Whitehall. I should have been guilty of a simple surrender to
despair if I had not forced myself to make this discovery. I cannot
help saying, with all my love for the literature of my own day, that
it has an evil side to it which none know except the millions of
sensitive persons who are condemned to exist in great towns. It
might be imagined from much of this literature that true humanity and
a belief in God are the offspring of the hills or the ocean; and by
implication, if not expressly, the vast multitudes who hardly ever
see the hills or the ocean must be without a religion. The long
poems which turn altogether upon scenery, perhaps in foreign lands,
and the passionate devotion to it which they breathe, may perhaps do
good in keeping alive in the hearts of men a determination to
preserve air, earth, and water from pollution; but speaking from
experience as a Londoner, I can testify that they are most
depressing, and I would counsel everybody whose position is what mine
was to avoid these books and to associate with those which will help
him in his own circumstances.

Half of my occupation soon came to an end. One of my editors sent me
a petulant note telling me that all I wrote he could easily find out
himself, and that he required something more "graphic and personal."
I could do no better, or rather I ought to say, no worse than I had
been doing. These letters were a great trouble to me. I was always
conscious of writing so much of which I was not certain, and so much
which was indifferent to me. The unfairness of parties haunted me.
But I continued to write, because I saw no other way of getting a
living, and surely it is a baser dishonesty to depend upon the
charity of friends because some pleasant, clean, ideal employment has
not presented itself, than to soil one's hands with a little of the
inevitable mud. I don't think I ever felt anything more keenly than