that we should
probably have had something not unlike Erewhon sooner or later, even
without the Russian lady and Sir F. N. Broome, to whose promptings,
owing to a certain diffidence which never left him, he was perhaps
inclined to attribute too much importance. But he would not have
agreed with this view at the time; he looked upon himself as a
painter and upon Erewhon as an interruption. It had come, like one
of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn, pestering him and
refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily
shape. It was only a little one, and he saw no likelihood of its
having any successors. So he satisfied its demands and then,
supposing that he had written himself out, looked forward to a
future in which nothing should interfere with the painting.
Nevertheless, when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded
to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of The
Fair Haven, which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and
preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author, John
Pickard Owen. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are
two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages
in forming the MS. of The Fair Haven. To have published this book
as by the author of Erewhon would have been to give away the irony
and satire. And he had another reason for not disclosing his name;
he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the authorship of
Erewhon was satisfied, the weekly sales fell from fifty down to only
two or three. But, as he always talked openly of whatever was in
his mind, he soon let out the secret of the authorship of The Fair
Haven, and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition.

One result of his submitting the MS. of Erewhon to Miss Savage was
that she thought he ought to write a novel, and urged him to do so.
I have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with
the idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to
ascertain whether he was likely to succeed with a novel. The result
seems to have satisfied him, for, not long after The Fair Haven, he
began The Way of All Flesh, sending the MS. to Miss Savage, as he
did everything he wrote, for her approval and putting her into the
book as Ernest's Aunt Alethea. He continued writing it in the
intervals of other work until her death in February, 1885, after
which he did not touch it. It was published in 1903 by M