Fortunate, in those days, were the few to whom demobilisation meant leisure to continue long-interrupted work; more fortunate the yet smaller company of those who were financially independent of the necessity to join in the hunt for paid appointments. The doctrine that a man's best work is done at the spurring of poverty has lost its former popularity: those to whom creation is a fiercely urgent need will express themselves in sickness and in health, at leisure and in the brief intervals of annihilating labour, when they have to beg for food and to borrow for ink and paper; those who are enervated by comfort and made slothful by luxury have not been impelled by love of creation for its own sake but by creation as a means to soft living and easy applause. The true artist works in spite of himself, the quality of his work is conditioned not by the public market but by his private conscience; and poverty is not so much a spur to his spiritual ambition as a thorn in his material flesh, distracting his mind with squalid cares when he would fain keep it serene and tempting him to youthful prostitution that he may later have the means of living in virtue. "Pot-boiling," writing to order and self-advertising are more commonly the fruit of poverty than is the accomplishment of a masterpiece. For even the most conscientious, some degree of independence is essential for the free development and play of their genius. Not only must they be secured freedom from interruption and from competing demands on their energy, but they must enjoy full liberty to work as they choose without regarding the blandishments of publishers or the exhortations of critics: the one would restrict them to working a single rich vein until it was exhausted, the other would lop or lengthen them until they fitted the Procrustean bed of the day's fashion. Rightly or wrongly, the creative artist claims to choose his own theme and to treat it in his own way; sooner or later the veering standards of criticism will concentrate upon him a massed attack to resist which he needs the fortitude of independence. At one moment the long novel, pardoned in Dickens, is condemned in De Morgan; at another the novel-sequence, praised in Balzac, is deplored in Compton Mackenzie; at another, again, the social and political world which Thackeray and Disraeli painted is put out of bounds for Galsworthy. In some years the drab life of grey skies and mean streets is commended as the novelist's single hope of salvation; in others he is urged to study Conrad and the Russians, as Prince Florizel advised the young men in holy orders to study Gaboriau. This urgency the novelist withstands at his peril, for his impenitence is likely to be rebuked with a magisterial reminder that the critics have spoken about this sort of thing before.