It is a pleasant fact that it is impossible to concentrate one’s mind on anything without in time becoming wiser, and in the course of years the author became quite a skilful critic of novels.  From the first he had allowed his reading to colour his impressions of life, and had obediently lived in a world of blacks and whites, of heroes and heroines, of villains and adventuresses, until the grateful discovery of the realistic school of fiction permitted him to believe that men and women were for the most part neither good nor bad, but tabby.  Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style.  He perceived that some combinations of words were illogical, and that others were unlovely to the ear; and at the same time he acquired a vocabulary and a knowledge of grammar and punctuation that his earlier education had failed to give him.  He read new novels at his writing-table, and took pleasure in correcting the mistakes of their authors in ink.  When he had done this, he would hand them to his wife, who always read the end first, and, indeed, rarely pursued her investigation of a book beyond the last chapter.

We buy knowledge with illusions, and pay a high price for it, for the acquirement of quite a small degree of wisdom will deprive us of a large number of pleasant fancies.  So it was with the author, who found his joy in novel-reading diminishing rapidly as his critical knowledge increased.  He was no longer able to lose himself between the covers of a romance, but slid his paper-knife between the pages of a book with an unwholesome readiness to be irritated by the ignorance and folly of the novelist.  His destructive criticism of works of fiction became so acute that it was natural that his unlettered friends should suggest that he himself ought to write a novel.  For a long while he was content to receive the flattering suggestion with a reticent smile that masked his conviction that there was a difference between criticism and creation.  But as he grew older the imperfections in the books he read ceased to give him the thrill of the successful explorer in sight of the expected, and time began to trickle too slowly through his idle fingers.  One day he sat down and wrote “Chapter I.” at the head of a sheet of quarto paper.

It seemed to him that the difficulty was only one of selection, and he wrote two-thirds of a novel with a breathless ease of creation that made him marvel at himself and the pitiful struggles of less gifted novelists.  Then in a moment of insight he picked up his manuscript and realised that what he had written was childishly crude.  He had felt his story while he wrote it, but somehow or other he had failed to get his emotions on paper, and he saw quite clearly that it was worse and not better than the majority of the books which he had held up to ridicule.