He was saturated with
the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already dawning,
and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as his appointed
material, and turned them to expression.
Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. 'I might have lived and
died,' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure lavishness above
there. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow of the
ousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity things
had seemed to me to be very well arranged.' Now from his new point of
view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that government was
a compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a
convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak, though
they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with a kind
of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved--and found that no one
in particular cared.'
He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady--she was a needy widow,
poor soul, and I was already in her debt--to keep an old box for me in
which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in
great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she
was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last she
consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then
I went forth into the world--to seek first the luck of a meal and then
shelter.
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