On a certain Monday morning in the following November, Lucian’s great
epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading
newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its
merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. Lucian found
a pile of the London morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his
attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through
them systematically. When he had made an end of them he looked across
the table at Haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer
way.
‘I say, Haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are--well, they’re not
very flattering. There are six mighty voices of the press
here,--_Times_, _Telegraph_, _Post_, _News_, _Chronicle_, and
_Standard_--and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in
their pronunciations. The epic poem seems to be at something of a
discount.’
The reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein--taking
them as a whole they were cold. There was a ring of disappointment in
them. One reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said
there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of Mr. Damerel’s
previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. Another
openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of
careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and
rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp
was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had
previously had from the same pen. Mr. Damerel’s history, said a third,
was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much
of the Norman Conquest from his poem as from the pages of Freeman, but
the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting in his
latest. Each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental
sorrow for the Mr. Damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an
undercurrent of regret that Lucian had chosen to explore another path
than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. The consensus of
opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers
lying on Lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that Mr. Damerel’s
new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did
not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his
previous volumes. And to show his exact meaning and make out a good case
for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting
those of Lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own
particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something
great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which
they would have wished Mr. Damerel to supply for ever.
Lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. It was
disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed
was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was
pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what
the critics believed him capable of doing. He was amused at the
disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred Lucian the earlier to
Lucian the later--and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great
effort somewhat looked askance at.
‘I’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of
breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘I ought to have
remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one--Tennyson
was wise in giving his public the _Idylls of the King_ in fragments--if
he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d
have had a surfeit. I should have followed his example, but I wanted to
present the thing as a whole. And it _is_ good, however they may damn it
with faint praise.’
‘Does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked Haidee, who had
gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head
of which Lucian’s name stood out in bold letters.
‘Sell? Why, I don’t think reviews make much difference to the sales of a
book,’ answered Lucian. ‘I really don’t know--I suppose the people who
bought all my other volumes will buy this.’
But as he ate his chop and drank his coffee he began to wonder what
would happen if the new volume did not sell. He knew exactly how many
copies of his other volumes had been sold up to the end of the previous
half-year: it was no business instinct that made him carry the figures
in his mind, but rather the instinct of the general who counts his
prisoners, his captured eagles, and his dead enemies after a victory,
and of the sportsman who knows that the magnitude of the winnings of a
great racehorse is a tribute to the quality of its blood and bone and
muscle. He recalled the figures of the last statement of account
rendered to him by his publisher, and their comfortable rotundity
cheered him. Whatever the critics might say, he had a public, and a
public of considerable size. And after all, this was the first time the
critics had not burned incense at his shrine--he forgave them with
generous readiness, and ere he rose from the breakfast table was as full
as ever of confident optimism. He felt as regards those particular
reviewers as a man might feel who bids all and sundry to a great feast,
and finds that the first-comers are taken aback by the grand proportions
of the banquet--he pitied them for their lack of appetite, but he had no
doubt of the verdict of the vast majority of later comers.
But if Lucian had heard some of the things that were said of him and his
beloved epic in those holes and corners of literary life wherein one may
hear much trenchant criticism plainly voiced, he would have felt less
cock-sure about it and himself. It was the general opinion amongst a
certain class of critics, who exercised a certain influence upon public
thought, that there was too much of the workshop in his _magnum opus_.
It was a magnificent block of marble that he had handled, but he had
handled it too much, and the result would have been greater if he had
not perpetually hovered about it with a hungry chisel and an itching
mallet. It was perfect in form and language and proportion, but it
wanted life and fire and rude strength.
‘It reminds me,’ said one man, discussing it in a club corner where
coffee cups, liqueur glasses, and cigarettes were greatly in evidence,
‘of the statue of Galatea, flawless, immaculate, but neuter,--yes,
neuter--as it appeared at the very moment ere Pygmalion’s love breathed
into it the very flush, the palpitating, forceful tremor of life.’
This man was young and newly come to town--the others looked at him with
shy eyes and tender sympathy, for they knew what it was that he meant to
say, and they also knew, being older, how difficult it is to express
oneself in words.
‘How very differently one sees things!’ sighed one of them. ‘Damerel’s
new poem, now, reminds me of a copy of the _Pink ’Un_, carefully edited
by a committee of old maids for the use of mixed classes in infant
schools.’
The young man who used mellifluous words manifested signs of
astonishment. He looked at the last speaker with inquiring eyes.
‘You mean----’ he began.
‘Ssh!’ whispered a voice at his elbow, ‘don’t ask _him_ what he means at
any time. He means that the thing’s lacking in virility.’
It may have been the man who likened Lucian’s epic to an emasculated and
expurgated _Pink ’Un_ to whom was due a subsequent article in the
_Porthole_, wherein, under the heading _Lucian the Ladylike_, much
sympathy was expressed with William the Conqueror at his sad fate in
being sung by a nineteenth-century bard. There was much good-humoured
satire in that article, but a good many of its points were sharply
barbed, and Lucian winced under them. He was beginning to find by that
time that his epic was not being greeted with the enthusiasm which he
had anticipated for it; the great literary papers, the influential
journals of the provinces, and the critics who wrote of it in two or
three of the monthly reviews, all concurred that it was very fine as a
literary exercise, but each deplored the absence of a certain something
which had been very conspicuous indeed in his earlier volumes.
Lucian began to think things over. He remembered how his earlier work
had been written--he recalled the free, joyous flush of thought, the
impulse to write, the fertility and fecundity which had been his in
those days, and he contrasted it all with the infinite pains which he
had taken in polishing and revising the epic. It must have been the
process of revision, he thought, which had sifted the fire and life out
of the poem. He read and re-read passages of it--in spite of all that
the critics said, they pleased him. He remembered the labour he had gone
through, and valued the results by it. And finally, he put the whole
affair away from him, feeling that he and his world were not in accord,
and that he had better wrap himself in his cloak for a while. He spoke
of the epic no more. But unfortunately for Lucian, there were monetary
considerations at the back of the new volume, and when he discovered at
the end of a month that the sales were small and already at a
standstill, he felt a sudden, strange sinking at the heart. He looked at
Mr. Robertson, who communicated this news to him, in a fashion which
showed the publisher that he did not quite understand this apparently
capricious neglect on the part of the public. Mr. Robertson endeavoured
to explain matters to him.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘there is such a thing as a vogue, and the best
man may lose it. I don’t say that you have lost yours, but here’s the
fact that the book is at a standstill. The faithful bought as a
religious duty as soon as we published; those of the outer courts won’t
buy. For one thing, your poem is not quite in the fashion--what people
are buying just now in poetry is patriotism up-to-date, with extension
of the Empire, and Maxim-guns, and deification of the soldier and
sailor, and so on.’
‘You talk as if there were fashions in poetry as there are in clothes,’
said Lucian, with some show of scornful indignation.
‘So there are, my dear sir!’ replied the publisher. ‘If you lived less
in the clouds and more in the world of plain fact you would know it.
You, for instance, would think it strange, if you had ever read it, to
find Pollok’s poem, _The Course of Time_, selling to the extent of
thousands and tens of thousands, or of Tupper’s _Proverbial Philosophy_
making almost as prominent a figure in the middle-class household as the
Bible itself. Of course there’s a fashion in poetry, as there is in
everything else. Byron was once the fashion; Mrs. Hemans was once the
fashion; even Robert Montgomery was once fashionable. You yourself were
very fashionable for three years--you see, if you’ll pardon me for
speaking plainly, you were an interesting young man. You had a beautiful
face; you were what the women call “interesting”; you aroused all the
town by your romantic marriage--you became a personality. I think you’ve
had a big run of it,’ concluded Mr. Robertson. ‘Why, lots of men come up
and go down within two years--you’ve had four already.’
Lucian regarded him with grave eyes.
‘Do you think of me as of a rocket or a comet?’ he said. ‘If things are
what you say they are, I wish I had never published anything. But I
think you are wrong,’ and he went away to consider all that had been
said to him. He decided, after some thought and reflection, that his
publisher was not arguing on sound lines, and he assured himself for the
hundredth time that the production of the tragedy would put everything
right.
It was now very near to the day on which the tragedy was to be produced
at the Athenæum, and both Lucian and Mr. Harcourt had been worried to
the point of death by pressmen who wanted to know all about it. Chiefly
owing to their persistency the public were now in possession of a
considerable amount of information as to what it might expect to hear
and see. It was to witness--that portion of it, at any rate, which was
lucky enough to secure seats for the first night--an attempt to revive
tragedy on the lines of pure Greek art. As this attempt was being made
at the close of the nineteenth century, it was quite in accordance with
everything that vast sums of money should be laid out on costumes,
scenery, and accessories, and it was well known to the readers of the
halfpenny newspapers that the production involved the employment of so
many hundreds of supernumeraries, that so many thousands of pounds had
been spent on the scenery, that certain realistic effects had been
worked up at enormous cost, and that the whole affair, to put it in
plain language, was a gigantic business speculation--nothing more nor
less, indeed, than the provision of a gorgeous spectacular drama, full
of life and colour and modern stage effects, which should be enthralling
and commanding enough to attract the public until a handsome profit had
been made on the outlay. But the words ‘an attempt to revive Tragedy on
the lines of pure Greek Art’ looked well in print, and had a highly
respectable sound, and the production of Lucian’s second tribute to the
tragic muse was looked forward to with much interest by many people who
ignored the fact that many thousands of pounds were being expended in
placing it upon the stage.