intended to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to
half a crown an hour - rarely as much as the latter sum. Occasionally it
happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in hand, and
extraordinary stories he could draw from his large experience in this sphere.
    Then as to his authorship. - But shortly after the discussion of Greek
metres he fell upon the subject of his literary projects, and, by no means for
the first time, developed the theory on which he worked.
    »I have thought of a new way of putting it. What I really aim at is an
absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I understand
it, is a new one; I don't know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar-life
with fidelity and seriousness. Zola writes deliberate tragedies; his vilest
figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. I
want to deal with the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of that
vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance. Dickens
understood the possibility of such work, but his tendency to melodrama on the
one hand, and his humour on the other, prevented him from thinking of it. An
instance, now. As I came along by Regent's Park half an hour ago a man and a
girl were walking close in front of me, love-making; I passed them slowly and
heard a good deal of their talk - it was part of the situation that they should
pay no heed to a stranger's proximity. Now, such a love-scene as that has
absolutely never been written down; it was entirely decent, yet vulgar to the n
th power. Dickens would have made it ludicrous - a gross injustice. Other men
who deal with low-class life would perhaps have preferred idealising it - an
absurdity. For my own part, I am going to reproduce it verbatim, without one
single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest
reporting. The result will be something unutterably tedious. Precisely. That is
the stamp of the ignobly decent life. If it were anything but tedious it would
be untrue. I speak, of course, of its effect upon the ordinary reader.«
    »I couldn't do it,« said Reardon.
    »Certainly you couldn't. You - well, you are a psychological realist in the
sphere of culture. You are impatient of vulgar circumstances.«
    »In a great measure because my life has been martyred by them.