The little creature turned its head a trifle to one side as though listening for the fall of nuts.

“Ah, indeed!” said the traveller:  “You, whose voice is so clear, is this all you get to eat?”

The little blind creature smiled . . . .

It is a twilight forest in which we writers of fiction wander, and once in a way, though all this has been said before, we may as well remind ourselves and others why the light is so dim; why there is so much bad and false fiction; why the demand for it is so great.  Living in a world where demand creates supply, we writers of fiction furnish the exception to this rule.  For, consider how, as a class, we come into existence.  Unlike the followers of any other occupation, nothing whatever compels any one of us to serve an apprenticeship.  We go to no school, have to pass no examination, attain no standard, receive no diploma.  We need not study that which should be studied; we are at liberty to flood our minds with all that should not be studied.  Like mushrooms, in a single sight we spring up—­a pen in our hands, very little in our brains, and who-knows-what in our hearts!

Few of us sit down in cold blood to write our first stories; we have something in us that we feel we must express.  This is the beginning of the vicious circle.  Our first books often have some thing in them.  We are sincere in trying to express that something.  It is true we cannot express it, not having learnt how, but its ghost haunts the pages the ghost of real experience and real life—­just enough to attract the untrained intelligence, just enough to make a generous Press remark:  “This shows promise.”  We have tasted blood, we pant for more.  Those of us who had a carking occupation hasten to throw it aside, those who had no occupation have now found one; some few of us keep both the old occupation and the new.  Whichever of these courses we pursue, the hurry with which we pursue it undoes us.  For, often we have only that one book in us, which we did not know how to write, and having expressed that which we have felt, we are driven in our second, our third, our fourth, to warm up variations, like those dressed remains of last night’s dinner which are served for lunch; or to spin from our usually commonplace imaginations thin extravagances which those who do not try to think for themselves are ever ready to accept as full of inspiration and vitality.  Anything for a book, we say—­anything for a book!

From time immemorial we have acted in this immoral manner, till we have accustomed the Press and Public to expect it.  From time immemorial we have allowed ourselves to be driven by those powerful drivers, Bread, and Praise, and cared little for the quality of either.  Sensibly, or insensibly, we tune our songs to earn the nuts of our twilight forest.  We tune them, not to the key of:  “Is it good?” but to the key of:  “Will it pay?” and at each tuning the nuts fall fast!  It is all