For, whatever happens, the love of writing stays even with the sorriest of hacks, the man who can afford to write only occasionally the thing he wants to write, who has to produce magazine fiction, and reviews and paragraphs, so that he may buy the leisure in which to write his verses or his unmarketable stories. We stint ourselves in one way so that we may squander ourselves in another. And, here again, we can find an analogy in the courtesan, in the woman who sells part of herself to one man that she may give herself more fully to another. In a love freely given she recovers her self-respect. “What does it matter,” she thinks, “what I do as long as I can make that one man happy. And because I allow a few favours to that rich old Jew, I can give to that other what he could have never got from those pink and white, those simpering, bread-and-butter misses.” It is in the same spirit that the purveyor of cheap fiction finances the publication of his verses. We are of the same race and the same blood, speaking the same language, having no part in the world’s business, in what is serviceable to the commercial machinery of life. Even if what we produce is a marketable commodity, even if we bring money into the pockets of publishers and promoters and actor managers, we are still the merchants of entertainment. For a while we have ceased to be rogues and vagabonds. We do not dine, as strolling players did, in the servant’s kitchen. We are, for the moment, almost respectable. We belong to clubs. We wear no distinctive dress. It is indeed the fashion for the artist of the day to look perfectly ordinary, to be, in fact, like everyone else, with short hair and servant problems. To-day Congreve would be content to style himself a dramatist and be a member of the Garrick Club. It is a phase. It is only the surface of life that alters. Another turn of the wheel and the artist will return to his own people. And he will stroll from one town to another, with minstrels and actors and courtesans, a merry, careless company, vagabonds of fortune, useless and ornamental. And once more, perhaps, there will be real play-acting and English singing and a-telling of simple tales. XI