s which he seemed to formulate out of the back of
his head for the defence of his swift verdicts. 'Now why?' I would say,
when the art of the novelist seemed to me to fail, or when the poet's
condemnation appeared extreme. 'Because so-and-so _must_ happen,' he
would answer. He was always right. He grasped with masterly strength the
operation of the two fundamental factors in the novelist's art--the
sympathy and the 'tragic mischief.' If these were not working well, he
knew by the end of the first chapters that, however fine in observation,
or racy in humour, or true in pathos, the work as an organism must fail.

It was an education in literary art to sharpen one's wits on such a
grindstone, to clarify one's thought in such a stream, to strengthen
one's imagination by contact with a mind that was 'of imagination all
compact.'

Now, down to that time, though I had often aspired to the writing of
plays, it had never occurred to me that I might write a novel. But I
began to think of it then as a remote possibility, and the immediate
surroundings of our daily life brought back recollection of the old
Cumberland legend. I told the story to Rossetti, and he was impressed by
it, but he strongly advised me not to tackle it. The incident did not
repel him by its ghastliness, but he saw no way of getting sympathy into
it on any side. His judgment disheartened me, and I let the idea go back
to the dark chambers of memory. He urged me to try my hand at a Manx
story. '"The Bard of Manxland"--it's worth while to be that,' he
said--he did not know the author of 'Foc's'le Yarns.' I thought so, too,
but the Cumbrian 'statesman' had begun to lay hold of my imagination. I
had been reviving my recollection and sharpening my practice of the
Cumbrian dialect which had been familiar to my ear, and even to my
tongue, in childhood, and so my Manx ambitions had to wait.

Two years passed, the poet died, I had spent eighteen months in daily
journalism in London, and was then settled in a little bungalow of three
rooms in a garden near the beach at Sandown in the Isle of Wight. And
there, at length, I began to write my first novel. I had grown impatient
of critical work, had persuaded myself (no doubt wrongly) that nobody
would go on writing about other people's writing who could do original
writing himself, and was resolved to live on little and earn nothing,
and never go back to London until I had written something of some sort.
As nearly as I