It was some little time before the public, the mysterious section of
the public that reads works of fiction, discovered that the
publisher, aided by the normal good-humour of the critics, had
persuaded them to sacrifice some of their scant hours of intellectual
recreation on a work of portentous dullness. Therefor the literary
audience has its sense of humour--they amused themselves for a while
by recommending the book to their friends, and the sales crept
steadily up to four thousand, and there stayed with an unmistakable
air of finality. If the book had had any real literary merit its life
would have started at that point, for the weary comments of reviewers
and the strident outcries of publishers tend to obscure rather than
reveal the permanent value of a book. But six months after
publication "The Improbable Marquis" was completely forgotten, save
by the second-hand booksellers, who found themselves embarrassed with
a number of books for which no one seemed anxious to pay six-pence,
in spite of the striking heliotrope binding. The publisher, who was
aware of this circumstance, offered the author five hundred copies at
cost price, and the author bought them, and sent them to public
libraries, without examining the motive for his action too closely.
There were moments when he regarded the success of his book with
suspicion. He would have preferred the praise that had greeted it to
have been less violent and more clearly defined. Of all the
criticisms, the only one that lingered in his mind was the curt
comment, "The author had nothing to say, and he has said it." He
thought it was unfair, but he had remembered it. At the same time, in
examining his own character, he could not find that masterfulness
that seemed to him necessary in a great man. But for the most part he
was content to accept his new honours with a placid satisfaction, and
to smile genially upon a world that was eager to credit him with
qualities that possibly he did not possess. For if his book was no
longer read his fame as an author seemed to be established on a rock.
Society, with a larger S than that which he had hitherto adorned, was
delighted to find after two notable failures that genius could still
be presentable, and the author was rather more than that. He was
rich, he had that air of the distinguished army officer which falls
so easily to those who occupy the pleasant position of sleeping
partner in the City, and he had just the right shade of amused
modesty with which to meet inquiries as to his literary intentions.
In a word, he was an author of whom any country--even France, that
prolific parent of presentable authors--would have been proud. Even
his wife, who had thought it an excellent joke that her husband
should have written a book, had to take him seriously as an author
when she found that their social position was steadily improving.
With feminine tact she gave him a fountain-pen on his birthday, from
which he was meant to conclude that she believed in his mission as an
artist.
Meanwhile, with the world at his feet, the author spent an
appreciable part of his time in visiting the second-hand bookshops
and buying copies of his book absurdly cheap. He carried these waifs
home and stored them in an attic secretly, for he would have found it
hard to explain his motives to the intellectually childless. In the
first flush of authorship he had sent a number of presentation copies
of his book to writers whom he admired, and he noticed without
bitterness that some of these volumes with their neatly turned
inscriptions were coming back to him through this channel. At all the
second-hand bookshops he saw long-haired young men looking over the
books without buying them, and he thought these must be authors, but
he was too shy to speak to them, though he had a great longing to
know other writers. He wanted to ask them questions concerning their
methods of work, for he was having trouble with his second book. He
had read an article in which the writer said that the great fault of
modern fiction was that authors were more concerned to produce good
chapters than to produce good books. It seemed to him that in his
first book he had only aimed at good sentences, but he knew no one
with whom he could discuss such matters.
One day he found a copy of "The Improbable Marquis" in the Charing
Cross Road, and was glancing through it with absent-minded interest,
when a voice at his elbow said, "I shouldn't buy that if I were you,
sir. It's no good!" He looked up and saw a wild young man, with
bright eyes and an untidy black beard. "But it's mine; I wrote it,"
cried the author. The young man stared at him in dismay. "I'm sorry;
I didn't know," he blurted out, and faded away into the crowd. The
author gazed after him wistfully, regretting that he had not had
presence of mind enough to ask him to lunch. Perhaps the young man
could have told him how he ought to write his second book.
For somehow or other, at the very moment when his literary position
seemed most secure in the eyes of his wife and his friends, the
author had lost all confidence in his own powers. He shut himself up
in his study every night, and was supposed by an admiring and almost
timorous household to be producing masterpieces, when in reality he
was conducting a series of barren skirmishes between the critical
and the creative elements of his nature. He would write a chapter or
two in a fine fury of composition, and then would read what he had
written with intense disgust. He felt that his second book ought to
be better than his first, and he doubted whether he would even be
able to write anything half so good. In his hour of disillusionment
he recalled the anonymous critic who had treated "The Improbable
Marquis" with such scant respect, and he wrote to him asking him to
expand his judgment. He was prepared to be wounded by the answer,
but the form it took surprised him. In reply to his temperate and
courteous letter the critic sent a postcard bearing only five short
words--"Why did you write it?"
This was bad manners, but the author was sensible enough to see that
it might be good criticism, especially as he found some difficulty in
answering the question. Why had he written a book? Not for money, or
for fame, or to express a personality of which he saw no reason to be
proud. All his friends had said that he ought to write a novel, and
he had thought that he could write a better one than the average. But
he had to admit that such motives seemed to him insufficient. There
was, perhaps, some mysterious force that drove men to create works of
art, and the critic had seen that his book had lacked this necessary
impulse. In the light of this new theory the author was roused by a
sense of injustice. He felt that it should be possible for anyone to
write a good book if they took sufficient pains, and he set himself
to work again with a savage and unproductive energy.
It seemed to him that in spite of his effort to bear in mind that the
whole should be greater than any part, his chapters broke up into
sentences and his sentences into forlorn and ungregarious words. When
he looked to his first book for comfort he found the same horrid
phenomenon taking place in its familiar pages. Sometimes when he was
disheartened by his fruitless efforts he slipped out into the
streets, fixing his attention on concrete objects to rest his tired
mind. But he could not help noticing that London had discovered the
secret which made his intellectual life a torment. The streets were
more than a mere assemblage of houses, London herself was more than a
tangled skein of streets, and overhead heaven was more than a
meeting-place of individual stars. What was this secret that made
words into a book, houses into cities, and restless and measurable
stars into an unchanging and immeasurable universe?