“_You have the letters Cadmus gave_”----
As I sit down to write this paper I am experiencing a quite novel
sensation. Most of us like to talk about ourselves when any one will
listen, and nearly all of us do so now and then. But to write about
one’s self in the reasonable expectation that a large number of
people, friends, enemies and those who are indifferent, will read what
one has written, is curious. There have been times when an interviewer
has come from a Magazine and I have found myself trying to explain my
views, to answer questions that were put, with some degree of fluency,
to do myself justice and yet not to be egotistical in a somewhat
difficult situation. Knowing quite well what I wanted to say, and
exactly how I wished to explain myself, I have listened to my words
with a kind of embarrassed wonder at their inadequacy. “What an ass
this fellow must be thinking me!” has been one’s continual thought.
Then, when the interview appears, sometimes with pictures of “Mr. Guy
Thorne at his desk,” “the dining-room,” “shooting upon the moor,” one
finds that the writer has made a nice smooth sequence of the
conversation, just as the photographer has taken charming pictures of
one’s carefully-arranged furniture. Yet one was rather prevented from
really saying what one would have liked to say because of the
interviewer’s presence as the medium who was to give the words to the
public. This is a foolish self-consciousness, no doubt, but it is not
easy to overcome. Now, and at this moment, there is no such
restriction upon free speech. The snow is driving over the Dover
cliffs, no sound penetrates to the ancient room in which I write, and
for the first time in my life I am sitting down to talk of myself, as
an author to his readers.
The essay has come to be written in this way. There were still some
pages of this book to fill when last week, I was asked to open a
bazaar in Dover. The vicar said a good many absurdly kind things about
my stories when he introduced me to the people there, and afterwards I
had to stand a continuous fire of questions for two hours. I could not
understand, and I do not now understand, why any one should be
interested in the _personal_ explanations of a writer as to how he
writes, what happens when he is writing, and so forth. I do not often
go to a theatre, but when I do I never buy a programme. I don’t want
to know the private name of the lady who plays Ophelia or the
gentleman who is the Hamlet of the night. I pay my money in order that
they shall be Hamlet and Ophelia to me, that I shall watch the agonies
of a dark and troubled spirit, shall sigh over the tender fancies of
an unhappy love-sick girl, and the more I am forced to realize that
the gentleman is Mr. Jones, who was fined five pounds in the morning
for driving his motor-car too fast, the less real he is as the Prince.
But, although this is my way of thinking, I am well aware it is not
the general way; and as I have proved for myself that there is a
demand for some sort of personal explanation, and as I endeavour to
conduct my trade of writing upon common-sense principles, this essay
is getting itself written.
Addison said that “So excessive is the egotism of the egotist that he
makes himself the darling theme of contemplation; he admires and loves
himself to that degree that he can talk of nothing else.” This is an
obvious statement, and made with little of Mr. Secretary’s usual charm
of style. But it is perfectly true. I beg leave to submit, however,
that what I am doing here is not so much an act of egotism--egoism is
the better word--but a legitimate statement for those, if there are
any, who care to read it.
I have strong convictions upon certain points, and I endeavour to pack
my stories with these convictions. That, by doing this, I please many
readers who think as I do I am presently going to show, by quoting
some of their letters which have reached me.
A novel is simply this: it is a certain portion of the lives of
certain people imagined by the author and seen through his
temperament. Very well then; let me proceed to prove that the modern
nonsense which would have people believe that Christianity in fiction
is _against the canons of art_, is simply a lie.
The life of every single human being in England is punctuated and
impinged upon by Christianity. As I pointed out in my first essay, the
usual modern novel never mentions--never even mentions!--Sunday. Yet
on Sunday, the shops, factories, theatres and public-houses close. The
drunkard has as much reason to find Sunday the most dismal day in the
week as the saint to know it the happiest and best. For half-an-hour
in every town and village the bells of church and chapel ring--if
indeed chapels are “ritualistic” enough to have bells, a point upon
which I am not informed!
And again, speaking of the constant reminder we all have of religion,
every coin we have in our pockets bears the inscription REX FID.
DEF.--our King is officially known as the Defender of the Christian
Faith. Every day as I write, the newspapers are full of the
controversy--the religious controversy--of the Education Bill. Each
time you and I go to a concert we finish it with the music of the
National Anthem, which is a prayer to God that he will bless and
preserve the Dynasty. Is it necessary to multiply instances? I think
not.
How can any one say, as the literary critics have sometimes said of my
own books and of others much more important, that “religion” is out of
place in a novel?
As I have pointed out at some length, the greatest novels are one and
all permeated with the sense of religion. Take your Thackeray and read
in _Vanity Fair_ of George Osborne going out to battle and first
saying “Our Father” with his wife. Read the works of this great writer
and regard how, whenever a great emotion, a poignant situation occurs,
so surely the author sends up a prayer to Almighty God either in his
own person or that of his characters. In that almost greatest of
English novels, Charles Reade’s _The Cloister and the Hearth_, the
hero dies with the holy name of Jesus on his lips. There is religion
in _Pickwick!_--we read of the Christmas of Dingley Dell. In _Les
Misérables_, that huge epic novel, Victor Hugo has drawn more than one
saint of God, has made Christianity the motive of his drama.
It _is_ so in life, be certain that it is and always will be.
Christianity is the central thing, the only important thing, and the
attempt to minimize its importance and influence is as the chirping of
a linnet on the roadside as some stately procession passes by.
_They say. What say they? Let them say!_
But let no one be deluded into believing that the printed sneers of
those who are afraid to recognize our Lord represent any real opinion,
any weight of opinion, as to the public distaste to Christianity as an
integral part of the fiction which they buy.
Sir Arthur Helps once said, “The influence of works of fiction is
unbounded. Even the minds of well-informed people are more often
stored with characters from acknowledged fiction than from history or
biography, or the real life around them. We dispute about these
characters as if they were realities. Their experience is our
experience; we adopt their feelings and imitate their acts.
Shakespeare’s Plays were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough.
Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what Achilles or
Ulysses did in Homer.”
All this is entirely true. As a young American novelist once put it to
me, “To-day is the day of the novel.” In no other day and by no other
vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed, and the
critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to
reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to
the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our
idiosyncrasy.
This is by no means intended as an apologia for the sort of tales I
write. I know that it is my duty to write them, the duty I owe to my
own convictions, and however badly I write them I am doing my best.
No, I am not apologizing for my point of view. I am only trying to
suggest that even in my greatest artistic failures my artistic
standpoint can’t be assailed. Any critic who says that because I write
as a Christian and that _therefore (and for that reason only)_ my
books are inartistic, is wrong.
I have headed this article “An Author’s Post-Bag” et cetera. Probably
you will be wondering when I am going to justify the title. I will
begin to do so now.
Post-time is always a recurring wonder to me. The lowest classes of
all, the people who don’t get letters, are incapable of experiencing
more than a third of the sensations which the highly-organized life of
our time has to offer us.
A novelist, and I have no reason to think that I am any exception to
the rule, receives a very varied correspondence. The business side of
his operations is more extensive than the layman would suppose. The
writer whose output is regular and whose work is in demand has an
almost daily letter to receive from his agent. There is the question
of a serial for this or that paper, an editor wants a short story, a
publisher is writing impatient letters to the agent for a book that is
overdue, “close times” for various books have to be arranged so that
they do not clash between various publishers--he is confronted every
day with an infinity of detail which even such an experienced and
assiduous agent as I myself am fortunate to possess cannot save him.
When the business letters have been read, there is his own private
correspondence, and then the great mass of communications from people
whom one has never heard of and never seen. It is of these letters
that I would speak, and of their varied appeals to one’s pocket, one’s
vanity, the sense of gratitude and the feeling of anger.
As Cowper said, “None but an author knows an author’s cares,” and not
the least of them is the number of letters he receives asking for
money. There is a rooted idea in the general mind that fame and
fortune come immediately a writer publishes his first book. A novelist
is popularly supposed to be a man of affluence in the twentieth
century, just as in the eighteenth century he was known to be a
pauper. “All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended
with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of
bookmaking were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune
came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain to be
abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night or
a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged,
unwashed poet with guineas.... A week of taverns soon qualified him
for another year of night cellars.” Well, we have progressed since
then certainly. There are beds to sleep in, food to eat and fire upon
the hearth for most of us. Nevertheless the ordinary novelist is
nearly always a poor man, sometimes bitter poor. I _know_ what I am
talking about and there is not an author, agent or publisher who
would not say the same. For the first book I ever wrote I received ten
pounds, and this was paid in two instalments. Until four years ago
thirty pounds was the largest sum I had received for a long novel.
The word “royalty” has a fine sound. It is a purple word and opens
vistas to the outsider of luxury and ease. Yet in its literary
application it is the biggest humbug and liar of a word that ever
masqueraded for what it is not. There are plenty of “royalties” that
will not pay the third-class return fare between London and Penzance.
A great personal friend of mine, a man of culture and real love of
human event, wrote his first novel three years ago. He had something
definite to say, knew how to say it, and had a first-rate plot. For
months and months I saw him toiling lovingly at his novel. When it was
written he found a publisher willing to produce it, and it duly
appeared. In almost every case the reviews were extremely laudatory.
Papers of position and weight praised it unreservedly, to all
appearances the book was a definite success--a minor success, no
doubt, but a success. From first to last his earnings realized five
pounds, and neither he nor I have reason to believe that his publisher
cheated him in the matter of sales. Here is the written testimony of
what I say, given by an author who died after producing four or five
really excellent and successful novels.
“Take, then, an unusually lucky instance, literally a novel whose
success is extraordinary, a novel which has sold 2500 copies. I repeat
that this is an extraordinary success. Not one book out of fifteen
will do as well. But let us consider it. The author has worked upon it
for--at the very least--six months. It is published. Twenty-five
hundred copies are sold. Then the sale stops. And by the word stop one
means cessation in the completest sense of the word. There are
people--I know plenty of them--who suppose that when a book is spoken
of as having stopped selling, a generality is intended, that merely a
falling off of the initial demand has occurred. Error. When a book--a
novel--stops selling, it stops with a definiteness of an engine when
the fire goes out. It stops with a suddenness that is appalling, and
thereafter not a copy, not one single, solitary copy is sold. And do
not for an instant suppose that ever after the interest may be
revived. A dead book can no more be resuscitated than a dead dog.
“But to go back. The 2500 have been sold. The extraordinary, the
marvellous has been achieved. What does the author get out of it? A
royalty of ten per cent. Eighty-three pounds six shillings and
eightpence for six months’ hard work. Roughly less than £3 9_s._ 0_d._
a week. An expert carpenter will easily make much more than that, and
the carpenter has infinitely the best of it in that he can keep the
work up year in and year out, where the novelist must wait for a new
idea, and the novel writer must then jockey and manoeuvre for
publication. Two novels a year is about as much as the writer can turn
out and yet keep a marketable standard. Even admitting that both the
novels sell 2500 copies there is only £166 13_s._ 4_d._ of profit. One
may well ask the question: Is fiction writing a money-making
profession?
“The astonishing thing about the affair is that a novel may make a
veritable stir, almost a sensation, and yet fail to sell very largely.
“There is so-and-so’s book. Everywhere you go you hear about it. Your
friends have read it. It is in demand at the libraries. You don’t pick
up a paper that does not contain a review of the story in question. It
is in the ‘Book of the Month’ column. It is even, even--the pinnacle
of achievement--in that shining roster, the list of best sellers of
the week.
“Why, of course, the author is growing rich! Ah, at last he has
arrived! No doubt he will build a country house out of his royalties.
Lucky fellow; one envies him.
“Catch him unawares and what is he doing? As like as not writing
unsigned book reviews at thirty shillings a week in order to pay his
lodging bill--and glad of the chance.”
This is absolutely and literally true.
Yet novelists are perhaps more pestered than any other people by
requests for help. A writer who, like myself, can live in fair comfort
by means of unceasing labour, but is not even a well-to-do man, to say
nothing of a “wealthy one,” receives innumerable letters to which he
is quite unable to reply as the applicants would wish, but which are
most distressing to read. At a time when I certainly had not a hundred
pounds in the world, I received the following letter--of course I
suppress the name and address.
“---- Vicarage,
“----shire.
“MY DEAR SIR,
“Thank you a thousand times for _When it was Dark_. I am now
looking forward to Friday, when your next book begins in the
_Daily Mail_. I have been reading about you to-day and have
taken courage to ask your help. You say ‘Let nothing disturb
thee,’ etc. How can I help it in such trouble as mine. My
husband has failed in health from years of hard work, and out
of an income of _under_ £200 a year we are paying a curate
£100. At this moment we are in _extremes_. My boy is reading
for Holy Orders, and we are in need of funds for his expenses.
He has been two years a licensed lay reader, and is a thorough
Catholic and has the highest testimonials. Will you help me in
my need to-day with a donation. I can give references, and for
any help I shall be so thankful. Please forgive me for
troubling you.”
I have no doubt that this appeal is quite genuine, and a very poignant
comment it is upon the way in which the priests of the Church of
England are paid. This type of letter is not a pleasant one to receive
when one is sitting down to work. The imagination with which one is
endowed and by which one earns one’s bread, is not a faculty very easy
to discipline or to control, and the power which should be devoted to
the chapter one is engaged upon wanders away and constructs a picture
of want and sorrow which one is quite powerless to alleviate.
Nor is it once or twice that such letters as this arrive. Here is a
far more piteous document still, if it is genuine. I think that when
you have read it you will agree with me that it is genuine enough.
There is nothing of the ordinary begging letter about it; and if the
writer could invent such a story, he ought not to be so hopelessly
unable to earn a single halfpenny by his pen. It is to be observed
also that in this case the writer wants work, not money.
“London, N.
“DEAR SIR,
“About two years ago I arrived in England from Australia, with
the object of striving to gain a footing in literature, but so
far have been unsuccessful. I have written two novels and
numerous short stories and articles, but I have ever had them
rejected, and all I can show for my work is a pile of
publishers’ letters. My resources long since gave out, and I
worked myself into the lowest poverty, and then I was
prostrated by a long illness. Knowing, sir, that you have had
much to do with journalistic work, I decided to write and ask
you if you knew of any one in the city--or elsewhere--to whom
you could refer me for some employment. I am practically
destitute, and knowing no one in London makes it extremely
difficult for me to get anything to do. About six months ago I
was turned out of my lodgings owing to arrears of rent, and
then I commenced tramping the country in the hope of getting
work. I managed to get three weeks’ hop-picking, but nothing
else, and so for a while I tramped aimlessly about, being
exposed to all kinds of weather, sleeping in haystacks, or
wherever else offered, until at last my health again gave way.
It was then that I called on a well-known novelist, and he was
very kind and assisted me, at the same time expressing a wish
to see my works. They were sent for, and duly forwarded on to
his agents, and I have been advised to write books for boys,
the agent expressing his opinion that I would succeed in this,
but as I am situated writing is out of the question. When I met
this novelist my health failed utterly, and I was compelled to
go into the infirmary for a while, and whilst there he wrote
telling me to try and get some practice in journalistic work
and to study for a while until I gained a little more
experience.
“I think he is out of England at present, but he gave me
permission to use his letter as a reference if I needed it.
Well, sir, I returned to London about a month ago, and managed
to get a few days’ work envelope addressing at Morgan and
Scott’s, in Paternoster Row, but so far I have been unable to
find anything else to do. I am very anxious to get some work
immediately, and if you could help me in this I should be
indeed grateful. I care not of what nature the employment may
be, manual or otherwise, if I can only get it at once.
“Apologizing for troubling you,
“I am,
“Dear Sir,
“Yours faithfully.”
Some time ago a drawing appeared in the _Daily Mail_ of a Cornish
cottage where I was then living. Within a week, by a curious
coincidence, I received _three_ water-colour drawings of the place,
made from the sketch in the newspaper. Two were excellent, and
accompanied by the kindest letters; they hang on my walls now. The
third was by no means a work of art, to say the very least of it, and
this letter came with it:--
“North Kensington.
“I am sending you a copy of the cottage I have painted from the
sketch in the _Daily Mail_ of November 16 last, if you will
accept it.
“I must explain that I am only a very poor hand at such work.
The fact of the matter is that through much _illness_ and _lost
trade_ that I am left very _badly off_, and seeing the sketch
and account of your work, thought perhaps if I could paint a
few copies and you would introduce the matter to your many
friends I could sell some to them, which would assist me to
earn something, my health being bad and getting on to seventy
years of age it is not much I can do. You will understand that
I do not know anything of the appearance of the country around
the cottage. I have not been in that part, so all I have put in
is imaginary. Will you please say what you think to it, and how
much you think I could sell them for. I have not means to buy
canvas so have painted on card. Your kind assistance in this
matter will great oblige
“Yours truly.”
I have quoted but three letters from a vast pile of others. “Que vivre
est difficile ô mon coeur fatigué!” says the French poet, and nobody
knows it better than the English novelist. But with the best will in
the world we cannot help everybody. Charity begins at home, its sun
rises there and should set abroad, but it is limited by the purse of
the giver. Among all the contents of his post-bag such letters are the
most distressing to the author, and add enormously to a difficult and
often very thankless task.
But such letters as these and all worries _ejusdem generis_ are, after
all, only a small portion of my post-bag. During the last year or two
I have received hundreds and hundreds of letters from all parts of the
world--letters which have given me inexpressible happiness. I think I
may be forgiven for quoting some of them here. The real reward of an
author’s labours lies in the sympathy and appreciation of his readers,
and in that alone. When, moreover, a writer works with a definite
object in view, the purpose of leading others to believe what he
himself believes, such letters are indeed a strong stay and holdfast
which console for any amount of misrepresentation and bring a
veritable oil of joy for mourning.