In 1900 he emancipated himself from the editorial chair and withdrew into the country to live quietly and economically and devote himself to ambitions that he knew he could realize. He had tried his strength in “A Man from the North,” and settled down now, deliberately and confidently, to become a novelist and a dramatist; he was out for success in both callings, and did not mean to be long about getting it, if not with the highest type of work, then with the most popular. For he was too eminently practical to have artistic scruples against giving the public what it wanted if by so doing he might get into a position for giving it what he wanted it to have. He expresses the sanest, healthfulest scorn for the superior but unsaleable author who cries sour grapes and pretends to a preference for an audience fit though few. “I can divide all the imaginative authors I have ever met,” he has written, “into two classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or religious life. And indeed, since the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.” And he proceeds to show from his letters how keenly Meredith desired to be popular, and praises him for compromising with circumstance and turning from the writing of poetry that did not pay to the writing of prose in the hope that it would. I doubt whether he would sympathize with any man who starved for art’s sake when he might have earned good bread and meat in another calling. The author should write for success, for popularity; that is his creed: “he owes the practice of elementary commonsense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.”