And this one does not get, because the great men are mostly
too much occupied in producing their own masterpieces to have the
time or inclination to appraise others. Yet I am sure there is a
vile fibre of ambition lurking in me, interwoven with my nature,
which I cannot exactly disentangle. I very earnestly desire to do
good and fine work, to write great books. If I genuinely and
critically approved of my own work, I could go on writing for the
mere pleasure of it, in the face of universal neglect. But one may
take it for granted that unless one is working on very novel and
original lines--and I am not--the good qualities of one's work are
not likely to escape attention. The reason why Keats, and Shelley,
and Tennyson, and Wordsworth were decried, was because their work
was so unusual, so new, that conventional critics could not
understand it. But I am using a perfectly familiar medium, and
there is a large and acute band of critics who are looking out for
interesting work in the region of novels. Besides I have arrived at
the point of having a vogue, so that anything I write would be
treated with a certain respect. Where my ambition comes in is in
the desire not to fall below my standard.
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