Chapter III: Part 3

I come now to a question only less delicate than that of the conflict of sexes in journalism--the question of reviewing, which, however, I shall treat with more freedom. If I have an aptitude for anything at all in letters, it is for criticism. Whenever I read a work of imagination, I am instantly filled with ideas concerning it; I form definite views about its merit or demerit, and having formed them, I hold those views with strong conviction. Denial of them rouses me; I must thump the table in support of them; I must compel people to believe that what I say is true; I cannot argue without getting serious in spite of myself. In literature, but in nothing else, I am a propagandist; I am not content to keep my opinion and let others keep theirs. To have a worthless book in my house (save in the way of business), to know that any friend of mine is enjoying it, actually distresses me. That book must go, the pretensions of that book must be exposed, if I am to enjoy peace of mind. Some may suspect that I am guilty here of the affectation of a pose. Really it is not so. I often say to myself, after the heat of an argument, a denunciation, or a defence: "What does it matter, fool? The great mundane movement will continue, the terrestrial ball will roll on." But will it? Something must matter, after all, or the mundane movement emphatically would not continue. And the triumph of a good book, and the ignominy of a bad book, matter to me.

The criticism of imaginative prose literature, which is my speciality, is an over-crowded and not very remunerative field of activity. Every intelligent mediocrity in Fleet Street thinks he can appraise a novel, and most of them, judging from the papers, seem to make the attempt. And so quite naturally the pay is as a rule contemptible. To enter this field, therefore, with the intention of tilling it to a profitable fiscal harvest is an enterprise in the nature of a forlorn hope. I undertook it in innocence and high spirits, from a profound instinct. I had something to say. Of late years I have come to the conclusion that the chief characteristic of all bad reviewing is the absence of genuine conviction, of a message, of a clear doctrine; the incompetent reviewer has to invent his opinions.

I succeeded at first by dint of ignoring one of the elementary laws of journalism, to-wit, that editors do not accept reviews from casual outsiders. I wrote a short review of a French work and sent it to "The Illustrated London News," always distinguished for its sound literary criticism. Any expert would have told me that I was wasting labour and postage. Nevertheless the review was accepted, printed, and handsomely paid for. I then sent a review of a new edition of Edward Carpenter's "Towards Democracy" to an evening paper, and this, too, achieved publicity. After that, for some months, I made no progress. And then I had the chance of a literary _causerie_ in a weekly paper: eight hundred words a week, thirty pounds a year. I wrote a sample article--and I well remember the incredible pains I took to show that Mrs. Lynn Linton's "In Haste and at Leisure" was thoroughly bad--but my article was too "literary." The editor with thirty pounds a year to spend on literary criticism went in search of a confection less austere than mine. But I was not baulked for long. The literary column of my own paper (of which I was then only assistant-editor) was presented to me on my assurance that I could liven it up: seven hundred words a week, at twelve and sixpence. The stuff that I wrote was entirely unsuited to the taste of our public; but it attracted attention from the seats of the mighty, and it also attracted--final triumph of the despised reviewer!--publishers' advertisements. I wrote this column every week for some years. And I got another one to do, by asking for it. Then I selected some of my best and wittiest reviews, and sent them to the editor of a well-known organ of culture with a note suggesting that my pen ought to add to the charms of his paper. An editor of sagacity and perspicacity, he admitted the soundness of my suggestion without cavil, and the result was mutually satisfactory. At the present time.[2] I am continually refusing critical work. I reckon that on an average I review a book and a fraction of a book every day of my life, Sundays included.

"Then," says the man in the street inevitably, "you must spend a very large part of each day in reading new books." Not so. I fit my reviewing into the odd unoccupied corners of my time, the main portions of which are given to the manufacture of novels, plays, short stories, and longer literary essays. I am an author of several sorts. I have various strings to my bow. And I know my business. I write half a million words a year. That is not excessive; but it is passable industry, and nowadays I make a point of not working too hard. The half million words contain one or two books, one or two plays, and numerous trifles not connected with literary criticism; only about a hundred and fifty thousand words are left for reviewing.

The sense of justice of the man in the street is revolted. "You do not read through all the books that you pretend to criticize?" he hints. I have never known a reviewer to answer this insinuation straightforwardly in print, but I will answer it: No, I do not.

And the man in the street says, shocked: "You are unjust."

And I reply: "Not at all. I am merely an expert."

The performances of the expert in any craft will surprise and amaze the inexpert. Come with me into my study and I will surprise and amaze you. Have I been handling novels for bread-and-cheese all these years and not learnt to judge them by any process quicker than that employed by you who merely pick up a novel for relaxation after dinner? Assuming that your taste is fairly sound, let us be confronted with the same new novel, and I will show you, though you are a quick reader, that I can anticipate your judgment of that novel by a minimum of fifty-five minutes. The title-page--that conjunction of the title, the name of the author, and the name of the publisher--speaks to me, telling me all sorts of things. The very chapter-headings deliver a message of style. The narrative everywhere discloses to me the merits and defects of the writer; no author ever lived who could write a page without giving himself away. The whole book, open it where I will, is murmurous with indications for me. In the case of nine books of ten, to read them through would be not a work of supererogation--it would be a sinful waste of time on the part of a professional reviewer. The majority of novels--and all these remarks apply only to novels--hold no surprise for the professional reviewer. He can foretell them as the nautical almanac foretells astronomical phenomena. The customary established popular author seldom or never deviates from his appointed track, and it is the customary established popular author upon whom chiefly the reviewer is a parasite. New authors occasionally cause the reviewer to hesitate in his swift verdicts, especially when the verdict is inclined to be favourable. Certain publishers (that is to say, their "readers") have a knack of acquiring new authors who can imitate real excellence in an astonishing manner. In some cases the reviewer must needs deliberately "get into" the book, in order not to be deceived by appearances, in order to decide positively whether the author has genuine imaginative power, and if so, whether that power is capable of a sustained effort. But these difficult instances are rare. There remains the work of the true artist, the work that the reviewer himself admires and enjoys: say one book in fifty, or one in a hundred. The reviewer reads that through.

Brief reflection will convince any one that it would be economically impossible for the reviewer to fulfil this extraordinary behest of the man of the street to read every book through. Take your London morning paper, and observe the column devoted to fiction of the day. It comprises some fifteen hundred words, and the reviewer receives, if he is well paid, three guineas for it. Five novels are discussed. Those novels will amount to sixteen hundred pages of printed matter. Reading at the rate of eight words a second, the reviewer would accomplish two pages a minute, and sixteen hundred pages in thirteen hours and twenty minutes. Add an hour and forty minutes for the composition, and we have fifteen hours, or two days' work. Do you imagine that the reviewer of a London morning paper is going to hire out his immortal soul, his experience, his mere skill, at the rate of thirty-one and sixpence per day on irregular jobs? Scarcely. He will earn his three guineas inside three hours, and it will be well and truly earned. As a journeyman author, with the ability and inclination to turn my pen in any direction at request, I long ago established a rule never to work for less than ten shillings an hour on piecework. If an editor commissioned an article, he received from me as much fundamental brain-power and as much time as the article demanded--up to the limit of his pay in terms of hours at ten shillings apiece. But each year I raise my price per hour. Of course, when I am working on my own initiative, for the sole advancement of my artistic reputation, I ignore finance and think of glory alone. It cannot, however, be too dearly understood that the professional author, the man who depends entirely on his pen for the continuance of breath, and whose income is at the mercy of an illness or a headache, is eternally compromising between glory and something more edible and warmer at nights. He labours in the first place for food, shelter, tailors, a woman, European travel, horses, stalls at the opera, good cigars, ambrosial evenings in restaurants; and he gives glory the best chance he can. I am not speaking of geniuses with a mania for posterity; I am speaking of human beings.

To return and to conclude this chapter. I feel convinced--nay, I know--that on the whole novelists get a little more than justice at the hands of their critics. I can recall many instances in which my praise has, in the light of further consideration, exceeded the deserts of a book; but very, very few in which I have cast a slur on genuine merit. Critics usually display a tendency towards a too generous kindness, particularly Scottish reviewers; it is almost a rule of the vocation. Most authors, I think, recognize this pleasing fact. It is only the minority, rabid for everlasting laudation, who carp; and, carping, demand the scalps of multiple-reviewers as a terrible example and warning to the smaller fry.

[Footnote 2: 1900.]

XII

Serial fiction is sold and bought just like any other fancy goods. It has its wholesale houses, its commercial travellers--even its trusts and "corners." An editor may for some reason desire the work of a particular author; he may dangle gold before that author or that author's agent; but if a corner has been established he will be met by polite regrets and the information that Mr. So-and-So, or the Such-and-Such Syndicate, is the proper quarter to apply to; then the editor is aware that he will get what he wants solely by one method of payment--through the nose. A considerable part of the fiction business is in the hand of a few large syndicates--syndicates in name only, and middlemen in fact. They perform a useful function. They will sell to the editor the entire rights of a serial, or they will sell him the rights for a particular district--the London district, the Manchester district, the John-o'-Groats district--the price varying in direct ratio with the size of the district. Many London papers are content to buy the London rights only of a serial, or to buy the English rights as distinct from the Scottish rights, or to buy the entire rights minus the rights of one or two large provincial districts. Thus a serial may make its original appearance in London only; or it may appear simultaneously in London and Manchester only, or in London only in England and throughout Scotland, or in fifty places at once in England and Scotland. And after a serial has appeared for the first time and run its course, the weeklies of small and obscure towns, the proud organs of all the little Pedlingtons, buy for a trifle the right to reprint it. The serials of some authors survive in this manner for years in the remote provinces; pick up the local sheet in a country inn, and you may perhaps shudder again over the excitations of a serial that you read in book form in the far-off nineties. So, all editorial purses are suited, the syndicates reap much profit, and they are in a position to pay their authors, both tame and wild, a just emolument; upon occasion they can even be generous to the verge of an imprudence.

When I was an editor, I found it convenient, economical, and satisfactory to buy all my fiction from a large and powerful syndicate. I got important "names," the names that one sees on the title-pages of railway novels, at a moderate price, and it was nothing to me that my serial was appearing also in Killicrankie, the Knockmilly-down Mountains, or the Scilly Isles. The representative of the syndicate, a man clothed with authority, called regularly; he displayed his dainty novelties, his leading lines, his old favourites, his rising stars, his dark horses, and his dead bargains; I turned them over, like a woman on remnant-day at a draper's; and after the inevitable Oriental chaffering, we came to terms. I bought Christmas stories in March, and seaside fiction in December, and good solid Baring-Gould or Le Queux or L.T. Meade all the year round.

Excellently as these ingenious narrative confections served their purpose, I dreamed of something better. And in my dream a sudden and beautiful thought accosted me: Why should all the buying be on one side?

And the next time the representative of the syndicate called upon me, I met his overtures with another.

"Why should all the buying be on one side?" I said. "You know I am an author." I added that if he had not seen any of my books, I must send him copies. They were exquisitely different from his wares, but I said nothing about that.

"Ah!" he parried firmly. "We never buy serials from editors."

I perceived that I was by no means the first astute editor who had tried to mingle one sort of business with another. Still it was plain to me that my good friend was finding it a little difficult to combine the affability of a seller with the lofty disinclination of one who is requested to buy in a crowded market.

"I should have thought," I remarked, with a diplomatic touch of annoyance, "that you would buy wherever you could get good stuff."

"Oh, yes," he said, "of course we do. But----"

"Well," I continued, "I am writing a serial, and I can tell you it will be a good one. I merely mention it to you. If you don't care for it, I fancy I can discover some one who will."

Then, having caused to float between us, cloud-like, the significance of the indisputable fact that there were other syndicates in the world, I proceeded nonchalantly to the matter of his visit and gave him a good order. He was an able merchant, but I had not moved in legal circles for nothing. Business is business: and he as well as I knew that arbitrary rules to the exclusion of editors must give way before this great and sublime truth, the foundation of England's glory.

The next thing was to concoct the serial. I had entered into a compact with myself that I would never "write down" to the public in a long fiction. I was almost bound to pander to the vulgar taste, or at any rate to a taste not refined, in my editing, in my articles, and in my short stories, but I had sworn solemnly that I would keep the novel-form unsullied for the pure exercise of the artist in me. What became of this high compact? I merely ignored it. I tore it up and it was forgotten, the instant I saw a chance of earning the money of shame. I devised excuses, of course. I said that my drawing-room wanted new furniture; I said that I might lift the sensational serial to a higher place, thus serving the cause of art; I said--I don't know what I said, all to my conscience. But I began the serial.

As an editor, I knew the qualities that a serial ought to possess. And I knew specially that what most serials lacked was a large, central, unifying, vivifying idea. I was very fortunate in lighting upon such an idea for my first serial. There are no original themes; probably no writer ever did invent an original theme; but my theme was a brilliant imposture of originality. It had, too, grandeur and passion, and fantasy, and it was inimical to none of the prejudices of the serial reader. In truth it was a theme worthy of much better treatment than I accorded to it. Throughout the composition of the tale, until nearly the end, I had the uneasy feeling, familiar to all writers, that I was frittering away a really good thing. But as the climax approached, the situa-took hold of me, and in spite of myself I wrote my best. The tale was divided into twelve instalments of five thousand words each, and I composed it in twenty-four half-days. Each morning, as I walked down the Thames Embankment, I contrived a chapter of two thousand five hundred words, and each afternoon I wrote the chapter. An instinctive sense of form helped me to plan the events into an imposing shape, and it needed no abnormal inventive faculty to provide a thrill for the conclusion of each section. Further, I was careful to begin the story on the first page, without preliminaries, and to finish it abruptly when it was finished. For the rest, I put in generous quantities of wealth, luxury, feminine beauty, surprise, catastrophe, and genial, incurable optimism. I was as satisfied with the result as I had been with the famous poem on Courage. I felt sure that the syndicate had never supplied me with a sensational serial half as good as mine, and I could conceive no plea upon which they would be justified in refusing mine.

They bought it. We had a difference concerning the price. They offered sixty pounds; I thought I might as well as not try to get a hundred, but when I had lifted them up to seventy-five, the force of bluff would no further go, and the bargain was closed. I saw that by writing serials I could earn three guineas per half-day; I saw myself embarking upon a life of what Ebenezer Jones called "sensation and event"; I saw my prices increasing, even to three hundred pounds for a sixty thousand word yarn--my imagination stopped there.

The lingering remains of an artistic conscience prompted me to sign this eye-smiting work with a pseudonym. The syndicate, since my name was quite unknown in their world, made no objection, and I invented several aliases, none of which they liked. Then a friend presented me with a gorgeous pseudonym--"Sampson Death." Surely, I thought, the syndicate will appreciate the subtle power of that! But no! They averred that their readers would be depressed by Sampson Death at the head of every instalment.

"Why not sign your own name?" they suggested.

And I signed my own name. I, apprentice of Flaubert et Cie., stood forth to the universe as a sensation-monger.

The syndicate stated that they would like to have the refusal of another serial from my pen.

In correcting the proofs of the first one, I perceived all the opportunities I had missed in it, and I had visions of a sensational serial absolutely sublime in those qualities that should characterize a sensational serial. I knew all about Eugène Sue, and something about Wilkie Collins; but my ecstatic contemplation of an ideal serial soared far beyond these. I imagined a serial decked with the profuse ornament of an Eastern princess, a serial at once grandiose and witty, at once modern and transcendental, a serial of which the interest should gradually close on the reader like a vice until it became intolerable. I saw the whole of London preoccupied with this serial instead of with cricket and politics. I heard the dandiacal City youths discussing in first-class compartments on the Underground what would happen next in it. I witnessed a riot in Fleet Street because I had, accidentally on purpose, delayed my copy for twenty-four hours, and the editor of the "Daily----" had been compelled to come out with an apology. Lastly, I heard the sigh of relief exhaled to heaven by a whole people, when in the final instalment I solved the mystery, untied the knot, relieved the cruel suspense.

Suck was my dream--a dream that I never realized, but which I believe to be capable of realization. It is decades since even a second-class imaginative genius devoted itself entirely to the cult of the literary _frisson_. Sue excited a nation by admirable sensationalism. The feat might be accomplished again, and in this era so prolific in Napoleons of the press, it seems strange that no Napoleon has been able to organize the sensational serial on a Napoleonic scale.

I did not realize my dream, but I was inspired by it. Once more I received from the gods a plot scintillating with possibilities. It was less fine than the previous one; it was of the earth earthly; but it began with a scene quite unique in the annals of syndicates, and by this time I knew a little better how to keep the fire burning. I lavished wit and style on the thing, and there is no material splendour of modern life that I left out. I plunged into it with all my energy and enthusiasm, and wrote the fifteen instalments in fifteen days; I tried to feel as much like Dumas _père_ as I could. But when I had done I felt, physically, rather more like the fragile Shelley or some wan curate than Dumas. I was a wreck.

The syndicate were willing to buy this serial, but they offered me no increase of rates. I declined to accept the old terms, and then the syndicate invited me to lunch. I made one of the greatest financial mistakes of my life on that accurst day, and my only excuse is that I was unaccustomed to being invited out to lunch by syndicates. I ought to have known, with all my boasted knowledge of the world of business, that syndicates do not invite almost unknown authors to lunch without excellent reason. I had refused the syndicate's offer, and the syndicate asked me to name a price for the entire rights of my tale. I named a price; it was a good price for me, then; but the words were scarcely out of my mouth before I saw that I had blundered. Too late! My terms were quietly accepted. Let me cast no slightest aspersion upon the methods of the syndicate: the bargain was completed before lunch had commenced.

The syndicate disposed of the whole first serial rights of my tale to a well-known London weekly. The proprietors of the paper engaged a first-class artist to illustrate it, they issued a special circular about it, they advertised it every week on 800 railway stations. The editor of the paper wrote me an extremely appreciative letter as to the effect of the serial from his point of view. The syndicate informed a friend of mine that it was the best serial they had ever had. After running in London it overran the provincial press like a locust-swarm. It was, in a word, a boom. It came out in volume form, and immediately went into a second edition; it still sells. It was the first of my books that "The Times" ever condescended to review; the "Spectator" took it seriously in a column and a quarter; and my friends took it seriously. I even received cables from foreign lands with offers to buy translation rights. I became known as the author of that serial. And all this, save for an insignificant trifle, to the profit of an exceedingly astute syndicate!

Subsequently I wrote other serials, but never again with the same verve. I found an outlet for my energies more amusing and more remunerative than the concoction of serials; and I am a serialist no longer.

XIII

While yet an assistant-editor, I became a dramatic critic through the unwillingness of my chief to attend a theatrical matinée performance given, by some forlorn little society, now defunct, for the rejuvenation of the English drama. My notice of the performance amused him, and soon afterwards he suggested that I should do our dramatic column in his stead. Behold me a "first-nighter"! When, with my best possible air of nonchalance and custom, I sauntered into my stall on a Lyceum first night, I glanced at the first rows of the pit with cold and aloof disdain. "Don't you wish you were me?" I thought behind that supercilious mask. "You have stood for hours imprisoned between parallel iron railings. Many times I have stood with you. But never again, miserable pittites!" Nevertheless I was by no means comfortable in my stall. Around me were dozens of famous or notorious faces, the leading representatives of all that is glittering and factitious in the city of wealth, pleasure, and smartness. And everybody seemed to know everybody else. I alone seemed to be left out in the cold. My exasperated self-conscious fancy perceived in every haughty stare the enquiry: "Who is this whipper-snapper in the dress-suit that obviously cost four guineas in Cheapside?" I knew not a soul in that brilliant resort. During the intervals I went into the foyer and listened to the phrases which the critics tossed to each other over their liqueur-glasses. Never was such a genial confusion of "Old Chap," "Old Man," "Old Boy," "Dear Old Pal"! "Are they all blood-brothers?" I asked myself. The banality, the perfect lack of any sort of aesthetic culture, which characterized their remarks on the piece, astounded me. I said arrogantly: "If I don't know more about the art of the theatre than the whole crowd of you put together, I will go out and hang myself." Yet I was unspeakably proud to be among them. In a corner I caught sight of a renowned novelist whose work I respected. None noticed him, and he looked rather sorry for himself. "You and I . . .!" I thought. I had not attended many first nights before I discovered that the handful of theatrical critics whose articles it is possible to read without fatigue, made a point of never leaving their stalls. They were nobody's old chap, and nobody's old pal. I copied their behaviour.

First on my own paper, and subsequently on two others, I practised dramatic criticism for five or six years. Although I threw it up in the end mainly from sheer lassitude, I enjoyed the work. It means late nights, and late nights are perdition; but there is a meretricious glamour about it that attracts the foolish moth in me, and this I am bound to admit. My trifling influence over the public was decidedly on the side of the angels. I gradually found that I possessed a coherent theory of the drama, definite critical standards, and all the rest of the apparatus; in short, that I had something to say. And my verdicts had a satisfactory habit of coinciding with those of the two foremost theatrical critics in London--perhaps in Europe (I need not name them). It is a somewhat strange fact that I made scarcely any friends in the theatre. After all those years of assiduous first-nighting, I was almost as solitary in the auditorium on the evening when I bade a _blase_ adieu to the critical bench as when I originally entered it. I fancied I had wasted my time and impaired my constitution in emulating the achievements of Théophile Gautier, Hazlitt, Francisque Sarcey and M. Jules Lemaître, to say nothing of Dutton Cook and Mr. Clement Scott. My health may have suffered; but, as it happened, I had not quite wasted my time.

"Why don't you write a play yourself?"

This blunt question was put to me by a friend, an amateur actor, whom I had asked to get up some little piece or other for an entertainment in the Theatre Royal back-drawing-room of my house.

"Quite out of my line," I replied, and I was absolutely sincere. I had no notion whatever of writing for the stage. I felt sure that I had not the aptitude.

"Nonsense!" he Exclaimed. "It's as easy as falling off a log."

We argued, and I was on the point of refusing the suggestion, when the spirit of wild adventure overcame me, and I gravely promised my friend that I would compose a duologue if he and his wife would promise to perform it at my party. The affair was arranged. I went to bed with the conviction that in the near future I stood a fair chance of looking an ass. However, I met with what I thought to be an amusing idea for a curtain-raiser the next morning, and in the afternoon I wrote the piece complete. I enjoyed writing it, and as I read it aloud to myself I laughed at it. I discovered that I had violated the great canon of dramatic art,--Never keep your audience in the dark, and this troubled me (Paul Hervieu had not then demonstrated by his "L'Enigme" that canon may be broken with impunity); but I could not be at the trouble of reconstructing the whole play for the sake of an Aristotelian maxim. I at once posted the original draft to my friend with this note: "Dear ----, Here is the play which last night I undertook to write for you."

The piece was admirably rendered to an audience of some thirty immortal souls--of course very sympathetic immortal souls. My feelings, as the situation which I had invented gradually developed into something alive on that tiny make-shift stage, were peculiar and, in a way, alarming. Every one who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that ensues when for the first time in your life you pull the starting lever, and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move. It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like that as I watched the progress of my first play. It was as though I had unwittingly liberated an energy greater than I knew, actually created something vital. This illusion of physical vitality is the exclusive possession of the dramatist; the novelist, the poet, cannot share it. The play was a delicious success. People laughed so much that some of my most subtle jocosities were drowned in the appreciative cachinnation. The final applause was memorable, at any rate to me. No mere good-nature can simulate the unique ring of genuine applause, and this applause was genuine. It was a microscopic triumph for me, but it was a triumph. Every one said to me: "But you are a dramatist!" "Oh, no!" I replied awkwardly; "this trifle is really nothing." But the still small voice of my vigorous self-confidence said: "Yes, you are, and you ought to have found it out years ago!" Among my audience was a publisher. He invited me to write for him a little book of one-act farces for amateurs; his terms were agreeable. I wrote three such farces, giving two days to each, and the volume was duly published; no book of mine has cost me less trouble. The reviews of it were lavish in praise of my "unfailing wit"; the circulation was mediocre. I was asked by companies of amateur actors up and down the country to assist at rehearsals of these pieces; but I could never find the energy to comply, save once. I hankered after the professional stage. By this time I could see that I was bound to enter seriously into the manufacture of stage-plays. My readers will have observed that once again in my history the inducement to embark for a fresh port had been quite external and adventitious.

I had a young friend with an extraordinary turn for brilliant epigram and an equally extraordinary gift for the devising of massive themes. He showed me one day the manuscript of a play. My faith in my instinct for form, whether in drama or fiction, was complete, and I saw instantly that what this piece lacked was form, which means intelligibility. It had everything except intelligibility. "Look here!" I said to him, "we will write a play together, you and I. We can do something that will knock spots off----" etc., etc. We determined upon a grand drawing-room melodrama which should unite style with those qualities that make for financial success on the British stage. In a few days my friend produced a list of about a dozen "ideas" for the piece. I chose the two largest and amalgamated them. In the confection of the plot, and also throughout the entire process of manufacture, my experience as a dramatic critic proved valuable. I believe my friend had only seen two plays in his life. We accomplished our first act in a month or so, and when this was done and the scenario of the other three written out, we informed each other that the stuff was exceedingly good.

Part of my share in the play was to sell it. I knew but one man of any importance in the theatrical world; he gave me an introduction to the manager of a West End theatre second to none in prestige and wealth. The introduction had weight; the manager intimated by letter that his sole object in life was to serve me, and in the meantime he suggested an appointment. I called one night with our first act and the scenario, and amid the luxuriousness of the managerial room, the aroma of coffee, the odour of Turkish cigarettes, I explained to that manager the true greatness of our play. I have never been treated with a more distinguished politeness; I might have been Victorien Sardou, or Ibsen . . . (no, not Ibsen). In quite a few days the manager telephoned to my office and asked me to call the same evening. He had read the manuscript; he thought very highly of it, very highly. "But----" Woe! Desolation! Dissipation of airy castles! It was preposterous on our part to expect that our first play should be commissioned by a leading theatre. But indeed we had expected this miracle. The fatal "But" arose from a difficulty of casting the principal part; so the manager told me. He was again remarkably courteous, and he assuaged the rigour of his refusal by informing me that he was really in need of a curtain-raiser with a part for a certain actress of his company; he fancied that we could supply him with the desired _bibelot_; but he wanted it at once, within a week. Within a week my partner and I had each written a one-act play, and in less than a fortnight I received a third invitation to discuss coffee, Turkish cigarettes, and plays. The manager began to talk about the play which was under my own signature.

"Now, what is your idea of terms?" he said, walking to and fro.

"Can it be true," I thought, "that I have actually sold a play to this famous manager?" In a moment my simple old ambitions burst like a Roman candle into innumerable bright stars. I had been content hitherto with the prospect of some fame, a thousand a year, and a few modest luxuries. But I knew what the earnings of successful dramatists were. My thousand increased tenfold; my mind dwelt on all the complex sybaritism of European capitals; and I saw how I could make use of the unequalled advertisement of theatrical renown to find a ready market for the most artistic fiction that I was capable of writing. This new scheme of things sprang into my brain instantaneously, full-grown.

I left the theatre an accepted dramatist.

It never rains but it pours. My kind manager mentioned our stylistic drawing-room melodrama to another manager with such laudation that the second manager was eager to see it. Having seen it, he was eager to buy it. He gave us a hundred down to finish it in three months, and when we had finished it he sealed a contract for production with another cheque for a hundred. At the same period, through the mediation of the friend who had first introduced me to this world where hundreds were thrown about like fivers, I was commissioned by the most powerful theatrical manager on earth to assist in the dramatization of a successful novel; and this led to another commission of a similar nature, on more remunerative terms. Then a certain management telegraphed for me (in the theatre all business is done by telegraph and cable), and offered me a commission to compress a five-act Old English comedy into three acts.

"We might have offered this to So-and-So or So-and-So," they said, designating persons of importance. "But we preferred to come to you."

"I assume my name is to appear?" I said.

But my name was not to appear, and I begged to be allowed to decline the work.

I suddenly found myself on terms of familiarity with some of the great ones of the stage. I found myself invited into the Garrick Club, and into the more Bohemian atmosphere of the Green Room Club. I became accustomed to hearing the phrase: "You are the dramatist of the future." One afternoon I was walking down Bedford Street when a hand was placed on my shoulder, and a voice noted for its rich and beautiful quality exclaimed: "How the d----l are you, my dear chap?" The speaker bears a name famous throughout the English-speaking world.

"You are arriving!" I said to myself, naïvely proud of this greeting. I had always understood that the theatrical "ring" was impenetrable to an outsider; and yet I had stepped into the very middle of it without the least trouble.

My collaborator and I then wrote a farce. "We can't expect to sell everything," I said to him warningly, but I sold it quite easily. Indeed I sold it, repurchased it, and sold it again, within the space of three months.

Reasons of discretion prevent me from carrying my theatrical record beyond this point.

I have not spoken of the artistic side of this play-concoction, because it scarcely has any. My aim in writing plays, whether alone or in collaboration, has always been strictly commercial.[3] I wanted money in heaps, and I wanted advertisement for my books. Here and there, in the comedies and farces in which I have been concerned, a little genuine dramatic art has, I fancy, been introduced; but surreptitiously, and quite unknown to the managers. I have never boasted of it in managerial apartments. That I have amused myself while constructing these arabesques of intrigue and epigram is indubitable, whether to my credit or discredit as a serious person. I laugh constantly in writing a farce. I have found it far easier to compose a commercial play than an artistic novel. How our princes of the dramatic kingdom can contrive to spend two years over a single piece, as they say they do, I cannot imagine. The average play contains from eighteen to twenty thousand words; the average novel contains eighty thousand; after all, writing is a question of words. At the rate of a thousand words a day, one could write a play three times over in a couple of months; prefix a month--thirty solid days of old Time!--for the perfecting of the plot, and you will be able to calculate the number of plays producible by an expert craftsman in a year. And unsuccessful plays are decidedly more remunerative than many successful novels. I am quite certain that the vast majority of failures produced in the West End mean to their authors a minimum remuneration of ten pounds per thousand words. In the fiction-mart ten pounds per thousand is gilded opulence. I am neither Sardou, Sudermann, nor George R. Sims, but I know what I am talking about, and I say that dramatic composition for the market is child's play compared to the writing of decent average fiction--provided one has an instinct for stage effect.

[Footnote 3: Once more written in 1900.]

XIV

It cuts me to the heart to compare English with American publishers to the disadvantage, however slight, of the former; but the exigencies of a truthful narrative demand from me this sacrifice of personal feeling to the god in "the sleeping-car emblematic of British enterprise." The representative of a great American firm came over to England on a mission to cultivate personal relations with authors of repute and profitableness. Among other documents of a similar nature, he had an introduction to myself; I was not an author of repute and profitableness, but I was decidedly in the movement and a useful sort of person to know. We met and became friends, this ambassador and I; he liked my work, a sure avenue to my esteem; I liked his genial shrewdness. Shortly afterwards, there appeared in a certain paper an unsigned article dealing, in a broad survey alleged to be masterly, with the evolution of the literary market during the last thirty years. My American publisher read the article--he read everything--and, immediately deciding in his own mind that I was the author of it, he wrote me an enthusiastic letter of appreciation. He had not been deceived; I was the author of the article. Within the next few days it happened that he encountered an English publisher who complained that he could not find a satisfactory "reader." He informed the English publisher of my existence, referred eulogistically to my article, and gave his opinion that I was precisely the man whom the English publisher needed. The English publisher had never heard of me (I do not blame him, I merely record), but he was so moved by the American's oration that he invited me to lunch at his club. I lunched at his club, in a discreet street off Piccadilly (an aged and a sound wine!), and after lunch, my host drew me out to talk at large on the subject of authors, publishers, and cash, and the interplay of these three. I talked. I talked for a very long while, enjoying it. The experience was a new one for me. The publisher did not agree with all that I said, but he agreed with a good deal of it, and at the close of the somewhat exhausting assize, in which between us we had judged the value of nearly every literary reputation in England, he offered me the post of principal reader to his firm, and I accepted it.

It is, I believe, an historical fact that authors seldom attend the funeral of a publisher's reader. They approve the sepulture, but do not, save sometimes in a spirit of ferocious humour, lend to the procession the dignity of their massive figures. Nevertheless, the publisher's reader is the most benevolent person on earth. He is so perforce. He may begin his labours in the slaughterous vein of the "Saturday Review"; but time and the extraordinary level mediocrity of manuscripts soon cure him of any such tendency. He comes to refuse but remains to accept. He must accept something--or where is the justification of his existence? Often, after a prolonged run of bad manuscripts, I have said to myself: "If I don't get a chance to recommend something soon I shall be asked to resign." I long to look on a manuscript and say that it is good, or that there are golden sovereigns between the lines. Instead of searching for faults I search for hidden excellences. No author ever had a more lenient audience than I. If the author would only believe it, I want, I actually desire, to be favourably impressed by his work. When I open the parcel of typescript I beam on it with kindly eyes, and I think: "Perhaps there is something really good here"; and in that state of mind I commence the perusal. But there never is anything really good there. In an experience not vast, but extending over some years, only one book with even a touch of genius has passed through my hands; that book was so faulty and so wilfully wild, that I could not unreservedly advise its publication and my firm declined it; I do not think that the book has been issued elsewhere. I have "discovered" only two authors of talent; one of these is very slowly achieving a reputation; of the other I have heard nothing since his first book, which resulted in a financial loss. Time and increasing knowledge of the two facts have dissipated for me the melancholy and affecting legend of literary talent going a-begging because of the indifference of publishers. O young author of talent, would that I could find you and make you understand how the publisher yearns for you as the lover for his love! _Qua_ publisher's reader, I am a sad man, a man confirmed in disappointment, a man in whom the phenomenon of continued hope is almost irrational. When I look back along the frightful vista of dull manuscripts that I have refused or accepted, I tremble for the future of English literature (or should tremble, did I not infallibly know that the future of English literature is perfectly safe after all)! And yet I have by no means drunk the worst of the cup of mediocrity. The watery milk of the manuscripts sent to my employer has always been skimmed for me by others; I have had only the cream to savour. I am asked sometimes why publishers publish so many bad books; and my reply is: "Because they can't get better." And this is a profound truth solemnly enunciated.

People have said to me: "_But you are so critical; you condemn everything_." Such is the complaint of the laity against the initiate, against the person who has diligently practised the cultivation of his taste. And, roughly speaking, it is a well-founded and excusable complaint. The person of fine taste does condemn nearly everything. He takes his pleasure in a number of books so limited as to be almost nothing in comparison with the total mass of production. Out of two thousand novels issued in a year, he may really enjoy half-a-dozen at the outside. And the one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four he lumps together in a wholesale contempt which draws no distinctions. This is right. This contributes to the preservation of a high standard. But the laity will never be persuaded that it is just. The point I wish to make, however, is that when I sit down to read for my publisher I first of all forget my literary exclusiveness. I sink the aesthetic aristocrat and become a plain man. By a deliberate act of imagination, I put myself in the place, not of the typical average reader--for there is no such person--but of a composite of the various _genera_ of average reader known to publishing science. I _am_ that composite for the time; and, being so, I remain quiescent and allow f the book to produce its own effect on me. I employ no canons, rules, measures. Does the book bore me--that condemns it. Does it interest me, ever so slightly--that is enough to entitle it to further consideration. When I have decided that it interests the imaginary composite whom I represent, then I become myself again, and proceed scientifically to enquire why it has interested, and why it has not interested more intensely; I proceed to catalogue its good and bad qualities, to calculate its chances, to assay its monetary worth.

The first gift of a publisher's reader should be imagination; without imagination, the power to put himself in a position in which actually he is not, fine taste is useless--indeed, it is worse than useless. The ideal publisher's reader should have two perfections--perfect taste and perfect knowledge of what the various kinds of other people deem to be taste. Such qualifications, even in a form far from perfect, are rare. A man is born with them; though they may be cultivated, they cannot either of them be acquired. The remuneration of the publisher's reader ought, therefore, to be high, lavish, princely. It it not. It has nothing approaching these characteristics. Instead of being regarded as the ultimate seat of directing energy, the brain within the publisher's brain, the reader often exists as a sort of offshoot, an accident, an external mechanism which must be employed because it is the custom to employ it. As one reflects upon the experience and judgment which readers must possess, the responsibility which weighs on them, and the brooding hypochondriasis engendered by their mysterious calling, one wonders that their salaries do not enable them to reside in Park Lane or Carlton House Terrace. The truth is, that they exist precariously in Walham Green, Camberwell, or out in the country where rents are low.

I have had no piquant adventures as a publisher's reader. The vocation fails in piquancy: that is precisely where it does fail. Occasionally when a manuscript comes from some established author who has been deemed the private property of another house, there is the excitement of discovering from the internal evidence of the manuscript, or from the circumstantial evidence of public facts carefully collated, just why that manuscript has been offered to my employer; and the discovered reason is always either amusing or shameful. But such excitements are rare, and not very thrilling after all. No! Reading for a publisher does not foster the joy of life. I have never done it with enthusiasm; and, frankly, I continue to do it more from habit than from inclination. One learns too much in the rôle. The gilt is off the gingerbread, and the bloom is off the rye, for a publisher's reader. The statistics of circulations are before him; and no one who is aware of the actual figures which literary advertisements are notoriously designed to conceal can be called happy until he is dead.

XV

When I had been in London a decade, I stood aside from myself and reviewed my situation with the god-like and detached impartiality of a trained artistic observer. And what I saw was a young man who pre-eminently knew his way about, and who was apt to be rather too complacent over this fact; a young man with some brilliance but far more shrewdness; a young man with a highly developed faculty for making a little go a long way; a young man who was accustomed to be listened to when he thought fit to speak, and who was decidedly more inclined to settle questions than to raise them.