There are times when one wearies of literature; when one reads over
one's first book, reflects how good it was, and how greatly one was
misunderstood; when one considers the perils and misadventures of so
accidental a life and likens oneself to those dogs described by Pliny
who run fast as they drink from the Nile for fear they should be seized
by the crocodiles; when one tires of following Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's
advice, 'to sit down in the back garden with pen, ink, and paper, to put
vine leaves in one's hair and to write'; when one remembers that in
Flaubert's view the literary man's was a dog's life (metaphors about
authors lead you back to the dog) but that none other was worth living.
In those moods, one does not agree with Flaubert; rather, one agrees
with Butler:--
'... those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense and one for rhyme,
I think's sufficient at one time.'
One sees life like Mr Polly, as 'a rotten, beastly thing.' One sighs for
adventure, to become a tramp or an expert witness. One knows that one
will never be so popular as Beecham's pills; thence is but a step to
picture oneself as less worthy.
We novelists are the showmen of life. We hold up its mirror, and, if it
look at us at all, it mostly makes faces at us. Indeed a writer might
have with impunity sliced Medusa's head: she would never have noticed
him. The truth is that the novelist is a despised creature. At moments,
when, say, a learned professor has devoted five columns to showing that
a particular novelist is one of the pests of society, the writer feels
exalted. But as society shows no signs of wanting to be rid of the pest,
the novelist begins to doubt his own pestilency. He is wrong. In a way,
society knows of our existence, but does not worry; it shows this in a
curiously large number of ways, more than can be enumerated here. It
sees the novelist as a man apart; as a creature fraught with venom, and,
paradoxically, a creature of singularly lamb-like and unpractical
temperament.
Consider, indeed, the painful position of a respectable family whose
sons make for Threadneedle Street every day, its daughters for Bond
Street and fashion, or for the East End, good works, and social
advancement. Imagine that family, who enjoys a steady income, shall we
say in the neighbourhood of L5000 a year, enough to keep it in modest
comfort, confronted with the sudden infatuation of one of its daughters
for an unnamed person, met presumably in the East End where he was
collecting copy. You can imagine the conversation after dinner:--