One of the miseries of my present situation is that it is all so
intangible, and to the outsider so incomprehensible. There is no
particular reason why I should write. I do not need the money; I
believe I do not desire fame. Let me try to be perfectly frank
about this; I do not at all desire the tangible results of fame,
invitations to banquets, requests to deliver lectures, the
acquaintance of notable people, laudatory reviews. I like a quiet
life; I do not want monstrari digito, as Horace says. I have had a
taste of all of these things, and they do not amuse me, though I
confess that I thought they would. I feel in this rather as
Tennyson felt--that I dislike contemptuous criticism, and do not
value praise--except the praise of a very few, the masters of the
craft. And this one does not get, because the great men are mostly
too much occupied in producing their own masterpieces to have the
time or inclination to appraise others. Yet I am sure there is a
vile fibre of ambition lurking in me, interwoven with my nature,
which I cannot exactly disentangle. I very earnestly desire to do
good and fine work, to write great books. If I genuinely and
critically approved of my own work, I could go on writing for the
mere pleasure of it, in the face of universal neglect. But one may
take it for granted that unless one is working on very novel and
original lines--and I am not--the good qualities of one's work are
not likely to escape attention. The reason why Keats, and Shelley,
and Tennyson, and Wordsworth were decried, was because their work
was so unusual, so new, that conventional critics could not
understand it. But I am using a perfectly familiar medium, and
there is a large and acute band of critics who are looking out for
interesting work in the region of novels. Besides I have arrived at
the point of having a vogue, so that anything I write would be