that, or the other
formal test they may open for themselves a new career. Not a few such
persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there are warehouse clerks
privately preparing (without any means or prospect of them) for a
call to the Bar, drapers' assistants who 'go in' for the preliminary
examination of the College of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable who
desire to procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy.
Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers for
cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended to appeal to
them; they pay from sixpence to half-a-crown an hour--rarely as much as
the latter sum. Occasionally it happened that Harold Biffen had three or
four such pupils in hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from
his large experience in this sphere.

Then as to his authorship.--But shortly after the discussion of Greek
metres he fell upon the subject of his literary projects, and, by no
means for the first time, developed the theory on which he worked.

'I have thought of a new way of putting it. What I really aim at is an
absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I
understand it, is a new one; I don't know any writer who has treated
ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness. Zola writes
deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the
place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. I want to deal with the
essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of that vast majority of
people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance. Dickens understood
the possibility of such work, but his tendency to melodrama on the one
hand, and his humour on the other, prevented him from thinking of it. An
instance, now. As I came along by Regent's Park half an hour ago a man
and a girl were walking close in front of me, love-making; I passed them
slowly and heard a good deal of their talk--it was part of the situation
that they should pay no heed to a stranger's proximity. Now, such
a love-scene as that has absolutely never been written down; it was
entirely decent, yet vulgar to the nth power. Dickens would have made
it ludicrous--a gross injustice. Other men who deal with low-class life
would perhaps have preferred idealising it--an absurdity. For my
own part, I am going to reproduce it verbatim, without one single
impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest
reporting. The result will be something u