i
When I am dead I would rather people thought me better than I was instead
of worse; but if they think me worse, I cannot help it and, if it matters
at all, it will matter more to them than to me. The one reputation I
deprecate is that of having been ill-used. I deprecate this because it
would tend to depress and discourage others from playing the game that I
have played. I will therefore forestall misconception on this head.
As regards general good-fortune, I am nearly fifty-five years old and for
the last thirty years have never been laid up with illness nor had any
physical pain that I can remember, not even toothache. Except sometimes,
when a little over-driven, I have had uninterrupted good health ever
since I was about five-and-twenty.
Of mental suffering I have had my share—as who has not?—but most of what
I have suffered has been, though I did not think so at the time, either
imaginary, or unnecessary and, so far, it has been soon forgotten. It
has been much less than it very easily might have been if the luck had
not now and again gone with me, and probably I have suffered less than
most people, take it all round. Like every one else, however, I have the
scars of old wounds; very few of these wounds were caused by anything
which was essential in the nature of things; most, if not all of them,
have been due to faults of heart and head on my own part and on that of
others which, one would have thought, might have been easily avoided if
in practice it had not turned out otherwise.
For many years I was in a good deal of money difficulty, but since my
father’s death I have had no trouble on this score—greatly otherwise.
Even when things were at their worst, I never missed my two months’
summer Italian trip since 1876, except one year and then I went to Mont
St. Michel and enjoyed it very much. It was those Italian trips that
enabled me to weather the storm. At other times I am engrossed with work
that fascinates me. I am surrounded by people to whom I am attached and
who like me in return so far as I can judge. In Alfred [his clerk and
attendant] I have the best body-guard and the most engaging of any man in
London. I live quietly but happily. And if this is being ill-used I
should like to know what being well-used is.
I do not deny, however, that I have been ill-used. I have been used
abominably. The positive amount of good or ill fortune, however, is not
the test of either the one or the other; the true measure lies in the
relative proportion of each and the way in which they have been
distributed, and by this I claim, after deducting all bad luck, to be
left with a large balance of good.
Some people think I must be depressed and discouraged because my books do
not make more noise; but, after all, whether people read my books or no
is their affair, not mine. I know by my sales that few read my books.
If I write at all, it follows that I want to be read and miss my mark if
I am not. So also with _Narcissus_. Whatever I do falls dead, and I
would rather people let me see that they liked it. To this extent I
certainly am disappointed. I am sorry not to have wooed the public more
successfully. But I have been told that winning and wearing generally
take something of the gilt off the wooing, and I am disposed to acquiesce
cheerfully in not finding myself so received as that I need woo no
longer. If I were to succeed I should be bored to death by my success in
a fortnight and so, I am convinced, would my friends. Retirement is to
me a condition of being able to work at all. I would rather write more
books and music than spend much time over what I have already written;
nor do I see how I could get retirement if I were not to a certain extent
unpopular.
It is this feeling on my own part—omnipresent with me when I am doing my
best to please, that is to say, whenever I write—which is the cause why I
do not, as people say, “get on.” If I had greatly cared about getting on
I think I could have done so. I think I could even now write an
anonymous book that would take the public as much as _Erewhon_ did.
Perhaps I could not, but I think I could. The reason why I do not try is
because I like doing other things better. What I most enjoy is running
the view of evolution set forth in _Life and Habit_ and making things
less easy for the hacks of literature and science; or perhaps even more I
enjoy taking snapshots and writing music, though aware that I had better
not enquire whether this last is any good or not. In fact there is
nothing I do that I do not enjoy so keenly that I cannot tear myself away
from it, and people who thus indulge themselves cannot have things both
ways. I am so intent upon pleasing myself that I have no time to cater
for the public. Some of them like things in the same way as I do; that
class of people I try to please as well as ever I can. With others I
have no concern, and they know it so they have no concern with me. I do
not believe there is any other explanation of my failure to get on than
this, nor do I see that any further explanation is needed. [1890.]
ii
Two or three people have asked me to return to the subject of my supposed
failure and explain it more fully from my own point of view. I have had
the subject on my notes for some time and it has bored me so much that it
has had a good deal to do with my not having kept my Note-Books posted
recently.
Briefly, in order to scotch that snake, my failure has not been so great
as people say it has. I believe my reputation stands well with the best
people. Granted that it makes no noise, but I have not been willing to
take the pains necessary to achieve what may be called guinea-pig review
success, because, although I have been in financial difficulties, I did
not seriously need success from a money point of view, and because I
hated the kind of people I should have had to court and kow-tow to if I
went in for that sort of thing. I could never have carried it through,
even if I had tried, and instinctively declined to try. A man cannot be
said to have failed, because he did not get what he did not try for.
What I did try for I believe I have got as fully as any reasonable man
can expect, and I have every hope that I shall get it still more both so
long as I live and after I am dead.
If, however, people mean that I am to explain how it is I have not made
more noise in spite of my own indolence in matter, the answer is that
those who do not either push the themselves into noise, or give some one
else a substantial interest in pushing them, never do get made a noise
about. How can they? I was too lazy to go about from publisher to
publisher and to decline to publish a book myself if I could not find
some one to speculate in it. I could take any amount of trouble about
writing a book but, so long as I could lay my hand on the money to bring
it out with, I found publishers’ antechambers so little to my taste that
I soon tired and fell back on the short and easy method of publishing my
book myself. Of course, therefore, it failed to sell. I know more about
these things now, and will never publish a book at my own risk again, or
at any rate I will send somebody else round the antechambers with it for
a good while before I pay for publishing it.
I should have liked notoriety and financial success well enough if they
could have been had for the asking, but I was not going to take any
trouble about them and, as a natural consequence, I did not get them. If
I had wanted them with the same passionate longing that has led me to
pursue every enquiry that I ever have pursued, I should have got them
fast enough. It is very rarely that I have failed to get what I have
really tried for and, as a matter of fact, I believe I have been a great
deal happier for not trying than I should have been if I had had
notoriety thrust upon me.
I confess I should like my books to pay their expenses and put me a
little in pocket besides—because I want to do more for Alfred than I see
my way to doing. As a natural consequence of beginning to care I have
begun to take pains, and am advising with the Society of Authors as to
what will be my best course. Very likely they can do nothing for me, but
at any rate I shall have tried.
One reason, and that the chief, why I have made no noise, is now
explained. It remains to add that from first to last I have been
unorthodox and militant in every book that I have written. I made
enemies of the parsons once for all with my first two books. [_Erewhon_
and _The Fair Haven_.] The evolution books made the Darwinians, and
through them the scientific world in general, even more angry than _The
Fair Haven_ had made the clergy so that I had no friends, for the
clerical and scientific people rule the roast between them.
I have chosen the fighting road rather than the hang-on-to-a-great-man
road, and what can a man who does this look for except that people should
try to silence him in whatever way they think will be most effectual? In
my case they have thought it best to pretend that I am non-existent. It
is no part of my business to complain of my opponents for choosing their
own line; my business is to defeat them as best I can upon their own
line, and I imagine I shall do most towards this by not allowing myself
to be made unhappy merely because I am not fussed about, and by going on
writing more books and adding to my pile.