One day he found a copy of “The Improbable Marquis” in the Charing Cross Road, and was glancing through it with absent-minded interest, when a voice at his elbow said, “I shouldn’t buy that if I were you, sir.  It’s no good!” He looked up and saw a wild young man, with bright eyes and an untidy black beard.  “But it’s mine; I wrote it,” cried the author.  The young man stared at him in dismay.  “I’m sorry; I didn’t know,” he blurted out, and faded away into the crowd.  The author gazed after him wistfully, regretting that he had not had presence of mind enough to ask him to lunch.  Perhaps the young man could have told him how he ought to write his second book.

For somehow or other, at the very moment when his literary position seemed most secure in the eyes of his wife and his friends, the author had lost all confidence in his own powers.  He shut himself up in his study every night, and was supposed by an admiring and almost timorous household to be producing masterpieces, when in reality he was conducting a series of barren skirmishes between the critical and the creative elements of his nature.  He would write a chapter or two in a fine fury of composition, and then would read what he had written with intense disgust.  He felt that his second book ought to be better than his first, and he doubted whether he would even be able to write anything half so good.  In his hour of disillusionment he recalled the anonymous critic who had treated “The Improbable Marquis” with such scant respect, and he wrote to him asking him to expand his judgment.  He was prepared to be wounded by the answer, but the form it took surprised him.  In reply to his temperate and courteous letter the critic sent a postcard bearing only five short words—­“Why did you write it?”

This was bad manners, but the author was sensible enough to see that it might be good criticism, especially as he found some difficulty in answering the question.  Why had he written a book?  Not for money, or for fame, or to express a personality of which he saw no reason to be proud.  All his friends had said that he ought to write a novel, and he had thought that he could write a better one than the average.  But he had to admit that such motives seemed to him insufficient.  There was, perhaps, some mysterious force that drove men to create works of art, and the critic had seen that his book had lacked this necessary impulse.  In the light of this new theory the author was roused by a sense of injustice.  He felt that it should be possible for anyone to write a good book if they took sufficient pains, and he set himself to work again with a savage and unproductive energy.