a volume with
other pieces. He wrote at once, thanking me for my opinion, and it was
only by accident at a later date, when I happened to ask him what he
was doing with the story, that he told me he had destroyed it. I
expressed deep regret that he had done so; and he said with a smile
that it was probably rather a foolish impulse that had decided him to
make away with it. "The fact is," he said, "that you wrote very kindly
about it, but you had had it in your hands so long, that I felt somehow
that it could not have interested you--it really doesn't matter," he
added, "I don't think it was at all successful." I apologised very
humbly, and explained the circumstances. "Oh, please don't blame
yourself in any way," he said, "I have not the least shadow of
resentment in my mind about it. There is something wrong about my work;
it doesn't interest people. I suppose it is that I can't let myself
go." An interesting conversation followed, and he told me more than he
ever told me before or since about himself. He confessed to being so
critical of his own work, that his table-drawers were full of
unfinished MSS. His usual experience was to begin a piece of work
enthusiastically; to plan it all out, and to work at first with zest.
"Then it begins to get all out of shape," he said, "there is no go
about it; it all loses itself in subtleties and complexities of motive;
one thing trips up another, and at last it all gets so tangled that I
put it aside; if I could follow the track of one strong and definite
emotion, it would be all right--but I am like the man in the story who
changes the cow for the horse, and the horse for the pig, and the pig
for the grindstone; and then the grindstone rolls into the river." He
seemed to take it all very philosophically, and I ventured to say so.
"Yes," he said, "I have learnt at last that that is how I am made; but
I have been through a good many agonies of disgust and discouragement
about it in old days--it is the same with everything I have touched.
The bits of work that I have completed have all been done in a rush--if
the mood lasts long enough, I am all right--and once or twice it has
just lasted. I am like a swimmer," he went on, "who can only swim a
certain distance; and if I judge the distance rightly, I can reach the
point I desire to reach; but I generally judge the distance wrong; and
half-way across I am seized with a sudden fright, and struggle back in
terror."

By one of the stra