ut very like the
Ferrand of real life--the figures of fiction soon diverge from their
prototypes.

The first draft of "The Island Pharisees" was buried in a drawer; when
retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque
string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These
two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that
its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling
heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of
Shelton. Three times be wrote that novel, and then it was long in
finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann's in
1904. That was a period of ferment and transition with me, a kind of
long awakening to the home truths of social existence and national
character. The liquor bubbled too furiously for clear bottling. And
the book, after all, became but an introduction to all those following
novels which depict--somewhat satirically--the various sections of
English "Society" with a more or less capital "S."

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the
emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other,
getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the
mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's
readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this
side than of that. My early work was certainly more emotional than
critical. But from 1901 came nine years when the critical was, in the
main, holding sway. From 1910 to 1918 the emotional again struggled for
the upper hand; and from that time on there seems to have been something
of a "dead beat." So the conflict goes, by what mysterious tides
promoted, I know not.

An author must ever wish to discover a hapless member of the Public who,
never yet having read a word of his writing, would submit to the ordeal
of reading him right through from beginning to end. Probably the effect
could only be judged through an autopsy, but in the remote case of
survival, it would interest one so profoundly to see the differences,
if any, produced in that reader's character or outlook over life. This,
however, is a consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for
there is a limit to human complaisance. One will never know the exact
measure of one's infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not