The Moon and Sixpence | Page 7

I will continue to write
moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my
own entertainment.


Chapter III
But all this is by the way.
I was very young when I wrote my first book. By a lucky chance it excited attention, and
various persons sought my acquaintance.
It is not without melancholy that I wander among my recollections of the world of letters
in London when first, bashful but eager, I was introduced to it. It is long since I
frequented it, and if the novels that describe its present singularities are accurate much in
it is now changed. The venue is different. Chelsea and Bloomsbury have taken the place
of Hampstead, Notting Hill Gate, and High Street, Kensington. Then it was a distinction
to be under forty, but now to be more than twenty-five is absurd. I think in those days we
were a little shy of our emotions, and the fear of ridicule tempered the more obvious
forms of pretentiousness. I do not believe that there was in that genteel Bohemia an
intensive culture of chastity, but I do not remember so crude a promiscuity as seems to be
practised in the present day. We did not think it hypocritical to draw over our vagaries the
curtain of a decent silence. The spade was not invariably called a bloody shovel. Woman
had not yet altogether come into her own.
I lived near Victoria Station, and I recall long excursions by bus to the hospitable houses
of the literary. In my timidity I wandered up and down the street while I screwed up my

courage to ring the bell; and then, sick with apprehension, was ushered into an airless
room full of people. I was introduced to this celebrated person after that one, and the kind
words they said about my book made me excessively uncomfortable. I felt they expected
me to say clever things, and I never could think of any till after the party was over. I tried
to conceal my embarrassment by handing round cups of tea and rather ill-cut
bread-and-butter. I wanted no one to take notice of me, so that I could observe these
famous creatures at my ease and listen to the clever things they said.
I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and rapacious eyes,
who wore their clothes as though they were armour; and of little, mouse-like spinsters,
with soft voices and a shrewd glance. I never ceased to be fascinated by their persistence
in eating buttered toast with their gloves on, and I observed with admiration the
unconcern with which they wiped their fingers on their chair when they thought no one
was looking. It must have been bad for the furniture, but I suppose the hostess took her
revenge on the furniture of her friends when, in turn, she visited them. Some of them
were dressed fashionably, and they said they couldn't for the life of them see why you
should be dowdy just because you had written a novel; if you had a neat figure you might
as well make the most of it, and a smart shoe on a small foot had never prevented an
editor from taking your "stuff." But others thought this frivolous, and they wore "art
fabrics" and barbaric jewelry. The men were seldom eccentric in appearance. They tried
to look as little like authors as possible. They wished to be taken for men of the world,
and could have passed anywhere for the managing clerks of a city firm. They always
seemed a little tired. I had never known writers before, and I found them very strange, but
I do not think they ever seemed to me quite real.
I remember that I thought their conversation brilliant, and I used to listen with
astonishment to the stinging humour with which they would tear a brother-author to
pieces the moment that his back was turned. The artist has this advantage over the rest of
the world, that his friends offer not only their appearance and their character to his satire,
but also their work. I despaired of ever expressing myself with such aptness or with such
fluency. In those days conversation was still cultivated as an art; a neat repartee was more
highly valued than the crackling of thorns under a pot; and the epigram, not yet a
mechanical appliance by which the dull may achieve a semblance of wit, gave
sprightliness to the small talk of the urbane. It is sad that I can remember nothing of all
this scintillation. But I think the conversation never settled down so comfortably as when
it turned to the details of the trade which was the other side of