The publisher to whom our author had confided his manuscript stood,
like all publishers, at the very head of his profession. His business
was conducted on sound conservative lines, which means that though he
had regretfully abandoned the three-volume novel for the novel
published at six shillings, he was not among the intrepid
revolutionaries who were beginning to produce new fiction at a still
lower price. Besides novels he published solid works of biography at
thirty-one and six, art books at a guinea, travel books at fifteen
shillings, flighty historical works at twelve-and-sixpence, and cheap
editions of Montaigne's Essays and "Robinson Crusoe" at a shilling.
Some idea of his business methods may be derived from the fact that
it pleased him to reflect that all the other publishers were
producing exactly the same books as he was. And though he would admit
that the trade had been ruined by competition and the outrageous
royalties demanded by successful authors, and, further, that he made
a loss on every separate department of his business, in some
mysterious fashion the business as a whole continued to pay him very
well. He left the active part of the management to a confidential
clerk, and contented himself with signing cheques and interviewing
authors.
With such a publisher the fate of our author's book was never in
doubt. If it was lacking in those qualities that might be expected to
commend it to the reading public, it was conspicuously rich in those
merits that determine the favourable judgment of publishers' readers.
It was above all things a gentlemanly book, without violence and
without eccentricities. It was carefully and grammatically written;
but it had not that exotic literary flavour which is so tiresome on a
long railway journey. It could be put into the hands of any
schoolgirl, and at most would merely send her to sleep. The only
thing that could be said against it was that the author's dread of
inspiration had made it grievously dull, but it was the publisher's
opinion that after a glut of sensational fiction the six-shilling
public had come to regard dullness as the hall-mark of literary
merit. He had no illusions as to its possible success, but, on the
other hand, he knew that he could not lose any money on it, so he
wrote a letter to the author inviting him to an interview.
As soon as he had read the letter the author told himself that he
had been certain all along that his book would be accepted.
Nevertheless, he went to the interview moved by certain emotional
flutterings against which circumstance had guarded him ever since
his boyhood. He found this mild excitation of the nervous system by
no means unpleasant. It was like digesting a new and subtle liqueur
that made him light-footed and tingled in the tips of his fingers.
He recalled a phrase that had greatly pleased him in the early days
of his novel. "As the sun colours flowers, so Art colours life." It
seemed to him that this was beginning to come true, and that life
was already presenting itself to him in a gayer, brighter dress. He
reached the publisher's office, therefore, in an unwontedly
receptive mood, and was tremendously impressed by the rudeness of
the clerks, who treated authors as mendicants and expressed their
opinion of literature by handling books as if they were bundles of
firewood.
The publisher looked at him under heavy eyelids, recognised his
position in the social scale, and reflected with satisfaction that
his acquaintances could be relied on to purchase at least a hundred
copies. The interview did not at all take the lines that the author
in his innocence had expected, and in a surprisingly short space of
time he found himself bowed out, with the duplicate of a contract in
the pocket of his overcoat. In the outer office the confidential
clerk took him in hand and led him to the door of an enormous cellar,
lit by electricity and filled from one end to the other with bales
and heaps of books. "Books!" said the confidential clerk, with the
smile of a gamekeeper displaying his hand-reared pheasants. "There
are a great many," the author said timidly.
"Of course, we do not keep our stock here," the clerk explained.
"These are just samples." It was sometimes necessary to remind
inexperienced writers that the publication of their first book was
only a trivial incident in the history of a great publishing house.
The author had a sad vision of his novel as a little brick in a
monstrous pyramid built of books, and the clerk mentally decided that
he was not the kind of man to turn up every day at the office to ask
them how they were getting on.
The author was a little dazed when he emerged into the street and the
sunshine. His book, which an hour before had seemed the most
important thing in the world, had, become almost insignificant in the
light of that vast collection of printed matter, and in some subtle
way he felt that he had dwindled with it. The publisher had praised
it without enthusiasm and had not specified any of its merits; he had
not even commented on his fantastic use of the colon. The author had
lived with it now for many months--it had become a part of his
personality, and he felt that he had betrayed himself in delivering
it into the hands of strangers who could not understand it. He had
the reticence of the well-bred Englishman, and though he told himself
reassuringly that his novel in no way reflected his private life, he
could not quite overcome the sentiment that it was a little vulgar to
allow alien eyes to read the product of his most intimate thoughts.
He had really been shocked at the matter-of-fact way in which every
one at the office had spoken of his book, and the sight of all the
other books with which it would soon be inextricably confused had
emphasised the painful impression. This all seemed to rob the
author's calling of its presumed distinction, and he looked at the
men and women who passed him on the pavement, and wondered whether
they too had written books.
This mood lasted for some weeks, at the end of which time he received
the proofs, which he read and re-read with real pleasure before
setting himself to correcting them with meticulous care. He performed
this task with such conscientiousness, and made so many minor
alterations--he changed most of those flighty colons to more
conventional semicolons--that the confidential clerk swore terribly
when he glanced at the proofs before handing them to a boy, with
instructions to remove three-quarters of the offending emendations.
A week or two later there happened one of those strange little
incidents that make modern literary history. It was a bright, sunny
afternoon; the publisher had been lunching with the star author of
the firm, a novelist whose books were read wherever the British flag
waved and there was a circulating library to distribute them, and
now, in the warm twilight of the lowered blinds he was enjoying
profound thoughts, delicately tinted by burgundy and old port. The
shrewdest men make mistakes, and certainly it was hardly wise of the
confidential clerk to choose this peaceful moment to speak about our
author's book. "I suppose we shall print a thousand?" he said. "Five
thousand!" ejaculated the publisher. What was he thinking about? Was
he filling up an imaginary income-tax statement, or was he trying to
estimate the number of butterflies that seemed to float in the amber
shadows of the room? The clerk did not know. "I suppose you mean one
thousand, sir?" he said gently. The publisher was now wide awake. He
had lost all his butterflies, and he was not the man to allow himself
to be sleepy in the afternoon. "I said five thousand!" The clerk bit
his lip and left the room.
The author never heard of this brief dialogue; probably if he had
been present he would have missed its significance. He would never
have connected it with the flood of paragraphs that appeared in the
Press announcing that the acumen of the publisher had discovered a
new author of genius--paragraphs wherein he was compared with
Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Richardson, Sir Walter Besant, Thomas
Browne, and the author of "An Englishwoman's Love-letters." As it
was, it did not occur to him to wonder why the publisher should spend
so much money on advertising a book of which he had seemed to have
but a half-hearted appreciation. After all it was his book, and the
author felt that it was only natural that as the hour of publication
drew near the world of letters should show signs of a dignified
excitement.