ise or sit down
or turn pale or look pleased without the author having known about it
long before the act was performed. It was as if the author could count
the very hairs on the heads of his people. "Just like God!" Henry had
said to himself when he had finished reading the article.... He had
tried to make a plan, and, after much labour, had completed one; but it
was useless to him, for when he came to write out the story, his
characters kicked it aside and insisted on behaving in some other way
than he had planned that they should behave. It was as if they had taken
their destinies into their own hands and insisted on living their lives
in accordance with their own wishes instead of living them in accordance
with his.... It was fortunate then that he began to read "Tristram
Shandy," for when he saw how Sterne's pen, refusing to obey him, had
filled some of his pages with curly lines and dots and confusions, had
even declined to fill a chapter at all, impudently skipping it, he
realised that authors are but creatures in the hands of some force that
wills them to create things which they cannot control and sometimes
cannot understand.

Writing his book had given him one pleasure. On the day on which he
wrote the last word of it, he felt joy. Before he began to write, he had
read in Forster's "Life of Dickens" that the great novelist had parted
from his characters with pain. Henry parted from his characters with
pleasure. "Thank God," he said, as he put down his pen, "I've finished
with the brutes!"

He had enjoyed reading the story in its finished state, and when he had
packed the manuscript into his portmanteau, he had felt that the story
was good, and had sat in a chair dreaming of the success it would make
and the praise he would receive for it. He tried to calculate the number
of copies that would be sold, basing his calculations on the total
population of the British Isles. "There are over forty millions of
people in England and Wales alone," he said to himself, "and another
ten millions, say, in Scotland and Ireland ... about fifty millions in
all. I ought to sell a good many copies ... and then there's America!"
He thought that ten per cent. of the population might buy the story, and
believed that his estimate was modest until he remembered that ten per
cent. of fifty millions is five millions!...

And that made him laugh. Even he, in his wildest imaginings, did not
dream of selling five million copies of his