So it was on this bright morning in October. I remember being rather struck with the excellence of the work of the preceding evening. It was not great work, you may say, not by any means in the category of immortal classics. It was not even signed, being an appreciation of a certain proprietary article in common use and extensively advertised. There was to me a quite indescribable humour in the fact that this essay in admiration was eventually published in French, German, Swedish and Polish, running into a six-figure issue, while my last novel, a sincere piece of literature, hung fire, so to speak, and never got beyond the publisher's preliminary forecast of a thousand copies. Was I not angry? Far from it. I was no puling undergraduate with a thin broad-margined book of verse to sell. The public was at perfect liberty to buy what it pleased. If they wanted my work, the work I loved and toiled to make as perfect as possible, they would get it, all in good time. For the present I was content to wait and do the thing which could be translated into Swedish and Polish, into dollars cash. It is customary, I know, to rail at the American public, to accuse them of a material mania. An artist is better employed, in my humble view, in trying to understand them, for believe me, they are not so vile as the precious _littérateurs_ and others would have us believe. Bitterness is no preparation for sympathetic study. And without sympathy our works, however clever and lovely, are but Dead Sea apples, crumbling to ashes at the touch of a human finger.
It must not be supposed that we had arrived at this way of thinking by a sudden leap. Again, far from it! My friend and I had been undergraduates, and very proud of ourselves into the bargain, long ago in England. But we had travelled since then, in more senses than one. We had known comfort and we had known the mute impressive numbness of despair. We had made "scoops" at times and celebrated them with joyous junketings. Once we had dined at Delmonico's, a meal of which the memory is still an absurd chaos. We had, moreover, confronted America with a blank wall of unyielding British prejudice. We had entrenched ourselves behind our conception of the thing to do and stupidly refused to do anything else. And we had been beaten to our knees. For it meant eventually either submission or flight. And we never had any intention of flight. We had fixed it firmly in our minds that we would return triumphant to England, some day as yet far off. We were aliens, yes; but we meant to win through at last, to make our dream come true; our dream of a cottage, with honeysuckle and roses, "far from the madding crowd."