he craft. And this one does not get, because the great
men are mostly too much occupied in producing their own masterpieces to
have the time or inclination to appraise others. Yet I am sure there is
a vile fibre of ambition lurking in me, interwoven with my nature,
which I cannot exactly disentangle. I very earnestly desire to do good
and fine work, to write great books. If I genuinely and critically
approved of my own work, I could go on writing for the mere pleasure of
it, in the face of universal neglect. But one may take it for granted
that unless one is working on very novel and original lines--and I am
not--the good qualities of one's work are not likely to escape
attention. The reason why Keats, and Shelley, and Tennyson, and
Wordsworth were decried, was because their work was so unusual, so new,
that conventional critics could not understand it. But I am using a
perfectly familiar medium, and there is a large and acute band of
critics who are looking out for interesting work in the region of
novels. Besides I have arrived at the point of having a vogue, so that
anything I write would be treated with a certain respect. Where my
ambition comes in is in the desire not to fall below my standard. I
suppose that while I feel that I do not rate the judgment of the
ordinary critic highly, I have an instinctive sense that my work is
worthy of his admiration. The pain I feel is the sort of pain that an
athlete feels who has established, say, a record in high-jumping, and
finds that he can no longer hurl his stiffening legs and portly frame
over the lath. Well, I have always held strongly that men ought to know
when to stop. There is nothing more melancholy and contemptible than to
see a successful man, who has brought out a brood of fine things,
sitting meekly on addled eggs, or, still worse, squatting complacently
among eggshells. It is like the story of the old tiresome Breton farmer
whose wife was so annoyed by his ineffective fussiness, that she clapt
him down to sit on a clutch of stone eggs for the rest of his life. How
often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a
series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor,
dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up
backgrounds. I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave
enough to tell me when I did that. But now that the end seems to have
come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat. I