The paper is launched, fresh painted, with flags gaily fluttering. At the oars are to be seen renowned sailors: men who have ventured on noble hazards in the cause of letters. There is a shout of acclamation from the shore. “Never,” they say, “has a ship been launched under happier auspices. See how it cuts the waves! See how the oars rise and fall together! Of a surety it will win through safely to the fortunate islands.”

But before the ship is many miles from land, the watchers from the land observe signs of disquiet and dissension. The flags begin to droop. The sails are slack. The oarsmen no longer work in harmony. Some of them have indeed ceased to row at all and others are making arrangements to put back to shore while the waters are still smooth. The bright speed of that first passage is forgotten. The ship sways in midsea at the mercy of tide and current. The faithful few are hard put to it to keep the boat afloat. They can make no headway, and the watchers from the land lose interest and give their ears to the tales of some newer seaman who brings tidings by another route of merchandise and treasure and perilous journeyings.

A sad story, but one whose details have grown so familiar as to cease almost to sadden us. We talk of the literary market. How, we ask, can a private enterprise hope to enter the lists against the vested interests of printer and publisher and bookseller. If the editor has a number of friends, he can produce two or three good numbers. But if his contributors are paid at all, they receive remuneration at a rate so low as to amount practically to insult. And however much the artificers of the new world, the evangelists of the dawn of brotherhood, may speak of the sacred trusts of art, a man is loath to sell for three guineas a commodity for which elsewhere he can obtain fifteen. The editor of such a paper receives from an “established author” only those compositions that cannot be satisfactorily sold in the open market. For two reasons may such compositions be unmarketable. Either they are bad, or they are unsuited for family consumption. Indeed, the student of literary history will find that most of the contributions to such periodicals of a lasting Æsthetic value are of a nature to justify their inclusion in “the index”; which is unfortunate commercially; for one does not particularly care to spend six shillings on a production that cannot be decently left about the house.

Unquestionably this is one of the main cross-currents that hinder the progress of the brave adventurers. But there are others, and I am not certain that the greatest of them is not the lack of harmony between the editor and the public. The magazine is a thing with which to pass the evening hours of half-past nine to eleven; and the man whose day has been spent among books, whose eyes are tired with the sight of print, would prefer, when his work is finished, to dance or play bridge or go to a theatre or a party. The dinner-jacket and white shirt into which we change after our evening bath is the symbol of a change of atmosphere. We have put away the traffic of the day’s business; and those of us whose livelihood depends on letters find it difficult to establish contact with the civil servant and the bank manager who is content after dinner to settle down happily before a solid scholarly review.

The editor has put his paper to bed; he leans back exhausted in his chair. “Thank God, that’s over,” he says; “and thank God,” he adds, “that I haven’t got to read it.”

That is the problem for an editor. If he prints what he would himself like to read at such a time, his choice will, as likely as not, fail to satisfy the man who has spent his day beside the telephone and whose ears are weary with listening to applications for an overdraft; while, if he prints what he feels his public would like to read, if he substitutes a standard of decision other than “I like” or “I don’t like it,” his paper will cease to be an expression of his own personality, and will be insincere. The ideal editor shares the tastes of the public that he is addressing.

And it was, I think, on that same evening that Clifford Bax asked me how the paper that I should myself most eagerly welcome would be constituted; and I answered that the paper would have to take the place of a friend, and that I should wish for such a paper as would reproduce the essence of the evening that we had spent together.

“We have talked,” I said, “much of cricket, of the great matches that we have seen and read of. We have wondered how we could persuade the M.C.C. to arrange a single-wicket match between Hearne and Woolley. We have fought old battles again, and have drawn weapons that have long lain rusty on the shelf. And we have spoken of our own achievements as may with complete propriety two such indifferent performers as ourselves. We need make no display of modesty. Our figures prove conclusively enough our quality. We do not apply to our cricket the standards that we apply to Hendren’s. We deal kindlily with one another, as reviewers do with those friendly, worthless little volumes of verse that do no one any harm and may quite conceivably cause innocent entertainment to their authors and their friends. So in my paper there could be some such talk of cricket.

“And as we have spoken of the technique of writing, and of the literary market, on these subjects should I commission articles. We have repeated a number of anecdotes, slightly scandalous ones for the most part, and the short story in my paper would not be sophisticated or obscure or modern: a piece of straightforward, concrete narrative that would aim less at vigour than at charm. I would have it a pretty, sentimental thing, with here and there a suggestion of wantonness, of riot. There would be personalities; for the peeping Tom that is in all of us clamours for satisfaction. And we pass a great deal of our time discussing the peculiarities of our acquaintances.

Each number should contain a character sketch of some public figure, and I should not object if it were malicious. It is a sign of vulgarity, I am told, to feel curious about the routine of other people’s lives. A number of critics dealt very harshly with Mrs Watts-Dunton’s little book on Swinburne. He was a poet, they said, a great poet. His work remains. That is all that matters. What purpose is served by this trivial gossip about boots and comforters and garters. Personally I found her book admirably entertaining. I felt, after reading it, that I knew Swinburne better than I had before. Routine is, after all, the framework of a man’s life; and it is interesting for a writer to learn how others work; at what time they write; how many words they write a day; whether they work steadily throughout the year, or in short bursts of intense concentration. It may dispel the illusion to watch a play from the wings of a theatre instead of from the stalls. But there are some things about the showman that can be only learnt behind the scenes. At any rate, that is the sort of stuff that I would like to read in my paper.”

The fire had begun to burn merrily in the grate; the warm light fell caressingly in a glowing haze on books and chairs and pictures; and I turned towards it from the book-shelves that had become to me inhospitable, wondering why one’s interests should be kept separate in literature if they are not so kept in life; why one book should be devoted exclusively to fiction, another to criticism, another to reminiscence, and another to sport. Would it not be for a change amusing to find unity of theme and subject abandoned for a unity of tone. And suddenly I knew in what words I should reply to Grant Richards in the morning.

“My dear Richards,” I should write, “I am afraid that I have no news for you about my novel. But I shall be sending you quite soon, I think, a book that you will, I hope, like a very great deal better. It will not be fiction, though there will be short stories in it, nor a sporting book, though there will be there both football and cricket: there will be much talk of books, but it will not be literary criticism. Indeed, I do not know to what shelf the librarian at the Times Book Club will consign it.”

It would be a sort of cousin to my dream paper; one feature only would be omitted. There would be no malicious personalities. There are some things that one may like to read, but does not care to write. For the sake of a few pennies and a few paragraphs, I would not run the risk of injuring a friendship.

And, lying back in the depths of my arm-chair, watching the dusky shadows of the firelight move over the ceiling as waves do on a calm day in mid-channel, I thought how pleasant would be the writing of such a book that would pass as conversation does from books to life, and from life to cricket, and so back to books again. How pleasant to let the pen follow the fancy of the anecdote, to let impression flow into impression, to snatch away the blinkers of the technique of formal narrative and criticism. Tired and well content and drowsy I let my thoughts wander out of my control on their lazy, haphazard journey.