[3]Once more written in 1900.
[3]Once more written in 1900.
It cuts me to the heart to compare English with American publishers to the disadvantage, however slight, of the former; but the exigencies of a truthful narrative demand from me this sacrifice of personal feeling to the god in "the sleeping-car emblematic of British enterprise." The representative of a great American firm came over to England on a mission to cultivate personal relations with authors of repute and profitableness. Among other documents of a similar nature, he had an introduction to myself; I was not an author of repute and profitableness, but I was decidedly in the movement and a useful sort of person to know. We met and became friends, this ambassador and I; he liked my work, a sure avenue to my esteem; I liked his genial shrewdness. Shortly afterwards, there appeared in a certain paper an unsigned article dealing, in a broad survey alleged to be masterly, with the evolution of the literary market during the last thirty years. My American publisher read the article—he read everything—and, immediately deciding in his own mind that I was the author of it, he wrote me an enthusiastic letter of appreciation. He had not been deceived; I was the author of the article. Within the next few days it happened that he encountered an English publisher who complained that he could not find a satisfactory "reader." He informed the English publisher of my existence, referred eulogistically to my article, and gave his opinion that I was precisely the man whom the English publisher needed. The English publisher had never heard of me (I do not blame him, I merely record), but he was so moved by the American's oration that he invited me to lunch at his club. I lunched at his club, in a discreet street off Piccadilly (an aged and a sound wine!), and after lunch, my host drew me out to talk at large on the subject of authors, publishers, and cash, and the interplay of these three. I talked. I talked for a very long while, enjoying it. The experience was a new one for me. The publisher did not agree with all that I said, but he agreed with a good deal of it, and at the close of the somewhat exhausting assize, in which between us we had judged the value of nearly every literary reputation in England, he offered me the post of principal reader to his firm, and I accepted it.
It is, I believe, an historical fact that authors seldom attend the funeral of a publisher's reader. They approve the sepulture, but do not, save sometimes in a spirit of ferocious humour, lend to the procession the dignity of their massive figures. Nevertheless, the publisher's reader is the most benevolent person on earth. He is so perforce. He may begin his labours in the slaughterous vein of the "Saturday Review"; but time and the extraordinary level mediocrity of manuscripts soon cure him of any such tendency. He comes to refuse but remains to accept. He must accept something—or where is the justification of his existence? Often, after a prolonged run of bad manuscripts, I have said to myself: "If I don't get a chance to recommend something soon I shall be asked to resign." I long to look on a manuscript and say that it is good, or that there are golden sovereigns between the lines. Instead of searching for faults I search for hidden excellences. No author ever had a more lenient audience than I. If the author would only believe it, I want, I actually desire, to be favourably impressed by his work. When I open the parcel of typescript I beam on it with kindly eyes, and I think: "Perhaps there is something really good here"; and in that state of mind I commence the perusal. But there never is anything really good there. In an experience not vast, but extending over some years, only one book with even a touch of genius has passed through my hands; that book was so faulty and so wilfully wild, that I could not unreservedly advise its publication and my firm declined it; I do not think that the book has been issued elsewhere. I have "discovered" only two authors of talent; one of these is very slowly achieving a reputation; of the other I have heard nothing since his first book, which resulted in a financial loss. Time and increasing knowledge of the two facts have dissipated for me the melancholy and affecting legend of literary talent going a-begging because of the indifference of publishers. O young author of talent, would that I could find you and make you understand how the publisher yearns for you as the lover for his love!Quapublisher's reader, I am a sad man, a man confirmed in disappointment, a man in whom the phenomenon of continued hope is almost irrational. When I look back along the frightful vista of dull manuscripts that I have refused or accepted, I tremble for the future of English literature (or should tremble, did I not infallibly know that the future of English literature is perfectly safe after all)! And yet I have by no means drunk the worst of the cup of mediocrity. The watery milk of the manuscripts sent to my employer has always been skimmed for me by others; I have had only the cream to savour. I am asked sometimes why publishers publish so many bad books; and my reply is: "Because they can't get better." And this is a profound truth solemnly enunciated.
People have said to me: "But you are so critical; you condemn everything." Such is the complaint of the laity against the initiate, against the person who has diligently practised the cultivation of his taste. And, roughly speaking, it is a well-founded and excusable complaint. The person of fine taste does condemn nearly everything. He takes his pleasure in a number of books so limited as to be almost nothing in comparison with the total mass of production. Out of two thousand novels issued in a year, he may really enjoy half-a-dozen at the outside. And the one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four he lumps together in a wholesale contempt which draws no distinctions. This is right. This contributes to the preservation of a high standard. But the laity will never be persuaded that it is just. The point I wish to make, however, is that when I sit down to read for my publisher I first of all forget my literary exclusiveness. I sink the aesthetic aristocrat and become a plain man. By a deliberate act of imagination, I put myself in the place, not of the typical average reader—for there is no such person—but of a composite of the variousgeneraof average reader known to publishing science. Iamthat composite for the time; and, being so, I remain quiescent and allow f the book to produce its own effect on me. I employ no canons, rules, measures. Does the book bore me—that condemns it. Does it interest me, ever so slightly—that is enough to entitle it to further consideration. When I have decided that it interests the imaginary composite whom I represent, then I become myself again, and proceed scientifically to enquire why it has interested, and why it has not interested more intensely; I proceed to catalogue its good and bad qualities, to calculate its chances, to assay its monetary worth.
The first gift of a publisher's reader should be imagination; without imagination, the power to put himself in a position in which actually he is not, fine taste is useless—indeed, it is worse than useless. The ideal publisher's reader should have two perfections—perfect taste and perfect knowledge of what the various kinds of other people deem to be taste. Such qualifications, even in a form far from perfect, are rare. A man is born with them; though they may be cultivated, they cannot either of them be acquired. The remuneration of the publisher's reader ought, therefore, to be high, lavish, princely. It it not. It has nothing approaching these characteristics. Instead of being regarded as the ultimate seat of directing energy, the brain within the publisher's brain, the reader often exists as a sort of offshoot, an accident, an external mechanism which must be employed because it is the custom to employ it. As one reflects upon the experience and judgment which readers must possess, the responsibility which weighs on them, and the brooding hypochondriasis engendered by their mysterious calling, one wonders that their salaries do not enable them to reside in Park Lane or Carlton House Terrace. The truth is, that they exist precariously in Walham Green, Camberwell, or out in the country where rents are low.
I have had no piquant adventures as a publisher's reader. The vocation fails in piquancy: that is precisely where it does fail. Occasionally when a manuscript comes from some established author who has been deemed the private property of another house, there is the excitement of discovering from the internal evidence of the manuscript, or from the circumstantial evidence of public facts carefully collated, just why that manuscript has been offered to my employer; and the discovered reason is always either amusing or shameful. But such excitements are rare, and not very thrilling after all. No! Reading for a publisher does not foster the joy of life. I have never done it with enthusiasm; and, frankly, I continue to do it more from habit than from inclination. One learns too much in the rôle. The gilt is off the gingerbread, and the bloom is off the rye, for a publisher's reader. The statistics of circulations are before him; and no one who is aware of the actual figures which literary advertisements are notoriously designed to conceal can be called happy until he is dead.
When I had been in London a decade, I stood aside from myself and reviewed my situation with the god-like and detached impartiality of a trained artistic observer. And what I saw was a young man who pre-eminently knew his way about, and who was apt to be rather too complacent over this fact; a young man with some brilliance but far more shrewdness; a young man with a highly developed faculty for making a little go a long way; a young man who was accustomed to be listened to when he thought fit to speak, and who was decidedly more inclined to settle questions than to raise them.
This young man had invaded the town as a clerk at twenty-five shillings a week, paying six shillings a week for a bed-sitting room, threepence for his breakfast, and sixpence for his vegetarian dinner. The curtain falls on the prologue. Ten years elapse. The curtain rises on the figure of an editor, novelist, dramatist, critic, connoisseur of all arts. See him in his suburban residence, with its poplar-shaded garden, its bicycle-house at the extremity thereof, and its horizon composed of the District Railway Line. See the study, lined with two thousand books, garnished with photogravures, and furnished with a writing-bureau and a chair and nothing else. See the drawing-room with its artistic wall-paper, its Kelmscotts, its water-colours of a pallid but indubitable distinction, its grand piano on which are a Wagnerian score and Bach's Two-part Inventions. See the bachelor's bedroom, so austere and precise, wherein Boswell's "Johnson" and Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal" exist peaceably together on the night-table. The entire machine speaks with one voice, and it tells you that there are no flies on that young man, that young man never gives the wrong change. He is in the movement, he is correct; but at the same time he is not so simple as not to smile with contemptuous toleration at all movements and all correctness. He knows. He is a complete guide to art and life. His innocent foible is never to be at a loss, and never to be carried away—save now and then, because an occasional ecstasy is good for the soul. His knowledge of thecoulissesof the various arts is wonderful. He numbers painters, sculptors, musicians, architects, among his intimate friends; and no artistic manifestation can possibly occur that he is unable within twenty-four hours to assess at its true value. He is terrible againstcabotins, no matter where he finds them, and this seems to be his hobby: to exposecabotins.
He is a young man of method; young men do not arrive without method at the condition of being encyclopædias; his watch is as correct as his judgments. He breakfasts at eight sharp, and his housekeeper sets the kitchen clock five minutes fast, for he is a terrible Ivan at breakfast. He glances at a couple of newspapers, first at the list of "publications received," and then at the news. Of course he is not hoodwinked by newspapers. He will meet the foreign editor of the "Daily ——" at lunch and will learn the true inwardness of that exploded canard from Berlin. Having assessed the newspapers, he may interpret to his own satisfaction a movement from a Mozart piano sonata, and then he will brush his hat, pick up sundry books, and pass sedately to the station. The station-master is respectfully cordial, and quite ready to explain to him the secret causation of delays, for his season-ticket is a white one. He gets into a compartment with a stockbroker, a lawyer, or a tea-merchant, and immediately falls to work; he does his minor reviewing in the train, fostering or annihilating reputations while the antique engine burrows beneath the squares of the West End; but his brain is not so fully occupied that he cannot spare a corner of it to meditate upon the extraordinary ignorance and simplicity of stockbrokers, lawyers, and tea-merchants. He reaches his office, and for two or three hours practises that occupation of watching other people work which is called editing: a process always of ordering, of rectifying, of laying down the law, of being looked up to, of showing how a thing ought to be done and can be done, of being flattered and cajoled, of dispensing joy or gloom—in short, the Jupiter and Shah of Persia business. He then departs, as to church, to his grill-room, where for a few moments himself and the cook hold an anxious consultation to decide which particular chop or which particular steak out of a mass of chops and steaks shall have the honour of sustaining him till tea-time. The place is full of literary shahs and those about to be shahs. They are all in the movement; they constitute the movement. They ride the comic-opera whirlwinds of public opinion and direct the tea-cup storms of popularity. The young man classes most of them with the stockbroker, the lawyer, and the tea-merchant. With a few he fraternises, and these few save their faces by appreciating the humour of the thing. Soon afterwards he goes home, diggingen routethe graves of more reputations, and, surrounded by the two thousand volumes, he works in seclusion at his various activities that he may triumph openly. He descends to dinner stating that he has written so many thousand words, and excellent words too—stylistic, dramatic, tender, witty. There may be a theatrical first-night toward, in which case he returns to town and sits in the seat of the languid for a space. Or he stays within doors and discusses with excessively sophisticated friends the longevity of illusions in ordinary people. At length he retires and reads himself to sleep. His last thoughts are the long, long thoughts of his perfect taste and tireless industry, and of the aesthetic darkness which covers the earth. . . .
Such was the young man I inimically beheld. And I was not satisfied with him. He was gorgeous, but not sufficiently gorgeous. He had done much in ten years, and I excused his facile pride, but he had not done enough. The curtain had risen on the first act of the drama of life, but the action, the intrigue, the passion seemed to hesitate and halt. Was this the artistic and creative life, this daily round? Was this the reality of that which I had dreamed? Where was the sense of romance, the consciousness of felicity? I felt that I had slipped into a groove which wore deeper every day. It seemed to me that I was fettered and tied down. I had grown weary of journalism. The necessity of being at a certain place at a certain hour on so many days of the week grew irksome to me; I regarded it as invasive of my rights as a freeborn Englishman, as shameful and scarcely tolerable. Was I a horse that I should be ridden on the curb by a Board of Directors? I objected to the theory of proprietors. The occasional conferences with the Board, though conducted with all the ritual of an extreme punctilio, were an indignity. The suave requests of the chairman: "Will you kindly tell us——?" And my defensive replies, and then the dismissal: "Thank you, Mr.——, I think we need trouble you no further this morning." And my exit, irritated by the thought that I was about to be discussed with the freedom that Boards in conclave permit themselves. It was as bad as being bullied by London University at an examination. I longed to tell this Board, with whom I was so amicable on unofficial occasions, that they were using a razor to cut firewood. I longed to tell them that the nursing of their excellent and precious organ was seriously interfering with the composition of great works and the manufacture of a dazzling reputation. I longed to point out to them that the time would come when they would mention to their friends with elaborate casualness and covert pride that they had once employed me, the unique me, at a salary measurable in hundreds.
Further, I was ill-pleased with literary London. "You have a literary life here," an American editor once said to me. "There is a literary circle, an atmosphere. . . . We have no such thing in New York." I answered that no doubt we had; but I spoke without enthusiasm. I suppose that if any one "moved in literary circles," I did, then. Yet I derived small satisfaction from my inclusion within those circumferences. To me there was a lack of ozone in the atmosphere which the American editor found so invigorating. Be it understood that when I say "literary circles," I do not in the least mean genteel Bohemia, the world of informal At-Homes that are all formality, where the little lions growl on their chains in a row against a drawing-room wall, and the hostess congratulates herself that every single captive in the salon has "done something." Such polite racketting, such discreet orgies of the higher intellectuality, may suit the elegant triflers, the authors of monographs on Velasquez, golf, Dante, asparagus, royalties, ping-pong, and Empire; but the business men who write from ten to fifty thousands words a week without chattering about it, have no use for the literary menagerie. I lived among the real business men—and even so I was dissatisfied. I believe too that they were dissatisfied, most of them. There is an infection in the air of London, a zymotic influence which is the mysterious cause of unnaturalness, pose, affectation, artificiality, moral neuritis, and satiety. One loses grasp of the essentials in an undue preoccupation with the vacuities which society has invented. The distractions are too multiform. One never gets a chance to talk common-sense with one's soul.
Thirdly, the rate at which I was making headway did not please me. My reputation was growing, but only like a coral-reef. Many people had an eye on me, as on one for whom the future held big things. Many people took care to read almost all that I wrote. But my name had no significance for the general public. The mention of my name would have brought no recognizing smile to the average person who is "fond of reading." I wanted to do something large, arresting, and decisive. And I saw no chance of doing this. I had too many irons in the fire. I was frittering myself away in a multitude of diverse activities of the pen.
I pondered upon these considerations for a long while. I saw only one way out, and, at last, circumstances appearing to conspire to lead me into that way, I wrote a letter to my Board of Directors and resigned my editorial post. I had decided to abandon London, that delectable paradise of my youthful desires. A To-let notice flourished suddenly in my front-garden, and my world became aware that I was going to desert it. The majority thought me rash and unwise, and predicted an ignominious return to Fleet Street. But the minority upheld my resolution. I reached down a map of England, and said that I must live on a certain main-line at a certain minimum distance from London. This fixed the neighbourhood of my future home. The next thing was to find that home, and with the aid of friends and a bicycle I soon found it. One fine wet day I stole out of London in a new quest of romance. No one seemed to be fundamentally disturbed over my exodus. I remarked to myself: "Either you are a far-seeing and bold fellow, or you are a fool. Time will show which." And that night I slept, or failed to sleep, in a house that was half a mile from the next house, three miles from a station, and three miles from a town. I had left the haunts of men with a vengeance, and incidentally I had left a regular income.
I ran over the list of our foremost writers: they nearly all lived in the country.
When I had settled down into the landscape, bought my live-stock, studied manuals on horses, riding, driving, hunting, dogs, poultry, and wildflowers, learned to distinguish between wheat and barley and between a six-year-old and an aged screw, shot a sparrow on the fence only to find it was a redbreast, drunk the cherry-brandy of the Elizabethan inn, played in the village cricket team, and ceased to feel self-conscious in riding-breeches, I perceived with absolute certainty that I had made no error; I knew that, come poverty or the riches of Indian short stories, I should never again live permanently in London. I expanded, and in my expansion I felt rather sorry for Londoners. I perceived, too, that the country possessed commercial advantages which I had failed to appreciate before. When you live two and a half miles from a railway you can cut a dash on an income which in London spells omnibus instead of cab. For myself I have a profound belief in the efficacy of cutting a dash. You invite an influential friend down for the week-end. You meet him at the station with a nice little grey mare in a phaeton, and an unimpeachable Dalmatian running behind. The turn-out is nothing alone, but the pedigree printed in the pinkiness of that dog's chaps and in the exiguity of his tail, spotted to the last inch, would give tone to a coster's cart. You see that your influential friend wishes to comment, but as you gather up the reins you carefully begin to talk about the weather and prices per thousand. You rush him home in twelve minutes, skimming gate posts. On Monday morning, purposely running it fine, you hurry him into a dog-cart behind a brown cob fresh from a pottle of beans, and you whirl him back to the station in ten minutes, up-hill half the way. You fling him into the train, with ten seconds to spare. "This is how we do it in these parts," your studiously nonchalant face says to him. He thinks. In a few hours Fleet Street becomes aware that young So-and-so, who lately buried himself in the country, is alive and lusty. Your stock rises. You go up one. You extort respect. You are ticketed in the retentive brains of literary shahs as a success. And you still have the dog left for another day.
In the country there is plenty of space and plenty of time, and no damnable fixed relation between these two; in other words, a particular hour does not imply a particular spot for you, and this is something to an author. I found my days succeeding each other with a leisurely and adorable monotony. I lingered over breakfast like a lord, perusing the previous evening's papers with as much gusto as though they were hot from the press. I looked sideways at my work, with a non-committal air, as if saying; "I may do you or I may not. I shall see how I feel." I went out for a walk, followed by dogs less spectacular than the Dalmatian, to collect ideas. I had nothing to think about but my own direct productiveness. I stopped to examine the progress of trees, to discuss meteorology with roadmenders, to wonder why lambs always waggled their tails during the act of taking sustenance. All was calmness, serenity. The embryo of the article or the chapter faintly adumbrated itself in my mind, assumed a form. One idea, then another; then an altercation with the dogs, ending in castigation, disillusion, and pessimism for them. Suddenly I exclaimed: "I think I've got enough to go on with!" And I turned back homewards. I reached my study and sat down. From my windows I beheld a magnificent panorama of hills. Now the contemplation of hills is uplifting to the soul; it leads to inspiration and induces nobility of character, but it has a tendency to interfere with actual composition. I stared long at those hills. Should I work, should I not work? A brief period always ensued when the odds were tremendous against any work being done that day. Then I seized the pen and wrote the title. Then another dreadful and disconcerting pause, all ideas having scuttled away like mice to their holes. Well, I must put something down, however ridiculous. I wrote a sentence, feeling first that it would not serve and then that it would have to serve, anyway. I glanced at the clock. Ten twenty-five! I watched the clock in a sort of hypnotism that authors know of, till it showed ten-thirty. Then with a horrible wrench I put the pen in the ink again . . . . Jove! Eleven forty-five, and I had written seven hundred words. Not bad stuff that! Indeed, very good! Time for a cigarette and a stroll round to hear wisdom from the gardener. I resumed at twelve, and then in about two minutes it was one o'clock and lunch time. After lunch, rest for the weary and the digesting; slumber; another stroll. Arrival of the second post on a Russian pony that cost fifty shillings. Tea, and perusal of the morning paper. Then another spell of work, and the day was gone, vanished, distilled away. And about five days made a week, and forty-eight weeks a year.
No newspaper-proprietors, contributors, circulations, placards, tape-machines, theatres, operas, concerts, picture-galleries, clubs, restaurants, parties, Undergrounds! Nothing artificial, except myself and my work! And nothing, save the fear of rent-day, to come between myself and my work!
It was dull, you will tell me. But I tell you it was magnificent. Monotony, solitude, are essential to the full activity of the artist. Just as a horse is seen best when coursing alone over a great plain, so the fierce and callous egotism of the artist comes to its perfection in a vast expanse of custom, leisure, and apparently vacuous reverie. To insist on forgetting his work, to keep his mind a blank until the work, no longer to be held in check, rushes into that emptiness and fills it up—that is one of the secrets of imaginative creation. Of course it is not a recipe for every artist. I have known artists, and genuine ones, who could keep their minds empty and suck in the beauty of the world for evermore without the slightest difficulty; who only wrote, as the early Britons hunted, when they were hungry and there was nothing in the pot. But I was not of that species. On the contrary, the incurable habit of industry, the itch for the pen, was my chiefest curse. To be unproductive for more than a couple of days or so was to be miserable. Like most writers I was frequently the victim of an illogical, indefensible and causeless melancholy; but one kind of melancholy could always be explained, and that was the melancholy of idleness. I could never divert myself with hobbies. I did not read much, except in the way of business. Two hours reading, even of Turgenev or Balzac or Montaigne, wearied me out. An author once remarked to me; "I know enough. I don't read books, I write 'em." It was a haughty and arrogant saying, but there is a sense in which it was true. Often I have felt like that: "I know enough, I feel enough. If my future is as long as my past, I shall still not be able to put down the tenth part of what I have already acquired." The consciousness of this, of what an extraordinary and wonderful museum of perceptions and emotions my brain was, sustained me many a time against the chagrins, the delays, and the defeats of the artistic career. Often have I said inwardly: "World, when I talk with you, dine with you, wrangle with you, love you, and hate you, I condescend!" Every artist has said that. People call it conceit; people may call it what they please. One of the greatest things a great man said, is:—
I know I am augustI do not trouble my spirit to indicate itself or to beunderstood . . .I exist as I am, that is enough.If no other in the world be aware I sit content.And if each and all be aware I sit content.
I know I am augustI do not trouble my spirit to indicate itself or to beunderstood . . .I exist as I am, that is enough.If no other in the world be aware I sit content.And if each and all be aware I sit content.
Nevertheless, for me, the contentment of the ultimate line surpassed the contentment of the penultimate. And therefore it was, perhaps, that I descended on London from time to time like a wolf on the fold, and made the world aware, and snatched its feverish joys for a space, and then, surfeited and advertised, went back and relapsed into my long monotony. And sometimes I would suddenly halt and address myself:
"You may be richer or you may be poorer; you may live in greater pomp and luxury, or in less. The point is that you will always be, essentially, what you are now. You have no real satisfaction to look forward to except the satisfaction of continually inventing, fancying, imagining, scribbling. Say another thirty years of these emotional ingenuities, these interminable variations on the theme of beauty. Is it good enough?"
And I answered: Yes.
But who knows? Who can preclude the regrets of the dying couch?