r me evidence that,
after the first six months of my stay in Howard Street, my work began
to tend more and more towards fiction, and away from newspaper
articles. My dealings at this time brought me more closely into touch
with magazines than with newspapers. I became more concerned with
human emotions and character, but especially with emotions, than with
those more abstract or again more matter-of-fact themes which had
served me in the writing of newspaper articles.

This may have helped me in some ways, since it meant that my name was
fairly frequently seen in print now. But the point I have in mind is,
that I take this tendency in my work to have been an indication of the
particular phase of character development through which I was passing
at the time. It was at this period that I indulged myself in
occasional dreams of fame. I do not know that my conceit made me
offensive in any way. I hardly think it went so far. But, in my inmost
heart, I believe I judged myself to be a creative artist of note. I
certainly had a lively imagination, a good deal of fluency--too much,
indeed--as a writer, and a considerable amount of emotional capacity
and sympathy.

Later in life I often wondered, not without depression, why I no
longer seemed able to move people, to influence them in a given
direction, or to arouse their enthusiasm, with the same facility which
I had known in my twenties. I see now the reasons of this. My
emotional capacity spent itself rapidly in writing and living; and
with its exhaustion (and the development of my critical faculties)
came an attenuation, a drying up, so to say, of the quality of facile
emotional sympathy, which in earlier years had made it easy for me to
attract, prepossess, or influence people at will.

Given some practical organising qualities which I certainly did not
possess, I apprehend that at this period I might have engineered
myself into a considerable vogue of popularity as a writer of fiction.
A little later I might almost have slid into the same position, even
in the absence of the practical qualities aforesaid, but for the trend
of circumstances which then became highly antagonistic to that sort of
development.

But I note with some interest that the stories I took to writing at
this period were highly emotional in tone, and somewhat exotic in
their setting. The exotic settings may have been due in part to the
fact that I had travelled, and yet more I fancy to revulsion from