BUT I doubt even if there had been some employment for it, whether that particular enthusiasm would have survived very long the return to peace conditions. We were only sympathetic to the Communists because their views on the war tallied with our own. We should have soon realised how wide is the divergence between their interests and ours. For Communism is, or so it would seem to me, a sort of insurance policy taken out by the routine worker against the creative worker. The routine worker, the man who knocks nails into the soles of boots, who adds up columns of figures in a ledger, who pushes a trolley up a slope, who does tolerably well a thing that some fifty thousand other people could do equally well if they so chose, is protecting himself against the ingenuity that contrives a machine that will take the place of twenty such as he. He plays for safety. He enters a business as office boy; licks the backs of stamps; he passes into the counting-house and sits on a high stool. He makes no blots in his ledgers, and puts the right invoices in the right envelopes. He is allotted a room to himself and becomes a junior manager. At the age of forty-five he is drawing a salary of £450 a year. At the age of sixty-six he is given a pension in return for faithful service. He knows his limitations. He accepts and fulfils orders. Of himself he produces nothing. He knows that anyone else could do his job as well as he can. He retains his position through industry and punctuality. He appeals to the humanity of his directors. He hopes in time to fill, in his firm, much the same position as a butler in a baronial establishment. He has weathered many storms. He has become an institution. But because he knows his limitations he is frightened, frightened of the ravages of creative business, the amalgamations of one firm with another firm, the hard, purposeful nature of young blood, of the introduction of new ideas. He knows that, after a certain age, he has no value in the open market. And so he would limit the scope of private enterprise. He would prevent big men from launching schemes whose failure will involve thousands in disaster. The State must supervise and guarantee big business. It must control the avenues of precarious livelihood. It is not envy of the rich that drives the routine worker to Communism. As long as he is paid an adequate and steady wage he does not mind what money his employer makes or loses. But he knows as long as there is big business, as long as tigers hunt and are hunted in the high jungle of finance, so long will markets rise and fall, and so long will there be slumps and crashes and a cutting of staffs and wages; so long will the law of demand and supply be operative. Communism is the armour of the feeble against the adventurous; of safety against daring.

And the artist, more perhaps than anyone, is the soldier of fortune.

He has no armour but his talents and his confidence. He makes his own terms with life. He stands in the open market. And he will stand there whatever party may be in power, whatever changes may alter the surface and the circumstance of life. He belongs to that community which was designated once “as rogues and vagabonds.” He is of the bastardy of Feste and Touchstone.

We are entertainers: we who paint pictures, or tell stories, or enact history. And, if we amuse you, you pay us well; and if we fail, you seek elsewhere diversion. Six hundred years ago minstrels and strolling players came by night to the great banqueting hall, and before the leaping fire told their stories and played their play and sang their song. And, if they gave pleasure, there was good food and wine and a roof above them and gold in their purses for the morrow’s journey. And if they failed to please there were blows and curses and a night of rain. To-day a novel is printed upon paper, bound in cloth, and scattered over three continents. There are double-column advertisements in the Sunday papers; there are paragraphs and reviews and luncheon parties. There are agents and royalties and contracts. The writing of a story is a trade that provides many thousands of people with employment. But it is only the surface of life that alters, the principle is the same. A man is telling a story: men and women respond to its humour, or its pathos, or its beauty. They pay richly for their entertainment. But the moment that the story-teller ceases to amuse he is deserted. There are some writers who are pleased to think of themselves as prophets and reformers, who object to the social stigma of their profession. But because they are merchants of hard words they are entertainers none the less. People like to be abused now and then. It is agreeable to sit after a good dinner before a leaping fire, with a decanter of whisky at one’s elbow, and read of the approaching overthrow of Israel. The sense of danger titivates the jaded palate. People do not wish always to be wrapped in cotton wool; they like to be frightened, to be “Grand Guignoled” now and then. To be told that their sins are of such blackness gives them a pleasing sense of their own importance. It is a sensation worth the buying.

It would be hardly, I think, too fanciful to draw a parallel between the artist and the courtesan. The real courtesan, I mean; not the poor drabs who trudge by night down Shaftesbury Avenue. One thinks of “Skittles” driving down Hyde Park in the sixties, to hold a levee by the Achilles statue; “Skittles” who broke hearts and homes and fortunes; Skittles who outlived her friends, her beauty, and her generation to die three years ago unremembered. There is more than a slight resemblance between the life of such a one and of the artist. Like her, he has no social status; like her, he is bought and used and flung away. He pleases as she pleases, for a while, through freshness and vitality and novelty; and those that have had their entertainment, feel no after sense of obligation. As long as he so pleases he is granted a wide licence to flout the conventions with which society has thought it wise to protect itself. Society knows that he is not of her, and she can afford to wait. Everything is forgiven to an “artistic temperament” as long as that temperament is the property of a skilful entertainer. The artist can make what hash he likes of his private life. He can refuse to be accepted without his mistress: and, on the whole, the public prefers its entertainer not to be domesticated like itself. A popular novelist, who had contributed a serial to a Sunday newspaper, was asked to provide the editor with a photograph. He sent a pleasant snap of himself, in his garden, with his wife and children. The snap was returned. “Our readers,” the editor said, “would prefer not to think of you as a married man.”

Much the same licence is accorded to the courtesan, as long as she is beautiful. She can, if she chooses, be rude to men who ask her for a dance. She can make fun of them in public. She rampages through life in the pride of her youth; she can pick and choose. Her charm and her beauty are her capital. She makes a bargain with the world of routine and wealth, the world that sells cotton and builds empires, the industrious, unflagging world that asks in its spare time to be amused. To such a one the world says: “Here are two pictures. Make your choice. You may stay all your life a suburban girl. You will go to subscription dances and get kissed furtively in the passage by smarmy, over-dressed young men, who will boast to their companions of your surrender. One of them you will select to take you to a cinema, and, as a payment, you will allow him to hold your hand. And to one of these young men you will eventually become engaged. You may be very much in love with him, or you may be seeking an escape from the uncongenial surroundings of your home. But in either case the result at the end of three years’ time will be the same. The blue bird will have flown away. You will be a mother and a housewife. You will have settled down to the humdrum of suburban matrimony. Your husband will no longer be satisfied with your company in the evening. He will bring in with him those tedious friends of his who were once your dance partners, those tedious friends grown smarmier and softer with the years. And you will sit sewing in a corner while they discuss the political situation and the latest murder case. There will be not a great deal of money. You will be clothed, not dressed. Your prettiness will soon pass, because you will be unable to give it the right setting of georgette and crÊpe-de-chine. And you will gaze enviously at the gay windows of Oxford Circus. Before you are thirty, before one of your hairs is grey, your personal life will be at an end. And you will never have lived. You will be safe, that is all. There will be food to eat, a fire to sit before, a roof above you when you have come to the weakening hours of age.

“And this is what we bring you in exchange. We bring you the opportunity of living to their full the best years of your life, eighteen to thirty-three. You will dance night after night at the Savoy. Poiret will design your dresses; you will drive through the London streets in the deep comfort of a Daimler; you will meet men of the world, brilliant, interesting men: barristers, financiers, doctors, artists. You will live romance. You will love deeply, you will suffer deeply. You will pass from the extreme of happiness to the extreme of pain. You will love no longer than love pleases. You will be the swinging pendulum. You will never rest. You will fulfil yourself.”

“And afterwards?”

The world shrugs its shoulders.

“That,” it says, “is your concern. You have had those years. It depends on whether you are clever and far-seeing. You may save much money; you may marry; you may become a respectable dowager. Or, with your connection, you may open, very profitably to yourself, a manicure establishment. But that is your affair. If you are wasteful and improvident, life may be very hard to you. That is, we repeat, not part of our bargain. We offer you those fifteen years.”

And is that offer so very different from the offer that the world makes the artist? “You have talent,” the world says. “We found that first book of yours to a high degree diverting. We are content that you should amuse us for a while if you so choose.” And are the alternatives so very different? The future presents no less dark a menace to the novelist. He knows that, sooner or later, he will out-write himself, that the public will get tired of his tricks, that he will cease to be original and they will clamour for something new. If he has saved money during his days of fortune, or if he has managed to establish himself in some sound commercial concern, in an Editor’s chair, or on the board of a publishing house, well and good. But if not, if he has saved no money and is at the end of his resources, he is driven to the equivalent of the courtesan’s dreary tramp down Jermyn Street and Piccadilly to hack ill-paid journalism in the columns of the provincial press. And the artist is in exchange offered the same wages. He is offered the opportunity of living to its full the best years of his life. He has money, he is well known. He is not fettered, as his contemporaries are, with office hours. He is free to do what he likes, go where he likes, make love where he likes.

Much has been written of the amours of poets, and novelists, and actors. They have earned a publicity far beyond the range, possibly also beyond the desire, of the financier’s. And the artist has been always inclined to attribute the dimensions of his success to his personal magnetism, to his powers of finesse and intuition. But it would be more modest, certainly more generous, in him to return gratitude for the unparalleled opportunities for gallantry with which the circumstances of his life provide him. Far let it be from me to disparage in any way the triumphal progress of certain distinguished and notorious persons. I would merely point out the disadvantages under which their less gifted rivals are conducting operations.

Consider the position of the city man. His daily routine is a matter of general knowledge. In order to carry on his business a great number of people must know where he is at any given moment to be found. His secretary should even know where he is lunching. If the telephone may be, and it doubtless is, of considerable assistance in the happy ordering of an intrigue, it is of no less service in the detection of it. If a wife rings up her husband in the afternoon and finds him away she begins to wonder. She knows, too, at what hour he leaves his office in the evening. If he is not home half an hour later her wonderment increases. He has either to resort to a lunch in a cabinet particulier or he has to manoeuvre with endless deception a week-end, or a business trip to Leeds. Every assignation has to be skilfully arranged. There is small scope for the sudden, the unpremeditated moment. It is as machine-made as the hosiery he handles.

But if it is hard to conduct an intrigue, it must be infinitely harder to start one. Even nowadays the majority of women are under some sort of masculine protection; there is either a husband or a father, or a fiancÉ or “an uncle.” And at the only hours when he himself is free that masculine protection is in operation, a fact that the realistic novelist is in the habit of overlooking. One wonders sometimes how they get started, these affairs of which we read every other day in the evening papers. At haphazard, possibly. Adjacent bedrooms at the end of the passage in a country house. A husband detained in town: a sudden opportunity seized at eagerly—the sort of thing, though, that happens more frequently in literature than in life. Certainly not an accident in the hope of which a conscientious Casanova would be prepared to delay action. Either that, though, or else a purely business proposition. A lunch at the Carlton grill, and over the liqueur the offer of a flat and five hundred pounds a year. Paul Bourget is reported to have remarked that the only folk worth writing about were those with large incomes; because it was only people without employment who were able to develop themselves naturally, which sounds foolish enough; but as adultery is the invariable background for Latin fiction, it was possibly some such predicament that Bourget had in mind.

Often enough, indeed, a man’s love-life is a spectacle to the novelist for melancholy contemplation. In the years that should overbrim with kisses, he has neither the money nor the leisure for much love-making. He is economically and temporally dependent. He indulges in occasional flirtations that he dare not pursue, believing it unfair to make love to a decent girl if he is not in a position to propose marriage to her. Occasionally he buys pleasure in some fourth-floor flat in Piccadilly and feels rather “a dog” about it. He marries when he is thirty-four, and the next three years are the most vital, the most personal he will ever know. Rapture passes; and having once drunken, he would drink again. He begins to sow his wild oats; wild oats must be sown at some time in a man’s life, and the casual bartering of sensation is of no significance. But by the time a man is thirty-seven he knows too much and has seen too much to become the light-hearted philanderer he might have been in the earlier twenties. A woman writer—I think it was Rebecca West—wrote somewhere something to the effect that it was not the bad man, not the philanderer against whom a young girl should be warned. The Jurgens and Casanovas and Macheaths have received so much happiness from women that they repay happiness with happiness. They are the sun that shines and leaves, after its setting, a sense of gratitude. It is against the spiteful man, against the man who has been unsuccessful with women that a young girl should be protected. That is the man who will be unkind to her. And I think it is a bad thing when a man on the verge of middle-age sets out deliberately to sow wild oats. He will be taking revenge somewhere for his starved boyhood. The chance to make the most of the years best worth having is the greatest offer that the world makes to the young artist whom it would turn into an entertainer.

But, even so, I doubt whether this bribe would overcome the instinct of preservation that cautions us to play for safety, were there not that other, that more powerful inducement, the love of one’s work for its own sake.

About a year ago there was a symposium in The Strand in which a number of novelists were invited to name that book of theirs of which they had most enjoyed the writing. Several writers said that they had not enjoyed writing any of them; that they had enjoyed the planning, the revision, but that the actual writing was hard and unpleasant work. I wonder. I suppose they were sincere. But I was glad to see the other day in an American paper an article by Hugh Walpole saying that he continued writing simply because he “loved it—it, telling stories.”

Money and leisure and gratified ambition are prettily coloured toys; but they are flavour, they are decoration; there does not come from them the deep, the sustaining satisfaction of a hard task tackled and carried through. It does not matter whether one writes well or badly: there is the same joy of creation, the same pleasure in watching the blank page fill before one’s eyes, in counting up the number of words that are the outcome of a morning’s work. There is the physical sense of effort; the physical weariness to be fought against, when one’s brain is eager with ideas, but one’s wrist is stiff and tired—when one longs to drop the pen and sink into an armchair. But one doesn’t drop the pen; one goes on, and it is worth it.

It is bowling up hill, against the wind, to keep the runs down while the man at the other end gets wickets. You have bowled ten overs; your legs and arms and back are tired. For sixty balls you have kept that length outside the off stump, just too short to drive, just too far up to cut. You have altered your pace a little; you have bowled first from the far end of the crease; then from close up against the wicket. Little tricks to keep him playing, to break his patience, so that he may make the fatal mistake at the other end against the man with wind and slope to help him. And you are tired. It is heart-breaking, the Fabius Cunctator game. You long to chuck the ball over to the captain, to say, “I’m tired, I can’t go on.” But you know that he cannot trust his other and better bowler to keep on at that length ball: you know that the wickets must come from the top end. You stick to it. You bowl another over and you get your second wind.

There is no such thing as work without physical exhaustion, and writing is physically the most exhausting thing I know, far more exhausting than the hardest game of rugger, or the longest day in the field. It is such an emptying of oneself. I tried dictating once, but I did not like it. I got through a terrific lot of work in a very little while. But I did not like it. I missed the sight of the white page slowly turning black, of the rising pile of paper at my side, and the long struggle of the brain against the growing weariness of wrist and fingers.

For, whatever happens, the love of writing stays even with the sorriest of hacks, the man who can afford to write only occasionally the thing he wants to write, who has to produce magazine fiction, and reviews and paragraphs, so that he may buy the leisure in which to write his verses or his unmarketable stories. We stint ourselves in one way so that we may squander ourselves in another. And, here again, we can find an analogy in the courtesan, in the woman who sells part of herself to one man that she may give herself more fully to another. In a love freely given she recovers her self-respect. “What does it matter,” she thinks, “what I do as long as I can make that one man happy. And because I allow a few favours to that rich old Jew, I can give to that other what he could have never got from those pink and white, those simpering, bread-and-butter misses.” It is in the same spirit that the purveyor of cheap fiction finances the publication of his verses.

We are of the same race and the same blood, speaking the same language, having no part in the world’s business, in what is serviceable to the commercial machinery of life. Even if what we produce is a marketable commodity, even if we bring money into the pockets of publishers and promoters and actor managers, we are still the merchants of entertainment. For a while we have ceased to be rogues and vagabonds. We do not dine, as strolling players did, in the servant’s kitchen. We are, for the moment, almost respectable. We belong to clubs. We wear no distinctive dress. It is indeed the fashion for the artist of the day to look perfectly ordinary, to be, in fact, like everyone else, with short hair and servant problems. To-day Congreve would be content to style himself a dramatist and be a member of the Garrick Club. It is a phase. It is only the surface of life that alters. Another turn of the wheel and the artist will return to his own people. And he will stroll from one town to another, with minstrels and actors and courtesans, a merry, careless company, vagabonds of fortune, useless and ornamental. And once more, perhaps, there will be real play-acting and English singing and a-telling of simple tales.