The result was a quite enchanting humiliation.  One paper reviewed it kindly, in a little paragraph, and said it was useful; another said that the writer used the word “one” much too frequently; while only one of my friends even acknowledged it.  It is pleasant to begin at the bottom again, and find that no one will listen, even to a very careful bit of writing by one who has at all events had a good deal of practice, and who did his very best!

2

This set me thinking over my literary adventures, and I think they may be interesting to other authors or would-be authors; and then I wish to go a little further, and try to say, if I can, what I believe the writing of books really to be, why one writes, and what one is aiming at.  I have a very clear idea about it all, and it can do no harm to state it.

I was brought up much among books and talk about books.  Indeed, I have always believed that my father, though he had great practical gifts of organisation and administration, which came out in his work as a schoolmaster and a bishop, was very much of an artist at heart, and would have liked to be a poet.  Indeed, the practice of authorship has run in my family to a quite extraordinary degree.  In four generations, I believe that some twenty of my blood-relations have written and published books, from my cousin Adelaide Anne Procter to my uncle Henry Sidgwick.  When we were children we produced little magazines of prose and poetry, and read them in the family circle.  I wrote poetry as a boy at Eton, and at Cambridge as an undergraduate; and at the end of my time at Cambridge I produced a novel, which I sent to Macmillan’s Magazine, of which Lord Morley was then editor, who sent it back to me with a kind letter to say that it was sauce without meat, and that I should not be proud of the book in later life if it were published.

Then as an undergraduate I began an odd little book called Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, a morbid affair, which was published anonymously, and, though severely handled by reviewers, had a certain measure of success.  But then I became a busy schoolmaster, and all I did was to write laboured little essays, which appeared in various magazines, and were afterwards collected.  Then I took up poetry, and worked very hard at it indeed for some years, producing five volumes, which very few people ever read.  It was a great delight, writing poetry, and I have masses of unpublished poems.  But I do not grudge the time spent on it, because I think it taught me the use of words.  Then came two volumes of stories, mostly told or read to the boys in my house, with a medieval sort of flavour—­ The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset.

I also put together a little book on Tennyson, which has, I believe, the merit of containing all the most interesting anecdotes about him, and I also wrote the Rossetti in the Men of Letters Series, a painstaking book, rather rhetorical; though the truth about Rossetti cannot be told, even if it could be known.