Could I have seen my work succeeding I would have
foregone everything else willingly and worked with satisfied ardour,
closing my eyes to the pleasure of life. Could I have obtained Lucia
I would have been content to work and wait patiently till success
chose to come to me. But the latter desire depended on the former,
and when I thought of Lucia, her image only brought back upon me the
stunning, deadening sense of the necessity of success, and so my
thoughts were dragged round in a perpetual, wearying, dizzying
circle, like a fixed wheel revolving without motion forward.
I had grown to hate my present daily existence. It was a state of
enforced passive inaction that seemed corroding my nerves as the
long worn fetter eats into the flesh. The current of life was
running at its swiftest and fiercest in my veins. Vitality was
ardent in the brain and blood, but there was no worthy expense of my
energies, and they simply fell back upon themselves again and again,
thwarted, baffled, unused, until existence seemed an intolerable
curse. I saw daily other men's works accepted and received, and
their talent and genius praised that could produce such a work,
which, when it drifted into my hands, I recognised was no better
than the MSS. lying in my study, unused, wasted. Sometimes the
morning of a day would pass in looking through the reviews and
criticisms of the favourite novel of the hour, the afternoon in
reading the book itself and forming a judgment of it, and then an
evening of sickly irritation would follow, in which, pacing
backwards and forwards, in the empty study, I had to admit that the
author, no more gifted, no more favoured with talent than myself,
had been successful and I had not.
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