There are some emotions so intimate that the most intrepid writer
hesitates to chronicle them lest it should be inferred that he
himself is in the confessional. We have endeavoured to show our
author as a level-headed English-man with his nerves well under
control and an honest contempt for emotionalism in the stronger sex;
but his feelings in the face of the first little bundle of reviews
sent him by the press-cutting agency would prove this portrait
incomplete. He noticed with a vague astonishment that the flimsy
scraps of paper were trembling in his fingers like banknotes in the
hands of a gambler, and he laid them down on the breakfast-table in
disgust of the feminine weakness. This unmistakable proof that he had
written a book, a real book, made him at once happy and uneasy. These
fragments of smudged prints were his passport into a new and
delightful world; they were, it might be said, the name of his
destination in the great republic of letters, and yet he hesitated to
look at them. He heard of the curious blindness of authors that made
it impossible for them to detect the most egregious failings in their
own work, and it occurred to him that this might be his malady. Why:
had he published his book? He felt at that moment that he had taken
too great a risk. It would have been so easy to have had it privately
printed and contented himself with distributing it among his friends.
But these people were paid for writing about books, these critics who
had sent Keats to his gallipots and Swinburne to his fig-tree, might
well have failed to have recognised that his book was sacred, because
it was his own.
When he had at last achieved a fatalistic tranquillity, he once more
picked up the notices, and this time he read them through carefully.
The _Rutlandshire Gazette_ quoted Shakespeare, the _Thrums Times_
compared him with Christopher North, the _Stamford-bridge Herald_
thought that his style resembled that of Macaulay, but they were
unanimous in praising his book without reservation. It seemed to the
author that he was listening to the authentic voice of fame. He
rested his chin on his hand and dreamed long dreams.
He could afford in this hour of his triumph to forget the annoyances
he had undergone since his book was first accepted. The publisher,
with a large first edition to dispose of, had been rather more than
firm with the author. He had changed the title of the book from
"Earth's Returns"--a title that had seemed to the author dignified
and pleasantly literary--to "The Improbable Marquis," which seemed
to him to mean nothing at all. Moreover, instead of giving the book
a quiet and scholarly exterior, he had bound it in boards of an
injudicious heliotrope, inset with a nasty little coloured picture
of a young woman with a St. Bernard dog. This binding revolted the
author, who objected, with some reason, that in all his book there
was no mention of a dog of that description, or, indeed, of any dog
at all. The book was wrapped in an outer cover that bore a
recommendation of its contents, starting with a hideous split
infinitive and describing it as an exquisite social comedy written
from within. On the whole it seemed to the author that his book was
flying false and undesirable colours, and since art lies outside the
domesticities, he was hardly relieved when his wife told him that
she thought the binding was very pretty. The author had shuddered no
less at the little paragraphs that the publisher had inserted in the
newspapers concerning his birth and education, wherein he was
bracketed with other well-known writers whose careers at the
University had been equally undistinguished. But now that, like
Byron, he found himself famous among the bacon and eggs, he was in
no mood to remember these past vexations. As soon as he had finished
breakfast he withdrew himself to his study and wrote half an essay
on the Republic of Letters.
In a country wherein fifteen novels--or is it fifty?--are
published every day of the year, the publisher's account of the
goods he sells is bound to have a certain value. Money talks,
as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed--indeed today it is grown
quite garrulous--and when a publisher spends a lot of money on
advertising a book, the inference is that some one believes the
book to be good. This will not secure a book good notices, but
it will secure it notices of some kind or other, and that, as
every publisher knows, is three-quarters of the battle. The
average critic today is an old young man who has not failed in
literature or art, possibly because he has not tried to
accomplish anything in either. By the time he has acquired some
skill in criticism he has generally ceased to be a critic,
through no fault of his own, but through sheer weariness of
spirit. When a man is very young he can dance upon everyone who
has not written a masterpiece with a light heart, but after
this period of joyous savagery there follows fatigue and a
certain pity. The critic loses sight of his first magnificent
standards, and becomes grateful for even the smallest merit in
the books he is compelled to read. Like a mother giving a
powder to her child, he is at pains to disguise his timid
censure with a teaspoonful of jam. As the years pass by he
becomes afraid of these books that continue to appear in
unreasonable profusion, and that have long ago destroyed his
faith in literature, his love of reading, his sense of humour,
and the colouring matter of his hair. He realises, with a
dreadful sense of the infinite, that when he is dead and buried
this torrent of books will overwhelm the individualities of his
successors, bound like himself to a lifelong examination of the
insignificant.
Timidity is certainly the note of modern criticism, which is rarely
roused to indignation save when confronted by the infrequent outrage
of some intellectual anarchist. If the critics of the more important
journals were not so enthusiastic as their provincial confreres,
they were at least gentle with "The Improbable Marquis." A critic of
genius would have said that such books were not worth writing, still
less worth reading. An outspoken critic would have said that it was
too dull to be an acceptable presentation of a life that we all find
interesting. As it was, most of the critics praised the style in
which it was written because it was quite impossible to call it an
enthralling or even an entertaining book. Some of the younger
critics, who still retained an interest in their own personalities,
discovered that its vacuity made it a convenient mirror by means of
which they would display the progress of their own genius. In common
gratitude they had to close these manifestations of their merit with
a word or two in praise of the book they were professing to review.
"The Improbable Marquis" was very favourably received by the Press
in general.
It was, as the publisher made haste to point out in his
advertisements, a book of the year, and, reassured by its flippant
exterior, the libraries and the public bought it with avidity. The
author pasted his swollen collection of newspaper-cuttings into an
album, and carefully revised his novel in case a second edition
should be called for. There was one review which he had read more
often than any of the others, and nevertheless he hesitated to
include it in his collection. "This book," wrote the anonymous
reviewer, "is as nearly faultless a book may be that possesses no
positive merit. It differs only from seven-eighths of the novels
that are produced today in being more carefully written. The author
had nothing to say, and he has said it." That was all, three
malignant lines in a paper of no commercial importance, the sort of
thing that was passed round the publisher's office with an
appreciative chuckle. In the face of the general amiability of the
Press, such a notice in an obscure journal could do the book no
harm.
Only the author sat hour after hour in his study with that diminutive
scrap of paper before him on the table, and wondered if it was
true.