All these cardinal points being settled, I passed to the business of choosing a subject. Need I say that I chose myself? But, in obedience to my philosophy, I made myself a failure. I regarded my hero with an air of "There, but for the grace of God, goes me!" I decided that he should go through most of my own experiences, but that instead of fame and a thousand a year he should arrive ultimately at disillusion and a desolating suburban domesticity. I said I would call my novel "In the Shadow," a title suggested to me by the motto of Balzac's "Country Doctor"—"For a wounded heart, shadow and silence." It was to be all very dolorous, this Odyssey of a London clerk who—— But I must not disclose any detail of the plot.
So I sat down, and wrote on a fair quarto sheet, "In the Shadow," and under that, "I." It was a religious rite, an august and imposing ceremonial; and I was the officiating priest. In the few fleeting instants between the tracing of the "I" and the tracing of the first word of the narrative, I felt happy and proud; but immediately the fundamental brain-work began, I lost nearly all my confidence. With every stroke the illusion grew thinner, more remote. I perceived that I could not become Flaubert by taking thought, and this rather obvious truth rushed over me as a surprise. I knew what I wanted to do, and I could not do it. I felt, but I could not express. My sentences would persist in being damnably Mudiesque. The mots justes hid themselves exasperatingly behind a cloud. The successions of dots looked merely fatuous. The charm, the poetry, the distinction, the inevitableness, the originality, the force, and the invaluable rhythmic contour—these were anywhere save on my page. All writers are familiar with the dreadful despair that ensues when a composition, on perusal, obstinately presents itself as a series of little systems of words joined by conjunctions and so forth, something like this—subject, predicate, object, but, subject, predicate, object. Pronoun, however, predicate, negative, infinitive verb. Nevertheless, participle, accusative, subject, predicate, etc., etc., etc., for evermore. I suffered that despair. The proper remedy is to go to the nearest bar and have a drink, or to read a bit of "Comus" or "Urn-Burial," but at that time I had no skill in weathering anti-cyclones, and I drove forward like a sinking steamer in a heavy sea.
And this was what it was, in serious earnest, to be an author! For I reckon that in writing the first chapter of my naturalistic novel, I formally became an author; I had undergone a certain apprenticeship. I didn't feel like an author, no more than I had felt like a journalist on a similar occasion. Indeed, far less: I felt like a fool, an incompetent ass. I seemed to have an idea that there was no such thing as literature, that literature was a mirage, or an effect of hypnotism, or a concerted fraud. After all, I thought, what in the name of common sense is the use of telling this silly ordinary story of everyday life? Where is the point? What is art, anyway, and all this chatter about truth to life, and all this rigmarole of canons?
I finished the chapter that night, hurriedly, perfunctorily, and only because I had sworn to finish it. Then, in obedience to an instinct which all Grub Street has felt, I picked out the correct "Yellow Book" from a shelf and read my beautiful story again. That enheartened me a little, restored my faith in the existence of art, and suggested the comfortable belief that things were not perhaps as bad as they seemed.
"Well, how's the novel getting on?" my friend the wall-paper enthusiast inquired jovially at supper.
"Oh, fine!" I said. "It's going to be immense."
Why one should utter these frightful and senseless lies, I cannot guess. I might just as well have spoken the precise truth to him, for his was a soul designed by providence for the encouragement of others. Still, having made that remark, I added in my private ear that either the novel must be immense or I must perish in the attempt to make it so.
In six months I had written only about thirty thousand words, and I felt the sort of elation that probably succeeds six months on a treadmill. But one evening, in the midst of a chapter, a sudden and mysterious satisfaction began to warm my inmost being. I knew that chapter was good and going to be good. I experienced happiness in the very act of work. Emotion and technique were reconciled. It was as if I had surprisingly come upon the chart with the blood-red cross showing where the Spanish treasure was buried. I dropped my pen, and went out for a walk, and decided to give the book an entirely fresh start. I carefully read through all that I had written. It was bad, but viewed in the mass it produced on me a sort of culminating effect which I had not anticipated. Conceive the poor Usual at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and the region of the Sublime at the top: it seemed to me that I had dragged the haggard thing halfway up, and that it lay there, inert but safe, awaiting my second effort. The next night I braced myself to this second effort, and I thought that I succeeded.
"We're doing the trick, Charlie," Edmund Kean whispered into the ear of his son during a poignant scene of "Brutus." And in the very crisis of my emotional chapters, while my hero was rushing fatally to the nether greyness of the suburbs and all the world was at its most sinister and most melancholy, I said to myself with glee: "We're doing the trick." My moods have always been a series of violent contrasts, and I was now just as uplifted as I had before been depressed. There were interludes of doubt and difficulty, but on the whole I was charmed with my novel. It would be a despicable affectation to disguise the fact that I deemed it a truly distinguished piece of literature, idiosyncratic, finely imaginative, and of rhythmic contour. As I approached the end, my self-esteem developed in a crescendo. I finished the tale, having sentenced my hero to a marriage infallibly disastrous, at three o'clock one morning. I had laboured for twelve hours without intermission. It was great, this spell; it was histrionic. It was Dumas over again, and the roaring French forties.
Nevertheless, to myself I did not yet dare to call myself an artist. I lacked the courage to believe that I had the sacred fire, the inborn and not-to-be-acquired vision. It seemed impossible that this should be so. I have ridiculed the whole artist tribe, and, in the pursuit of my vocation, I shall doubtless ridicule them again; but never seriously. Nothing is more deeply rooted in me than my reverence for the artistic faculty. And whenever I say, "The man's an artist," I say it with an instinctive solemnity that so far as I am concerned ends all discussion. Dared I utter this great saying to my shaving-mirror? No, I repeat that I dared not. More than a year elapsed before the little incident described at the commencement of these memoirs provided me with the audacity to inform the author of "In the Shadow" that he too belonged to the weird tribe of Benjamin.