not from any lack of
substance, style, merit, or quality that my books failed to reach a
really large public; but, rather, that they were without a certain
vulgarity which would commend them to the multitude. If not precisely
that they were too good, I doubtless thought that, whilst good in
every literary sense, they happened to be couched in a vein only to be
appreciated by the subtler minds of the minority. The critics
certainly helped me to sustain this congenial theory; and it was not
until long afterwards that I accepted (with more, perhaps, of sadness
or sourness than philosophy) the conclusion that if my work never had
appealed to a big audience, the simple reason was that it was not big
enough to reach so far. It was perhaps, within the limits of literary
judgment, to some extent praiseworthy. And it won praise. I should
have been content.

I certainly was not content, and I dare say the life I led was too far
removed from the normal, both socially and from a health standpoint,
to permit of content for me, quite apart from any question of personal
temperament or idiosyncrasy. I worked and I slept, and that was all.
That is probably not enough for the purchase of healthy content; at
all events, where the work is sedentary and productive of strain upon
the mind, nerves, and emotions.

As society is constituted in England to-day, a man of my sort may be
almost as completely isolated, socially, in a place like Dorking as he
would expect to be in the middle of the Sahara. The labouring sort of
folk, the trades-people, and the landowners and county families, each
form compact social microcosms. The latter class, in normal
circumstances, remains not so much indifferent to as unaware of the
existence of such people as myself, as bachelors in country-town
lodgings. The other two compact little worlds had nothing to offer me
socially. And so, socially, I had no existence at all.

The same holds good, to a great extent, of my sort of person
practically anywhere to-day. (The latter part of the nineteenth
century produced a quite large number of people who belonged to no
recognised class or order in our social cosmos.) But it is most
noticeable in the case of such a man living in a country town. In
London, or Paris, or New York, there is no longer any question of a
man being in or out of society, since there is no longer any compact
division of the community which forms society. Rather, the community
divides itself into