I resumed at twelve, and then in about two minutes it was one o'clock and lunch time. After lunch, rest for the weary and the digesting; slumber; another stroll. Arrival of the second post on a Russian pony that cost fifty shillings. Tea, and perusal of the morning paper. Then another spell of work, and the day was gone, vanished, distilled away. And about five days made a week, and forty-eight weeks a year. No newspaper-proprietors, contributors, circulations, placards, tape-machines, theatres, operas, concerts, picture-galleries, clubs, restaurants, parties, Undergrounds! Nothing artificial, except myself and my work! And nothing, save the fear of rent-day, to come between myself and my work! It was dull, you will tell me. But I tell you it was magnificent. Monotony, solitude, are essential to the full activity of the artist. Just as a horse is seen best when coursing alone over a great plain, so the fierce and callous egotism of the artist comes to its perfection in a vast expanse of custom, leisure, and apparently vacuous reverie. To insist on forgetting his work, to keep his mind a blank until the work, no longer to be held in check, rushes into that emptiness and fills it up--that is one of the secrets of imaginative creation. Of course it is not a recipe for every artist. I have known artists, and genuine ones, who could keep their minds empty and suck in the beauty of the world for evermore without the slightest difficulty; who only wrote, as the early Britons hunted, when they were hungry and there was nothing in the pot. But I was not of that species. On the contrary, the incurable habit of industry, the itch for the pen, was my chiefest curse. To be unproductive for more than a couple of days or so was to be miserable. Like most writers I was frequently the victim of an illogical, indefensible and causeless melancholy; but one kind of melancholy could always be explained, and that was the melancholy of idleness. I could never divert myself with hobbies. I did not read much, except in the way of business. Two hours reading, even of Turgenev or Balzac or Montaigne, wearied me out. An author once remarked to me; "_I know enough. I don't read books, I write 'em_." It was a haughty and arrogant saying, but there is a sense in which it was true. Often I have felt like that: "I know enough, I feel enough. If my future is as long as my past, I shall still not be able to put down the tenth part of what I have already acquired." The consciousness of this, of what an extraordinary and wonderful museum of perceptions and emotions my brain was, sustained me many a time against the chagrins, the delays, and the defeats of the artistic career. Often have I said inwardly: "World, when I talk with you, dine with you, wrangle with you, love you, and hate you, I condescend!" Every artist has said that. People call it conceit; people may call it what they please. One of the greatest things a great man said, is:--