can pursue his aims as a writer with entire indifference to the
half-yearly statements of his publisher. In respect of the various
employments of trade and commerce, the case is still plainer. Men must
needs go where the best wages may be earned; and under modern
conditions of life it is as natural that population should flow toward
cities, as that rivers should seek the sea. These matters will be more
particularly discussed later on; it is enough for me to explain at
present that I was one of those persons for whom life in a city was an
absolute necessity.

It is not until one is tied to a locality that its defects become
apparent. A street that interests the mind by some charm of populous
vivacity when it is traversed at random and without object, becomes
inexpressibly wearisome when it is the thoroughfare of daily duty. My
daily duty took me through a long stretch of Oxford Street, which is a
street not altogether destitute of some real claim to gaiety and
dignity. At first I was ready to concede this claim, and even to
endorse it with enthusiasm; but from the day when I realised that
Oxford Street conducted me, by a force of inevitable gravitation, to a
desk in an office, I began to loathe it. The eye became conscious of a
hundred defects and incongruities; the tall houses rose like prison
walls; the resounding tumult of the streets seemed like the clamour of
tormented spirits. For the first time I began to understand why
imaginative writers had often likened London to Inferno.

I well remember by what a series of curious expedients I endeavoured to
evade these sensations. The most obvious was altogether to avoid this
glittering and detested thoroughfare by making long detours through the
meaner streets which lay behind it; but this was merely to exchange one
kind of aesthetic misery which had some alleviations for another kind