Philip Carey’s resignation from accountancy and decision to study painting in Paris mark the moment when a vague escape fantasy becomes a deliberate break with respectable employment. The choice is driven by dissatisfaction with office life, romantic ideas about art, and his own cautious reckoning with money; it sends him toward a new artistic identity without guaranteeing that he possesses the talent he hopes to cultivate.

From office misery to a Parisian possibility

In the spring, G. Etheridge Hayward’s letter from Italy urged Philip to leave the office and go to Paris to study art. Hayward praised love and art, risk and adventure, and reminded Philip that he had once thought him talented. The suggestion gave shape to a possibility Philip had already been turning over, but it initially startled him. His disappointment at being left without the hoped-for conversation with Hayward sharpened the appeal: Philip had been reading and thinking intensely, yet knew no one in London willing to engage with his abstract ideas.

Paris already carried imaginative force for Philip. He had brought La Vie de Bohème to London, and when depressed could return in its pages to the attics where Rodolphe and his companions danced, loved, and sang. Having once imagined London as a place of romance, he now invested Paris with the same promise of beauty and love. His belief in his own prospects rested partly on encouragement from others: people at Heidelberg had admired his watercolours, Miss Wilkinson had repeatedly praised them, and the Watsons had noticed his sketches. Painting also held a direct attraction for him; he wondered why he could not paint as well as anyone else.

Miss Wilkinson enthusiastically endorsed the plan and estimated that Philip could live in Paris on eighty pounds a year. Her assurance that he was too good to be wasted in an office strengthened his hopes, but Philip did not share Hayward’s financial ease. Hayward had three hundred a year in secure investments; Philip’s entire fortune was only eighteen hundred pounds. He hesitated, caught between the romance of a new life and the practical risk of spending his limited resources.

The business trip that settles the choice

An unexpected opportunity took Philip to Paris with Mr. Goodworthy, whose firm kept the accounts for an English-owned hotel in the Faubourg St. Honore. The usual clerk was ill, and the firm’s workload prevented anyone else from going; Philip could be spared, and his articles gave him a claim to the assignment. The trip thus offered a practical, employer-funded visit to the city he had been imagining. Goodworthy warned that they would work during the day but have their evenings free, with meals provided at the hotel.

Goodworthy’s Paris was a bawdy attraction. He sought out what he called the city’s obscene entertainments, taking Philip to the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergeres and pointing out the sexualized spectacle. Philip, however, saw beyond the vulgarity Goodworthy displayed. In the early morning he went to the Champs Elysees and stood at the Place de la Concorde; in June’s delicate air, he felt drawn to the people and thought that at last he had found romance. The contrast between Goodworthy’s appetite for titillation and Philip’s idealizing gaze exposed how differently the same city could be experienced.

After nearly a week in Paris, Philip returned late at night to his shabby rooms in Barnes with his mind made up. He would surrender his articles and go to Paris to study art, but he resolved to remain at the office until his year was complete so that no one could accuse him of acting unreasonably. The decision was firm before the resignation itself: although he still went to work, he could no longer pretend to care about it. In the latter part of July, he used time supposedly devoted to lectures for his first examination to visit the National Gallery, while reading about Paris and painting.

Resolving hesitation and leaving the office

Philip steeped himself in Ruskin and read many of Vasari’s lives of painters. The story of Correggio appealed to him, and he imagined standing before a masterpiece and exclaiming that he too was a painter. His hesitation receded; he persuaded himself that he had the makings of a great painter and that taking a risk was the necessary test. The imagined artistic future was therefore not simply a career calculation. It had become a story Philip told himself about courage, vocation, and the possibility of becoming someone other than a clerk.

At the end of his year, while Mr. Carter was away in Scotland and the managing clerk was in charge, Philip confirmed that he would not return after his holiday. The arrangement with Mr. Carter allowed him to recover half the money paid for his articles if he disliked accountancy and left at the year’s end. Philip explained that for ten months he had loathed the work and the office, and even London; he would rather sweep a crossing than spend his days there. The managing clerk conceded that he did not seem suited to accountancy, bringing the exchange to a close without dispute over Philip’s judgment.

Philip thanked the clerk for his kindness and apologized in case he had been troublesome, admitting that he had known almost from the beginning that he was no good at the work. He then made his departure unmistakable, expressing the hope that he would never see any of them again. The bluntness turns resignation into a clean severance: the office had been an imposed apprenticeship, and the farewell rejects not only its daily tasks but the prospect of returning to that world.

The cost and irony of the artistic vocation

The choice replaces the relative security of accountancy with an uncertain attempt to make a living through art. Philip’s confidence at departure is sustained by a mixture of actual praise, romantic literature, Hayward’s exhortation, and Miss Wilkinson’s encouragement; none establishes that he has exceptional ability. His later Parisian experience tests precisely that gap between aspiration and capacity. At the studio, Foinet tells him that his work is badly drawn and advises him to tear it up; later, after assessing Philip’s work, he grants him manual dexterity and the possibility of becoming a careful painter through effort, but sees no talent and predicts mediocrity.

Paris nevertheless changes Philip’s relation to art before it settles his prospects as a painter. He gradually abandons his earlier artistic allegiances, comes to admire Manet, Monet, and Degas, and pins photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia side by side above his washing-stand. His transformation is visible in both taste and appearance: he exchanges his bowler hat and neat blue tie for a broad-brimmed hat, flowing black cravat, and romantic cape, and learns to drink absinthe without distaste. The decision to go to Paris thus begins as a wager on a life of beauty and artistic distinction, while the life that follows subjects both that ideal and Philip’s claimed talent to revision.