The sole liberty that I might permit myself in handling the Usual was to give it a rhythmic contour—a precious distinction in those Yeller-bocky days.
All these cardinal points being settled, I passed to the business of choosing a subject. Need I say that I chose myself? But, in obedience to my philosophy, I made myself a failure. I regarded my hero with an air of "There, but for the grace of God, goes me!" I decided that he should go through most of my own experiences, but that instead of fame and a thousand a year he should arrive ultimately at disillusion and a desolating suburban domesticity. I said I would call my novel "In the Shadow," a title suggested to me by the motto of Balzac's "Country Doctor"—"For a wounded heart, shadow and silence." It was to be all very dolorous, this Odyssey of a London clerk who—— But I must not disclose any detail of the plot.
So I sat down, and wrote on a fair quarto sheet, "In the Shadow," and under that, "I." It was a religious rite, an august and imposing ceremonial; and I was the officiating priest. In the few fleeting instants between the tracing of the "I" and the tracing of the first word of the narrative, I felt happy and proud; but immediately the fundamental brain-work began, I lost nearly all my confidence. With every stroke the illusion grew thinner, more remote. I perceived that I could not become Flaubert by taking thought, and this rather obvious truth rushed over me as a surprise. I knew what I wanted to do, and I could not do it. I felt, but I could not express. My sentences would persist in being damnably Mudiesque. Themots justeshid themselves exasperatingly behind a cloud. The successions of dots looked merely fatuous. The charm, the poetry, the distinction, the inevitableness, the originality, the force, and the invaluable rhythmic contour—these were anywhere save on my page. All writers are familiar with the dreadful despair that ensues when a composition, on perusal, obstinately presents itself as a series of little systems of words joined by conjunctions and so forth, something like this—subject, predicate, object,but, subject, predicate, object. Pronoun,however, predicate, negative, infinitive verb.Nevertheless, participle, accusative, subject, predicate, etc., etc., etc., for evermore. I suffered that despair. The proper remedy is to go to the nearest bar and have a drink, or to read a bit of "Comus" or "Urn-Burial," but at that time I had no skill in weathering anti-cyclones, and I drove forward like a sinking steamer in a heavy sea.
And this was what it was, in serious earnest, to be an author! For I reckon that in writing the first chapter of my naturalistic novel, I formally became an author; I had undergone a certain apprenticeship. I didn't feel like an author, no more than I had felt like a journalist on a similar occasion. Indeed, far less: I felt like a fool, an incompetent ass. I seemed to have an idea that there was no such thing as literature, that literature was a mirage, or an effect of hypnotism, or a concerted fraud. After all, I thought, what in the name of common sense is the use of telling this silly ordinary story of everyday life? Where is the point? Whatisart, anyway, and all this chatter about truth to life, and all this rigmarole of canons?
I finished the chapter that night, hurriedly, perfunctorily, and only because I had sworn to finish it. Then, in obedience to an instinct which all Grub Street has felt, I picked out the correct "Yellow Book" from a shelf and read my beautiful story again. That enheartened me a little, restored my faith in the existence of art, and suggested the comfortable belief that things were not perhaps as bad as they seemed.
"Well, how's the novel getting on?" my friend the wall-paper enthusiast inquired jovially at supper.
"Oh, fine!" I said. "It's going to be immense."
Why one should utter these frightful and senseless lies, I cannot guess. I might just as well have spoken the precise truth to him, for his was a soul designed by providence for the encouragement of others. Still, having made that remark, I added in my private ear that either the novel must be immense or I must perish in the attempt to make it so.
In six months I had written only about thirty thousand words, and I felt the sort of elation that probably succeeds six months on a treadmill. But one evening, in the midst of a chapter, a sudden and mysterious satisfaction began to warm my inmost being. I knew that chapter was good and going to be good. I experienced happiness in the very act of work. Emotion and technique were reconciled. It was as if I had surprisingly come upon the chart with the blood-red cross showing where the Spanish treasure was buried. I dropped my pen, and went out for a walk, and decided to give the book an entirely fresh start. I carefully read through all that I had written. It was bad, but viewed in the mass it produced on me a sort of culminating effect which I had not anticipated. Conceive the poor Usual at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and the region of the Sublime at the top: it seemed to me that I had dragged the haggard thing halfway up, and that it lay there, inert but safe, awaiting my second effort. The next night I braced myself to this second effort, and I thought that I succeeded.
"We're doing the trick, Charlie," Edmund Kean whispered into the ear of his son during a poignant scene of "Brutus." And in the very crisis of my emotional chapters, while my hero was rushing fatally to the nether greyness of the suburbs and all the world was at its most sinister and most melancholy, I said to myself with glee: "We're doing the trick." My moods have always been a series of violent contrasts, and I was now just as uplifted as I had before been depressed. There were interludes of doubt and difficulty, but on the whole I was charmed with my novel. It would be a despicable affectation to disguise the fact that I deemed it a truly distinguished piece of literature, idiosyncratic, finely imaginative, and of rhythmic contour. As I approached the end, my self-esteem developed in acrescendo. I finished the tale, having sentenced my hero to a marriage infallibly disastrous, at three o'clock one morning. I had laboured for twelve hours without intermission. It was great, this spell; it was histrionic. It was Dumas over again, and the roaring French forties.
Nevertheless, to myself I did not yet dare to call myself an artist. I lacked the courage to believe that I had the sacred fire, the inborn and not-to-be-acquired vision. It seemed impossible that this should be so. I have ridiculed the whole artist tribe, and, in the pursuit of my vocation, I shall doubtless ridicule them again; but never seriously. Nothing is more deeply rooted in me than my reverence for the artistic faculty. And whenever I say, "The man's an artist," I say it with an instinctive solemnity that so far as I am concerned ends all discussion. Dared I utter this great saying to my shaving-mirror? No, I repeat that I dared not. More than a year elapsed before the little incident described at the commencement of these memoirs provided me with the audacity to inform the author of "In the Shadow" that he too belonged to the weird tribe of Benjamin.
When my novel had been typewritten and I read it in cold blood, I was absolutely unable to decide whether it was very good, good, medium, bad, or very bad. I could not criticize it. All I knew was that certain sentences, in the vein of theécriture artiste, persisted beautifully in my mind, like fine lines from a favourite poet. I loosed the brave poor thing into the world over a post-office counter. "What chancehasit, in the fray?" I exclaimed. My novel had become nothing but a parcel. Thus it went in search of its fate.
I have described the composition of my first book in detail as realistic as I can make it, partly because a few years ago the leading novelists of the day seemed to enter into a conspiracy to sentimentalize the first book episode in their brilliant careers.
"Will you step this way?" said the publisher's manager, and after coasting by many shelves loaded with scores of copies of the same book laid flat in piles—to an author the most depressing sight in the world—I was ushered into the sanctum, the star-chamber, the den, the web of the spider.
I beheld the publisher, whose name is a household word wherever the English language is written for posterity. Even at that time his imprint flamed on the title-pages of one or two works of a deathless nature. My manuscript lay on an occasional table by his side, and I had the curious illusion that he was posing for his photograph with my manuscript. As I glanced at it I could not help thinking that its presence there bordered on the miraculous. I had parted with it at a post-office. It had been stamped, sorted, chucked into a van, whirled through the perilous traffic of London's centre, chucked out of a van, sorted again, and delivered with many other similar parcels at the publisher's. The publisher had said: "Send this to So-and-so to read." Then more perils by road and rail, more risks of extinction and disorientation. Then So-and-so, probably a curt man, with a palate cloyed by the sickliness of many manuscripts, and a short way with new authors, had read it or pretended to read it. Then finally the third ordeal of locomotion. And there it was, I saw it once more, safe!
We discussed the weather and new reputations. I was nervous, and I think the publisher was nervous, too. At length, in a manner mysterious and inexplicable, the talk shifted to my manuscript. The publisher permitted himself a few compliments of the guarded sort. "But there's no money in it, you know," he said.
"I suppose not," I assented. ("You are an ass for assenting to that," I said to myself.)
"I invariably lose money over new authors," he remarked, as if I was to blame.
"You didn't lose much over Mrs.——," I replied, naming one of his notorious successes.
"Oh,well!" he said, "of course——. But I didn't make so much as you think, perhaps. Publishing is a very funny business." And then he added: "Do you think your novel will succeed like Mrs.——'s?"
I said that I hoped it would.
"I'll be perfectly frank with you," the publisher exclaimed, smiling beneficently. "My reader likes your book. I'll tell you what he says." He took a sheet of paper that lay on the top of the manuscript and read.
I was enchanted, spell-bound. The nameless literary adviser used phrases of which the following are specimens (I am recording with exactitude): "Written with great knowledge and a good deal of insight." "Character delineated by a succession of rare and subtle touches." "Living, convincing." "Vigour and accuracy." "The style is good."
I had no idea that publishers' readers were capable of such laudation.
The publisher read on: "I do not think it likely to be a striking success!"
"Oh!" I murmured, shocked by this bluntness.
"There's no money in it," the publisher repeated, firmly. "First books are too risky. . . . I should like to publish it."
"Well?" I said, and paused. I felt that he had withdrawn within himself in order to ponder upon the chances of this terrible risk. So as not to incommode him with my gaze, I examined the office, which resembled a small drawing-room rather than an office. I saw around me signed portraits of all the roaring lions on the sunny side of Grub Street.
"I'll publish it," said the publisher, and I believe he made an honest attempt not to look like a philanthropist; however, the attempt failed. "I'll publish it. But of course I can only give you a small royalty."
"What royalty?" I asked.
"Five per cent.—on a three-and-six-penny book."
"Very well. Thank you!" I said.
"I'll give you fifteen per cent, after the sale of five thousand copies," he added kindly.
O ironist!
I emerged from the web of the spider triumphant, an accepted author. Exactly ten days had elapsed since I had first parted with my manuscript. Once again life was plagiarizing fiction. I could not believe that this thing was true. I simply could not believe it. "Oh!" I reflected, incredulous, "Something's bound to happen. It can't really come off. The publisher might die, and then——"
Protected by heaven on account of his good deeds, the publisher felicitously survived; and after a delay of twelve months (twelve centuries—during which I imagined that the universe hung motionless and expectant in the void!) he accomplished his destiny by really and truly publishing my book.
The impossible had occurred. I was no longer a mere journalist; I was an author.
"After all, it's nothing!" I said, with that intense and unoriginal humanity which distinguishes all of us. And in a blinding flash I saw that an author was in essence the same thing as a grocer or a duke.
My novel, under a new title, was published both in England and America. I actually collected forty-one reviews, of it, and there must have been many that escaped me. Of these forty-one, four were unfavourable, eleven mingled praise and blame in about equal proportions, and twenty-six were unmistakably favourable, a few of them being enthusiastic.
Yet I had practically no friends on the press. One friend I had, a man of power, and he reviewed my book with an appreciation far too kind; but his article came as a complete surprise to me. Another friend I had, sub-editor of a society weekly, and he asked me for a copy of my book so that he might "look after it" in the paper. Here is part of the result:
"He has all the young novelist's faults. . . . These are glaring faults; for, given lack of interest, and unpleasant scenes, how can a book be expected to be popular?"
A third friend I had, who knew the chief fiction-reviewer on a great morning paper. He asked me for a special copy of my book, and quite on his own initiative, undertook to arrange the affair. Here is part of the result:
"There is not much to be said either for or against—— by Mr.——"
I had no other friends on the press, or friends who had friends on the press.
I might easily butcher the reviews for your amusement, but this practice is becoming trite. I will quote a single sentence which pleased me as much as any:—"What our hero's fate was let those who care to know find out, but let us assure them that in its discovery they will read of London life and labour as it is, not as the bulk of romances paint it." All the principal organs were surprisingly appreciative. And the majority of the reviewers agreed that my knowledge of human nature was exceptionally good, that my style was exceptionally good, that I had in me the makings of a novelist, and that my present subject was weak. My subject was not weak; but let that pass. When I reflect how my book flouted the accepted canons of English fiction, and how many aspects of it must have annoyed nine reviewers out of ten, I am compelled to the conclusion that reviewers are a very good-natured class of persons. I shall return to this interesting point later—after I have described how I became a reviewer myself. The fact to be asserted is that I, quite obscure and defenceless, was treated very well. I could afford to smile from a high latitude at the remark of "The New York——" that "the story and characters are commonplace in the extreme." I felt that I had not lived in vain, and that kindred spirits were abroad in the land.
My profits from this book with the exceptional style and the exceptional knowledge of human nature, exceeded the cost of having it typewritten by the sum of one sovereign. Nor was I, nor am I, disposed to grumble at this. Many a first book has cost its author a hundred pounds. I got a new hat out of mine.
What I did grumble at was the dishonour of the prophet in his own county. Here I must delicately recall that my novel was naturalistic, and that it described the career of a young man alone in London. It had no "realism" in the vulgar sense, as several critics admitted, but still it was desperately exact in places, and I never surrounded the head of a spade with the aureole of a sentimental implement. The organ of a great seaport remarked: "We do not consider the book a healthy one. We say no more." Now you must imagine this excessively modern novel put before a set of estimable people whose ideas on fiction had been formed under the influence of Dickens and Mrs. Henry Wood, and who had never changed those ideas. Some of them, perhaps, had not read a novel for ten years before they read mine. The result was appalling, frightful, tragical. For months I hesitated to visit the town which had the foresight to bear me, and which is going to be famous on that score. I was castigated in the local paper. My nearest and dearest played nervously with their bread when my novel was mentioned at dinner. A relative in a distant continent troubled himself to inform me that the book was fragmentary and absolutely worthless. The broader-minded merely wished that I had never written the book. The discreet received it in silence. One innocent person, for whom I have the warmest regard, thought that my novel might be a suitable birthday present for his adolescent son. By chance he perused the book himself on the birthday eve. I was told that neither on that night nor on the next did he get a wink of sleep. His adolescent son certainly never got my book.
Most authors, I have learnt on enquiry, have to suffer from this strange lack of appreciation in the very circle where appreciation should be kindest; if one fault isn't found, another is; but they draw a veil across that dark aspect of the bright auctorial career. I, however, am trying to do without veils, and hence I refer to the matter.
My chief resigned his position on the paper with intent to enliven other spheres of activity. The news of his resignation was a blow to me. It often happens that when an editor walks out of an office in the exercise of free-will, the staff follows him under compulsion. In Fleet Street there is no security of tenure unless one is ingenious enough to be the proprietor of one's paper.
"I shall never get on with any one as I have got on with you," I said to the chief.
"You needn't," he answered. "I'm sure they'll have the sense to give you my place if you ask for it." "They" were a board of directors.
And they had the sense; they even had the sense not to wait until I asked. I have before remarked that the thumb of my Fate has always been turned up. Still on the glorious side of thirty, still young, enthusiastic, and a prey to delightful illusions, I suddenly found myself the editor of a London weekly paper. It was not a leading organ, but it was a London weekly paper, and it had pretensions; at least I had. My name was inscribed in various annuals of reference. I dined as an editor with other editors. I remember one day sitting down to table in a populous haunt of journalists with no less than four editors. "Three years ago," I said to myself, "I should have deemed this an impossible fairy tale." I know now that there are hundreds of persons in London and elsewhere who regard even editors with gentle and condescending toleration. One learns.
I needed a sub-editor, and my first act was to acquire one. I had the whole world of struggling lady-journalists to select from: to choose was an almost sublime function. For some months previously we had been receiving paragraphs and articles from an outside contributor whoseflairin the discovery of subjects, whose direct simplicity of style and general tidiness of "copy," had always impressed me. I had never seen her, and I knew nothing about her; but I decided that, if she pleased, this lady should be my sub-editor. I wrote desiring her to call, and she called. Without much preface I offered her the situation; she accepted it.
"Who recommended me to you?" she asked.
"No one," I replied, in the rôle of Joseph Pulitzer; "I liked your stuff."
It was a romantic scene. I mention it because I derived a child-like enjoyment from that morning. Vanity was mixed up in it; but I argued—If you are an editor, be an editor imaginatively. I seemed to resemble Louis the Fifteenth beginning to reign after the death of the Regent, but with no troublesome Fleury in the background.
"Now," I cried, "up goes the circulation!"
But circulations are not to be bullied into ascension. They will only rise on the pinions of a carefully constructed policy. I thought I knew all about journalism for women, and I found that I knew scarcely the fringe of it. A man may be a sub-editor, or even an assistant-editor, for half a lifetime, and yet remain ignorant of the true significance of journalism. Those first months were months of experience in a very poignant sense. The proprietary desired certain modifications in the existing policy. O that mysterious "policy," which has to be created and built up out of articles, paragraphs, and pictures! That thrice-mysterious "public taste" which has to be aimed at in the dark and hit! I soon learnt the difference between legislature and executive. I could "execute" anything, from a eulogy of a philanthropic duchess to a Paris fashion letter. I could instruct a fashion-artist as though I knew what I was talking about. I could play Blucher at the Waterloo of the advertisement-manager. I could interview a beauty and make her say the things that a beauty must say in an interview. But to devise the contents of an issue, to plan them, to balance them; to sail with this wind and tack against that; to keep a sensitive cool finger on the faintly beating pulse of the terrible many-headed patron; to walk in a straight line through a forest black as midnight; to guess the riddle of the circulation-book week by week; to know by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat-order, or why Simpkins' was ten quires less; to keep one eye on the majestic march of the world, and the other on the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter who has forgotten the law of libel: these things, and seventy-seven others, are the real journalism. It is these things that make editors sardonic, grey, unapproachable.
Unique among all suspenses is the suspense that occupies the editorial mind between the moment of finally going to press and the moment of examining the issue on the morning of publication. Errors, appalling and disastrous errors, will creep in; and they are irremediable then. These mishaps occur to the most exalted papers, to all papers, except perhaps the "Voce della Verità," which, being the organ of the Pope, is presumably infallible. Tales circulate in Fleet Street that make the hair stand on end; and every editor says: "This might have happened tome." Subtle beyond all subtleties is the magic and sinister change that happens to your issue in the machine-room at the printers. You pass the final page and all seems fair, attractive, clever, well-designed. . . . Ah! But what you see is not what is on the paper; it is the reflection of the bright image in your mind of what you intended! When the last thousand is printed and the parcels are in the vans, then you gaze at the unalterable thing, and you see it coldly as it actually is. You see not what you intended, but what you have accomplished. And the difference! It is like the chill, steely dawn after the vague poetry of a moonlit night.
There is no peace for an editor. He may act the farce of taking a holiday, but the worm of apprehension is always gnawing at the root of pleasure. I once put my organ to bed and went off by a late train in a perfect delirium of joyous anticipation of my holiday. I was recalled by a telegram that a fire with a strong sense of ironic humour had burnt the printing office to the ground and destroyed five-sixths of my entire issue. In such crises something has to be done, and done quickly. You cannot say to your public next week: "Kindly excuse the absence of the last number, as there was a fire at the printers." Your public recks not of fires, no more than the General Post Office, in its attitude towards late clerks, recognizes the existence of fogs in winter. And herein lies, for the true journalist, one of the principal charms of Fleet Street. Herein lies the reason why an editor's life is at once insufferable and worth living. There are no excuses. Every one knows that if the crater of Highgate Hill were to burst and bury London in lava to-morrow, the newspapers would show no trace of the disaster except an account of it. That thought is fine, heroic, when an editor thinks of it.
And if an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want something and those who have something to bestow; those who are anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept a lunch; those who have an axe to grind and those who possess the grindstone. The change from the one position to the other was for me at first rather disconcerting; I could not understand it; there was an apparent unreality about it; I thought I must be mistaken; I said to myself: "Surely this unusual ingratiating affability has nothing to do with the accident that I am an editor." Then, like the rest of the owners of grindstones, I grew accustomed to the ownership, and cynical withal, cold, suspicious, and forbidding. I became bored by the excessive complaisance that had once tickled and flattered me. (Nevertheless, after I had ceased to be an editor I missed it; involuntarily I continued to expect it.) The situation of the editor of a ladies' paper is piquantly complicated, in this respect, by the fact that some women, not many—but a few, have an extraordinary belief in, and make unscrupulous use of, their feminine fascinations. The art of being "nice to editors" is diligently practised by these few; often, I know, with brilliant results. Sometimes I have sat in my office, with the charmer opposite, and sardonically reflected: "You think I am revolving round your little finger, madam, but you were never more mistaken in your life." And yet, breathes there the man with soul so uniformly cold that once or twice in such circumstances the woman was not right after all? I cannot tell. The whole subject, the subject of that strange, disturbing, distracting, emotional atmosphere of femininity which surrounds the male in command of a group of more or less talented women, is of a supreme delicacy. It could only be treated safely in a novel—one of the novels which it is my fixed intention never to write. This I know and affirm, that the average woman-journalist is the most loyal, earnest, and teachable person under the sun. I begin to feel sentimental when I think of her astounding earnestness, even in grasping the live coal of English syntax. Syntax, bane of writing-women, I have spent scores of ineffectual hours in trying to inoculate the ungrammatical sex against your terrors! And how seriously they frowned, and how seriously I talked; and all the while the eternal mystery of the origin and destiny of all life lay thick and unnoticed about us!
These syntax-sittings led indirectly to a new development of my activities. One day a man called on me with a letter of introduction. He was a colonial of literary tastes. I asked in what manner I might serve him.
"I want to know whether you would care to teach me journalism," he said.
"Teach you journalism!" I echoed, wondering by what unperceived alchemy I myself, but yesterday a tyro, had been metamorphosed into a professor of the most comprehensive of all crafts.
"I am told you are the best person to come to," he said.
"Why not?" I thought. "Why shouldn't I?" I have never refused work when the pay has been good. I named a fee that might have frightened him, but it did not. And so it fell out that I taught journalism to him, and to others, for a year or two. This vocation suited me; I had an aptitude for it; and my fame spread abroad. Some of the greatest experts in London complimented me on my methods and my results. Other and more ambitious schemes, however, induced me to abandon this lucrative field, which was threatening to grow tiresome.
I come now to a question only less delicate than that of the conflict of sexes in journalism—the question of reviewing, which, however, I shall treat with more freedom. If I have an aptitude for anything at all in letters, it is for criticism. Whenever I read a work of imagination, I am instantly filled with ideas concerning it; I form definite views about its merit or demerit, and having formed them, I hold those views with strong conviction. Denial of them rouses me; I must thump the table in support of them; I must compel people to believe that what I say is true; I cannot argue without getting serious in spite of myself. In literature, but in nothing else, I am a propagandist; I am not content to keep my opinion and let others keep theirs. To have a worthless book in my house (save in the way of business), to know that any friend of mine is enjoying it, actually distresses me. That book must go, the pretensions of that book must be exposed, if I am to enjoy peace of mind. Some may suspect that I am guilty here of the affectation of a pose. Really it is not so. I often say to myself, after the heat of an argument, a denunciation, or a defence: "What does it matter, fool? The great mundane movement will continue, the terrestrial ball will roll on." But will it? Something must matter, after all, or the mundane movement emphatically would not continue. And the triumph of a good book, and the ignominy of a bad book, matter to me.
The criticism of imaginative prose literature, which is my speciality, is an over-crowded and not very remunerative field of activity. Every intelligent mediocrity in Fleet Street thinks he can appraise a novel, and most of them, judging from the papers, seem to make the attempt. And so quite naturally the pay is as a rule contemptible. To enter this field, therefore, with the intention of tilling it to a profitable fiscal harvest is an enterprise in the nature of a forlorn hope. I undertook it in innocence and high spirits, from a profound instinct. I had something to say. Of late years I have come to the conclusion that the chief characteristic of all bad reviewing is the absence of genuine conviction, of a message, of a clear doctrine; the incompetent reviewer has to invent his opinions.
I succeeded at first by dint of ignoring one of the elementary laws of journalism, to-wit, that editors do not accept reviews from casual outsiders. I wrote a short review of a French work and sent it to "The Illustrated London News," always distinguished for its sound literary criticism. Any expert would have told me that I was wasting labour and postage. Nevertheless the review was accepted, printed, and handsomely paid for. I then sent a review of a new edition of Edward Carpenter's "Towards Democracy" to an evening paper, and this, too, achieved publicity. After that, for some months, I made no progress. And then I had the chance of a literarycauseriein a weekly paper: eight hundred words a week, thirty pounds a year. I wrote a sample article—and I well remember the incredible pains I took to show that Mrs. Lynn Linton's "In Haste and at Leisure" was thoroughly bad—but my article was too "literary." The editor with thirty pounds a year to spend on literary criticism went in search of a confection less austere than mine. But I was not baulked for long. The literary column of my own paper (of which I was then only assistant-editor) was presented to me on my assurance that I could liven it up: seven hundred words a week, at twelve and sixpence. The stuff that I wrote was entirely unsuited to the taste of our public; but it attracted attention from the seats of the mighty, and it also attracted—final triumph of the despised reviewer!—publishers' advertisements. I wrote this column every week for some years. And I got another one to do, by asking for it. Then I selected some of my best and wittiest reviews, and sent them to the editor of a well-known organ of culture with a note suggesting that my pen ought to add to the charms of his paper. An editor of sagacity and perspicacity, he admitted the soundness of my suggestion without cavil, and the result was mutually satisfactory. At the present time.[2]I am continually refusing critical work. I reckon that on an average I review a book and a fraction of a book every day of my life, Sundays included.
"Then," says the man in the street inevitably, "you must spend a very large part of each day in reading new books." Not so. I fit my reviewing into the odd unoccupied corners of my time, the main portions of which are given to the manufacture of novels, plays, short stories, and longer literary essays. I am an author of several sorts. I have various strings to my bow. And I know my business. I write half a million words a year. That is not excessive; but it is passable industry, and nowadays I make a point of not working too hard. The half million words contain one or two books, one or two plays, and numerous trifles not connected with literary criticism; only about a hundred and fifty thousand words are left for reviewing.
The sense of justice of the man in the street is revolted. "You do not read through all the books that you pretend to criticize?" he hints. I have never known a reviewer to answer this insinuation straightforwardly in print, but I will answer it: No, I do not.
And the man in the street says, shocked: "You are unjust."
And I reply: "Not at all. I am merely an expert."
The performances of the expert in any craft will surprise and amaze the inexpert. Come with me into my study and I will surprise and amaze you. Have I been handling novels for bread-and-cheese all these years and not learnt to judge them by any process quicker than that employed by you who merely pick up a novel for relaxation after dinner? Assuming that your taste is fairly sound, let us be confronted with the same new novel, and I will show you, though you are a quick reader, that I can anticipate your judgment of that novel by a minimum of fifty-five minutes. The title-page—that conjunction of the title, the name of the author, and the name of the publisher—speaks to me, telling me all sorts of things. The very chapter-headings deliver a message of style. The narrative everywhere discloses to me the merits and defects of the writer; no author ever lived who could write a page without giving himself away. The whole book, open it where I will, is murmurous with indications for me. In the case of nine books of ten, to read them through would be not a work of supererogation—it would be a sinful waste of time on the part of a professional reviewer. The majority of novels—and all these remarks apply only to novels—hold no surprise for the professional reviewer. He can foretell them as the nautical almanac foretells astronomical phenomena. The customary established popular author seldom or never deviates from his appointed track, and it is the customary established popular author upon whom chiefly the reviewer is a parasite. New authors occasionally cause the reviewer to hesitate in his swift verdicts, especially when the verdict is inclined to be favourable. Certain publishers (that is to say, their "readers") have a knack of acquiring new authors who can imitate real excellence in an astonishing manner. In some cases the reviewer must needs deliberately "get into" the book, in order not to be deceived by appearances, in order to decide positively whether the author has genuine imaginative power, and if so, whether that power is capable of a sustained effort. But these difficult instances are rare. There remains the work of the true artist, the work that the reviewer himself admires and enjoys: say one book in fifty, or one in a hundred. The reviewer reads that through.
Brief reflection will convince any one that it would be economically impossible for the reviewer to fulfil this extraordinary behest of the man of the street to read every book through. Take your London morning paper, and observe the column devoted to fiction of the day. It comprises some fifteen hundred words, and the reviewer receives, if he is well paid, three guineas for it. Five novels are discussed. Those novels will amount to sixteen hundred pages of printed matter. Reading at the rate of eight words a second, the reviewer would accomplish two pages a minute, and sixteen hundred pages in thirteen hours and twenty minutes. Add an hour and forty minutes for the composition, and we have fifteen hours, or two days' work. Do you imagine that the reviewer of a London morning paper is going to hire out his immortal soul, his experience, his mere skill, at the rate of thirty-one and sixpence per day on irregular jobs? Scarcely. He will earn his three guineas inside three hours, and it will be well and truly earned. As a journeyman author, with the ability and inclination to turn my pen in any direction at request, I long ago established a rule never to work for less than ten shillings an hour on piecework. If an editor commissioned an article, he received from me as much fundamental brain-power and as much time as the article demanded—up to the limit of his pay in terms of hours at ten shillings apiece. But each year I raise my price per hour. Of course, when I am working on my own initiative, for the sole advancement of my artistic reputation, I ignore finance and think of glory alone. It cannot, however, be too dearly understood that the professional author, the man who depends entirely on his pen for the continuance of breath, and whose income is at the mercy of an illness or a headache, is eternally compromising between glory and something more edible and warmer at nights. He labours in the first place for food, shelter, tailors, a woman, European travel, horses, stalls at the opera, good cigars, ambrosial evenings in restaurants; and he gives glory the best chance he can. I am not speaking of geniuses with a mania for posterity; I am speaking of human beings.
To return and to conclude this chapter. I feel convinced—nay, I know—that on the whole novelists get a little more than justice at the hands of their critics. I can recall many instances in which my praise has, in the light of further consideration, exceeded the deserts of a book; but very, very few in which I have cast a slur on genuine merit. Critics usually display a tendency towards a too generous kindness, particularly Scottish reviewers; it is almost a rule of the vocation. Most authors, I think, recognize this pleasing fact. It is only the minority, rabid for everlasting laudation, who carp; and, carping, demand the scalps of multiple-reviewers as a terrible example and warning to the smaller fry.
[2]1900.
[2]1900.
Serial fiction is sold and bought just like any other fancy goods. It has its wholesale houses, its commercial travellers—even its trusts and "corners." An editor may for some reason desire the work of a particular author; he may dangle gold before that author or that author's agent; but if a corner has been established he will be met by polite regrets and the information that Mr. So-and-So, or the Such-and-Such Syndicate, is the proper quarter to apply to; then the editor is aware that he will get what he wants solely by one method of payment—through the nose. A considerable part of the fiction business is in the hand of a few large syndicates—syndicates in name only, and middlemen in fact. They perform a useful function. They will sell to the editor the entire rights of a serial, or they will sell him the rights for a particular district—the London district, the Manchester district, the John-o'-Groats district—the price varying in direct ratio with the size of the district. Many London papers are content to buy the London rights only of a serial, or to buy the English rights as distinct from the Scottish rights, or to buy the entire rights minus the rights of one or two large provincial districts. Thus a serial may make its original appearance in London only; or it may appear simultaneously in London and Manchester only, or in London only in England and throughout Scotland, or in fifty places at once in England and Scotland. And after a serial has appeared for the first time and run its course, the weeklies of small and obscure towns, the proud organs of all the little Pedlingtons, buy for a trifle the right to reprint it. The serials of some authors survive in this manner for years in the remote provinces; pick up the local sheet in a country inn, and you may perhaps shudder again over the excitations of a serial that you read in book form in the far-off nineties. So, all editorial purses are suited, the syndicates reap much profit, and they are in a position to pay their authors, both tame and wild, a just emolument; upon occasion they can even be generous to the verge of an imprudence.
When I was an editor, I found it convenient, economical, and satisfactory to buy all my fiction from a large and powerful syndicate. I got important "names," the names that one sees on the title-pages of railway novels, at a moderate price, and it was nothing to me that my serial was appearing also in Killicrankie, the Knockmilly-down Mountains, or the Scilly Isles. The representative of the syndicate, a man clothed with authority, called regularly; he displayed his dainty novelties, his leading lines, his old favourites, his rising stars, his dark horses, and his dead bargains; I turned them over, like a woman on remnant-day at a draper's; and after the inevitable Oriental chaffering, we came to terms. I bought Christmas stories in March, and seaside fiction in December, and good solid Baring-Gould or Le Queux or L.T. Meade all the year round.
Excellently as these ingenious narrative confections served their purpose, I dreamed of something better. And in my dream a sudden and beautiful thought accosted me: Why should all the buying be on one side?
And the next time the representative of the syndicate called upon me, I met his overtures with another.
"Why should all the buying be on one side?" I said. "You know I am an author." I added that if he had not seen any of my books, I must send him copies. They were exquisitely different from his wares, but I said nothing about that.
"Ah!" he parried firmly. "We never buy serials from editors."
I perceived that I was by no means the first astute editor who had tried to mingle one sort of business with another. Still it was plain to me that my good friend was finding it a little difficult to combine the affability of a seller with the lofty disinclination of one who is requested to buy in a crowded market.
"I should have thought," I remarked, with a diplomatic touch of annoyance, "that you would buy wherever you could get good stuff."
"Oh, yes," he said, "of course we do. But——"
"Well," I continued, "I am writing a serial, and I can tell you it will be a good one. I merely mention it to you. If you don't care for it, I fancy I can discover some one who will."
Then, having caused to float between us, cloud-like, the significance of the indisputable fact that there were other syndicates in the world, I proceeded nonchalantly to the matter of his visit and gave him a good order. He was an able merchant, but I had not moved in legal circles for nothing. Business is business: and he as well as I knew that arbitrary rules to the exclusion of editors must give way before this great and sublime truth, the foundation of England's glory.
The next thing was to concoct the serial. I had entered into a compact with myself that I would never "write down" to the public in a long fiction. I was almost bound to pander to the vulgar taste, or at any rate to a taste not refined, in my editing, in my articles, and in my short stories, but I had sworn solemnly that I would keep the novel-form unsullied for the pure exercise of the artist in me. What became of this high compact? I merely ignored it. I tore it up and it was forgotten, the instant I saw a chance of earning the money of shame. I devised excuses, of course. I said that my drawing-room wanted new furniture; I said that I might lift the sensational serial to a higher place, thus serving the cause of art; I said—I don't know what I said, all to my conscience. But I began the serial.
As an editor, I knew the qualities that a serial ought to possess. And I knew specially that what most serials lacked was a large, central, unifying, vivifying idea. I was very fortunate in lighting upon such an idea for my first serial. There are no original themes; probably no writer ever did invent an original theme; but my theme was a brilliant imposture of originality. It had, too, grandeur and passion, and fantasy, and it was inimical to none of the prejudices of the serial reader. In truth it was a theme worthy of much better treatment than I accorded to it. Throughout the composition of the tale, until nearly the end, I had the uneasy feeling, familiar to all writers, that I was frittering away a really good thing. But as the climax approached, the situa-took hold of me, and in spite of myself I wrote my best. The tale was divided into twelve instalments of five thousand words each, and I composed it in twenty-four half-days. Each morning, as I walked down the Thames Embankment, I contrived a chapter of two thousand five hundred words, and each afternoon I wrote the chapter. An instinctive sense of form helped me to plan the events into an imposing shape, and it needed no abnormal inventive faculty to provide a thrill for the conclusion of each section. Further, I was careful to begin the story on the first page, without preliminaries, and to finish it abruptly when it was finished. For the rest, I put in generous quantities of wealth, luxury, feminine beauty, surprise, catastrophe, and genial, incurable optimism. I was as satisfied with the result as I had been with the famous poem on Courage. I felt sure that the syndicate had never supplied me with a sensational serial half as good as mine, and I could conceive no plea upon which they would be justified in refusing mine.
They bought it. We had a difference concerning the price. They offered sixty pounds; I thought I might as well as not try to get a hundred, but when I had lifted them up to seventy-five, the force of bluff would no further go, and the bargain was closed. I saw that by writing serials I could earn three guineas per half-day; I saw myself embarking upon a life of what Ebenezer Jones called "sensation and event"; I saw my prices increasing, even to three hundred pounds for a sixty thousand word yarn—my imagination stopped there.
The lingering remains of an artistic conscience prompted me to sign this eye-smiting work with a pseudonym. The syndicate, since my name was quite unknown in their world, made no objection, and I invented several aliases, none of which they liked. Then a friend presented me with a gorgeous pseudonym—"Sampson Death." Surely, I thought, the syndicate will appreciate the subtle power of that! But no! They averred that their readers would be depressed by Sampson Death at the head of every instalment.
"Why not sign your own name?" they suggested.
And I signed my own name. I, apprentice of Flaubert et Cie., stood forth to the universe as a sensation-monger.
The syndicate stated that they would like to have the refusal of another serial from my pen.
In correcting the proofs of the first one, I perceived all the opportunities I had missed in it, and I had visions of a sensational serial absolutely sublime in those qualities that should characterize a sensational serial. I knew all about Eugène Sue, and something about Wilkie Collins; but my ecstatic contemplation of an ideal serial soared far beyond these. I imagined a serial decked with the profuse ornament of an Eastern princess, a serial at once grandiose and witty, at once modern and transcendental, a serial of which the interest should gradually close on the reader like a vice until it became intolerable. I saw the whole of London preoccupied with this serial instead of with cricket and politics. I heard the dandiacal City youths discussing in first-class compartments on the Underground what would happen next in it. I witnessed a riot in Fleet Street because I had, accidentally on purpose, delayed my copy for twenty-four hours, and the editor of the "Daily——" had been compelled to come out with an apology. Lastly, I heard the sigh of relief exhaled to heaven by a whole people, when in the final instalment I solved the mystery, untied the knot, relieved the cruel suspense.
Suck was my dream—a dream that I never realized, but which I believe to be capable of realization. It is decades since even a second-class imaginative genius devoted itself entirely to the cult of the literaryfrisson. Sue excited a nation by admirable sensationalism. The feat might be accomplished again, and in this era so prolific in Napoleons of the press, it seems strange that no Napoleon has been able to organize the sensational serial on a Napoleonic scale.
I did not realize my dream, but I was inspired by it. Once more I received from the gods a plot scintillating with possibilities. It was less fine than the previous one; it was of the earth earthly; but it began with a scene quite unique in the annals of syndicates, and by this time I knew a little better how to keep the fire burning. I lavished wit and style on the thing, and there is no material splendour of modern life that I left out. I plunged into it with all my energy and enthusiasm, and wrote the fifteen instalments in fifteen days; I tried to feel as much like Dumaspèreas I could. But when I had done I felt, physically, rather more like the fragile Shelley or some wan curate than Dumas. I was a wreck.
The syndicate were willing to buy this serial, but they offered me no increase of rates. I declined to accept the old terms, and then the syndicate invited me to lunch. I made one of the greatest financial mistakes of my life on that accurst day, and my only excuse is that I was unaccustomed to being invited out to lunch by syndicates. I ought to have known, with all my boasted knowledge of the world of business, that syndicates do not invite almost unknown authors to lunch without excellent reason. I had refused the syndicate's offer, and the syndicate asked me to name a price for the entire rights of my tale. I named a price; it was a good price for me, then; but the words were scarcely out of my mouth before I saw that I had blundered. Too late! My terms were quietly accepted. Let me cast no slightest aspersion upon the methods of the syndicate: the bargain was completed before lunch had commenced.
The syndicate disposed of the whole first serial rights of my tale to a well-known London weekly. The proprietors of the paper engaged a first-class artist to illustrate it, they issued a special circular about it, they advertised it every week on 800 railway stations. The editor of the paper wrote me an extremely appreciative letter as to the effect of the serial from his point of view. The syndicate informed a friend of mine that it was the best serial they had ever had. After running in London it overran the provincial press like a locust-swarm. It was, in a word, a boom. It came out in volume form, and immediately went into a second edition; it still sells. It was the first of my books that "The Times" ever condescended to review; the "Spectator" took it seriously in a column and a quarter; and my friends took it seriously. I even received cables from foreign lands with offers to buy translation rights. I became known as the author of that serial. And all this, save for an insignificant trifle, to the profit of an exceedingly astute syndicate!
Subsequently I wrote other serials, but never again with the same verve. I found an outlet for my energies more amusing and more remunerative than the concoction of serials; and I am a serialist no longer.
While yet an assistant-editor, I became a dramatic critic through the unwillingness of my chief to attend a theatrical matinée performance given, by some forlorn little society, now defunct, for the rejuvenation of the English drama. My notice of the performance amused him, and soon afterwards he suggested that I should do our dramatic column in his stead. Behold me a "first-nighter"! When, with my best possible air of nonchalance and custom, I sauntered into my stall on a Lyceum first night, I glanced at the first rows of the pit with cold and aloof disdain. "Don't you wish you were me?" I thought behind that supercilious mask. "You have stood for hours imprisoned between parallel iron railings. Many times I have stood with you. But never again, miserable pittites!" Nevertheless I was by no means comfortable in my stall. Around me were dozens of famous or notorious faces, the leading representatives of all that is glittering and factitious in the city of wealth, pleasure, and smartness. And everybody seemed to know everybody else. I alone seemed to be left out in the cold. My exasperated self-conscious fancy perceived in every haughty stare the enquiry: "Who is this whipper-snapper in the dress-suit that obviously cost four guineas in Cheapside?" I knew not a soul in that brilliant resort. During the intervals I went into the foyer and listened to the phrases which the critics tossed to each other over their liqueur-glasses. Never was such a genial confusion of "Old Chap," "Old Man," "Old Boy," "Dear Old Pal"! "Are they all blood-brothers?" I asked myself. The banality, the perfect lack of any sort of aesthetic culture, which characterized their remarks on the piece, astounded me. I said arrogantly: "If I don't know more about the art of the theatre than the whole crowd of you put together, I will go out and hang myself." Yet I was unspeakably proud to be among them. In a corner I caught sight of a renowned novelist whose work I respected. None noticed him, and he looked rather sorry for himself. "You and I . . .!" I thought. I had not attended many first nights before I discovered that the handful of theatrical critics whose articles it is possible to read without fatigue, made a point of never leaving their stalls. They were nobody's old chap, and nobody's old pal. I copied their behaviour.
First on my own paper, and subsequently on two others, I practised dramatic criticism for five or six years. Although I threw it up in the end mainly from sheer lassitude, I enjoyed the work. It means late nights, and late nights are perdition; but there is a meretricious glamour about it that attracts the foolish moth in me, and this I am bound to admit. My trifling influence over the public was decidedly on the side of the angels. I gradually found that I possessed a coherent theory of the drama, definite critical standards, and all the rest of the apparatus; in short, that I had something to say. And my verdicts had a satisfactory habit of coinciding with those of the two foremost theatrical critics in London—perhaps in Europe (I need not name them). It is a somewhat strange fact that I made scarcely any friends in the theatre. After all those years of assiduous first-nighting, I was almost as solitary in the auditorium on the evening when I bade ablaseadieu to the critical bench as when I originally entered it. I fancied I had wasted my time and impaired my constitution in emulating the achievements of Théophile Gautier, Hazlitt, Francisque Sarcey and M. Jules Lemaître, to say nothing of Dutton Cook and Mr. Clement Scott. My health may have suffered; but, as it happened, I had not quite wasted my time.
"Why don't you write a play yourself?"
This blunt question was put to me by a friend, an amateur actor, whom I had asked to get up some little piece or other for an entertainment in the Theatre Royal back-drawing-room of my house.
"Quite out of my line," I replied, and I was absolutely sincere. I had no notion whatever of writing for the stage. I felt sure that I had not the aptitude.
"Nonsense!" he Exclaimed. "It's as easy as falling off a log."
We argued, and I was on the point of refusing the suggestion, when the spirit of wild adventure overcame me, and I gravely promised my friend that I would compose a duologue if he and his wife would promise to perform it at my party. The affair was arranged. I went to bed with the conviction that in the near future I stood a fair chance of looking an ass. However, I met with what I thought to be an amusing idea for a curtain-raiser the next morning, and in the afternoon I wrote the piece complete. I enjoyed writing it, and as I read it aloud to myself I laughed at it. I discovered that I had violated the great canon of dramatic art,—Never keep your audience in the dark, and this troubled me (Paul Hervieu had not then demonstrated by his "L'Enigme" that canon may be broken with impunity); but I could not be at the trouble of reconstructing the whole play for the sake of an Aristotelian maxim. I at once posted the original draft to my friend with this note: "Dear ——, Here is the play which last night I undertook to write for you."
The piece was admirably rendered to an audience of some thirty immortal souls—of course very sympathetic immortal souls. My feelings, as the situation which I had invented gradually developed into something alive on that tiny make-shift stage, were peculiar and, in a way, alarming. Every one who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that ensues when for the first time in your life you pull the starting lever, and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move. It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like that as I watched the progress of my first play. It was as though I had unwittingly liberated an energy greater than I knew, actually created something vital. This illusion of physical vitality is the exclusive possession of the dramatist; the novelist, the poet, cannot share it. The play was a delicious success. People laughed so much that some of my most subtle jocosities were drowned in the appreciative cachinnation. The final applause was memorable, at any rate to me. No mere good-nature can simulate the unique ring of genuine applause, and this applause was genuine. It was a microscopic triumph for me, but it was a triumph. Every one said to me: "But you are a dramatist!" "Oh, no!" I replied awkwardly; "this trifle is really nothing." But the still small voice of my vigorous self-confidence said: "Yes, you are, and you ought to have found it out years ago!" Among my audience was a publisher. He invited me to write for him a little book of one-act farces for amateurs; his terms were agreeable. I wrote three such farces, giving two days to each, and the volume was duly published; no book of mine has cost me less trouble. The reviews of it were lavish in praise of my "unfailing wit"; the circulation was mediocre. I was asked by companies of amateur actors up and down the country to assist at rehearsals of these pieces; but I could never find the energy to comply, save once. I hankered after the professional stage. By this time I could see that I was bound to enter seriously into the manufacture of stage-plays. My readers will have observed that once again in my history the inducement to embark for a fresh port had been quite external and adventitious.
I had a young friend with an extraordinary turn for brilliant epigram and an equally extraordinary gift for the devising of massive themes. He showed me one day the manuscript of a play. My faith in my instinct for form, whether in drama or fiction, was complete, and I saw instantly that what this piece lacked was form, which means intelligibility. It had everything except intelligibility. "Look here!" I said to him, "we will write a play together, you and I. We can do something that will knock spots off——" etc., etc. We determined upon a grand drawing-room melodrama which should unite style with those qualities that make for financial success on the British stage. In a few days my friend produced a list of about a dozen "ideas" for the piece. I chose the two largest and amalgamated them. In the confection of the plot, and also throughout the entire process of manufacture, my experience as a dramatic critic proved valuable. I believe my friend had only seen two plays in his life. We accomplished our first act in a month or so, and when this was done and the scenario of the other three written out, we informed each other that the stuff was exceedingly good.
Part of my share in the play was to sell it. I knew but one man of any importance in the theatrical world; he gave me an introduction to the manager of a West End theatre second to none in prestige and wealth. The introduction had weight; the manager intimated by letter that his sole object in life was to serve me, and in the meantime he suggested an appointment. I called one night with our first act and the scenario, and amid the luxuriousness of the managerial room, the aroma of coffee, the odour of Turkish cigarettes, I explained to that manager the true greatness of our play. I have never been treated with a more distinguished politeness; I might have been Victorien Sardou, or Ibsen . . . (no, not Ibsen). In quite a few days the manager telephoned to my office and asked me to call the same evening. He had read the manuscript; he thought very highly of it, very highly. "But——" Woe! Desolation! Dissipation of airy castles! It was preposterous on our part to expect that our first play should be commissioned by a leading theatre. But indeed we had expected this miracle. The fatal "But" arose from a difficulty of casting the principal part; so the manager told me. He was again remarkably courteous, and he assuaged the rigour of his refusal by informing me that he was really in need of a curtain-raiser with a part for a certain actress of his company; he fancied that we could supply him with the desiredbibelot; but he wanted it at once, within a week. Within a week my partner and I had each written a one-act play, and in less than a fortnight I received a third invitation to discuss coffee, Turkish cigarettes, and plays. The manager began to talk about the play which was under my own signature.
"Now, what is your idea of terms?" he said, walking to and fro.
"Can it be true," I thought, "that I have actually sold a play to this famous manager?" In a moment my simple old ambitions burst like a Roman candle into innumerable bright stars. I had been content hitherto with the prospect of some fame, a thousand a year, and a few modest luxuries. But I knew what the earnings of successful dramatists were. My thousand increased tenfold; my mind dwelt on all the complex sybaritism of European capitals; and I saw how I could make use of the unequalled advertisement of theatrical renown to find a ready market for the most artistic fiction that I was capable of writing. This new scheme of things sprang into my brain instantaneously, full-grown.
I left the theatre an accepted dramatist.
It never rains but it pours. My kind manager mentioned our stylistic drawing-room melodrama to another manager with such laudation that the second manager was eager to see it. Having seen it, he was eager to buy it. He gave us a hundred down to finish it in three months, and when we had finished it he sealed a contract for production with another cheque for a hundred. At the same period, through the mediation of the friend who had first introduced me to this world where hundreds were thrown about like fivers, I was commissioned by the most powerful theatrical manager on earth to assist in the dramatization of a successful novel; and this led to another commission of a similar nature, on more remunerative terms. Then a certain management telegraphed for me (in the theatre all business is done by telegraph and cable), and offered me a commission to compress a five-act Old English comedy into three acts.
"We might have offered this to So-and-So or So-and-So," they said, designating persons of importance. "But we preferred to come to you."
"I assume my name is to appear?" I said.
But my name was not to appear, and I begged to be allowed to decline the work.
I suddenly found myself on terms of familiarity with some of the great ones of the stage. I found myself invited into the Garrick Club, and into the more Bohemian atmosphere of the Green Room Club. I became accustomed to hearing the phrase: "You are the dramatist of the future." One afternoon I was walking down Bedford Street when a hand was placed on my shoulder, and a voice noted for its rich and beautiful quality exclaimed: "How the d——l are you, my dear chap?" The speaker bears a name famous throughout the English-speaking world.
"You are arriving!" I said to myself, naïvely proud of this greeting. I had always understood that the theatrical "ring" was impenetrable to an outsider; and yet I had stepped into the very middle of it without the least trouble.
My collaborator and I then wrote a farce. "We can't expect to sell everything," I said to him warningly, but I sold it quite easily. Indeed I sold it, repurchased it, and sold it again, within the space of three months.
Reasons of discretion prevent me from carrying my theatrical record beyond this point.
I have not spoken of the artistic side of this play-concoction, because it scarcely has any. My aim in writing plays, whether alone or in collaboration, has always been strictly commercial.[3]I wanted money in heaps, and I wanted advertisement for my books. Here and there, in the comedies and farces in which I have been concerned, a little genuine dramatic art has, I fancy, been introduced; but surreptitiously, and quite unknown to the managers. I have never boasted of it in managerial apartments. That I have amused myself while constructing these arabesques of intrigue and epigram is indubitable, whether to my credit or discredit as a serious person. I laugh constantly in writing a farce. I have found it far easier to compose a commercial play than an artistic novel. How our princes of the dramatic kingdom can contrive to spend two years over a single piece, as they say they do, I cannot imagine. The average play contains from eighteen to twenty thousand words; the average novel contains eighty thousand; after all, writing is a question of words. At the rate of a thousand words a day, one could write a play three times over in a couple of months; prefix a month—thirty solid days of old Time!—for the perfecting of the plot, and you will be able to calculate the number of plays producible by an expert craftsman in a year. And unsuccessful plays are decidedly more remunerative than many successful novels. I am quite certain that the vast majority of failures produced in the West End mean to their authors a minimum remuneration of ten pounds per thousand words. In the fiction-mart ten pounds per thousand is gilded opulence. I am neither Sardou, Sudermann, nor George R. Sims, but I know what I am talking about, and I say that dramatic composition for the market is child's play compared to the writing of decent average fiction—provided one has an instinct for stage effect.