THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 i^ 
 
 L
 
 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS
 
 AGENTS 
 
 America . . The Macmillan Company 
 
 64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York 
 
 AusTEAiAsiA. The Oxford University Press 
 
 205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 
 
 Canada . . The Macmilla\ Company of Canada, Ltd. 
 
 St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,Toronto 
 
 India . • MACMaLAN & Company, Ltd. 
 
 Macmillan Bdilding, Bombay 
 309 Bow Bazaar Street, Caicdtta
 
 A BOOR 
 ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 REFLECTIONS & RECOLLECTIONS 
 OF A BOOK-WRIGHT 
 
 By 
 
 A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF 
 
 ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 
 
 4, 5 & 6, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W 
 
 1914
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I HAD thought of modestly styling this a Book about 
 Bookmakers ; but that word has unworthy associa- 
 tions, and the Society of Authors licenses us all to take 
 a higher title. One remembers the Rouen judge's 
 dictum to Dumas when he scrupled to style himself a 
 dramatist in the city of the great Corneille — Il-y-a des 
 degres, M. Dumas ! And indeed what I have in mind 
 in the following pages is that, where they are not mere 
 makers of books, great and small authors differ from 
 one another in degree rather than in kind. 
 
 In the teeth of what has been said in his first 
 chapter against inviting the public inside an author's 
 door, the present writer is here fain to obtrude a 
 personal apology. Through illness, his book had to 
 be hurried to the press somewhat " unhousel'd, dis- 
 appointed, unaneled " ; and the first proofs came 
 to be corrected on a painful sick-bed, without access 
 to works of reference. For what crossing of Vs and 
 dotting of ^'s may appear deficient, then, his fellow 
 book-wrights will be able to make allowance. That 
 all its imperfections are not still upon its head, he has 
 to thank the care of a friend, to whose manifold 
 helpfulness, at a time of need, he owes more than 
 words can acknowledge. 
 
 5fi:?.4j;i 
 
 *^* ' sriAt
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 Introduction — the Author ..... 1 
 
 II 
 
 A Short History op Authors 14 
 
 III 
 
 The Anatomy of Authors 43 
 
 IV 
 
 An Apology for Authors 78 
 
 V 
 
 The Author's Apprenticeship 123 
 
 VI 
 The Trade of Author 153 
 
 VII 
 Publishers 187 
 
 VIII 
 Editors 224 
 
 IX 
 Critics 250 
 
 X 
 Readers 276 
 
 Vll
 
 INTEODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 
 
 There is a fashion in our days for authors, like other 
 persons dependent on the favour of the public, to court 
 its interest by posing before the cameras of its curi- 
 osity. The catalogues of their works are headed by 
 simpering or studiously reflective portraits; their 
 addresses, clubs, recreations are communicated in 
 works of reference ; interviewers are made welcome 
 in their homes ; and flattering biographies of them, 
 while still living, are taken for a seal of distinction. 
 With this fashion the present writer is out of sympathy, 
 holding that the humblest craftsman has a right to 
 keep his life private, at least to put up the shutters 
 after business hours. Yet for once he must take 
 leave to speak frankly about himself, by way of 
 proving his title to speak of other authors. 
 
 In these pages, the reader's humble servant cele- 
 brates his jubilee as a maker of books. It is more than 
 half a century, indeed, since he first got into print, to 
 wit, with some verses hailing the volunteer movement, 
 which were recommended to a well-known newspaper 
 by their topical interest. At a very early age he took 
 to scribbling like a duck to water ; and most of us 
 ducklings, whether or no we turn out swans in the end, 
 are apt to begin by quacking in rhyme. There are 
 
 1 B
 
 2 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 many who might confess like myself to wasting paper 
 before they got into their teens. Before I was out of 
 them I had written and made money by a real book, 
 published without my real name, as now I am glad to 
 think — " look on't again I dare not ! " Still earlier 
 came my first " honorarium " in shape of permission 
 to make toffee for the whole house, an admiring school- 
 master's reward for a description of a school picnic, 
 sweet reminiscence that brings me almost to a diamond 
 jubilee of authorship. 
 
 Success fell to me too soon on this precocious 
 career. I had not, like many authorlings, to serve 
 seven years for the Leah of publication, and seven 
 more for the Rachel of profit. I was scarcely of age, 
 when I made something of a hit in the literary arena. 
 My turn being for the realistic rather than the roman- 
 tic, I had soon abandoned imitations of Scott and 
 Byron for prose, and took to writing accounts of 
 school life, as the only life I knew much about. While 
 still at college, I wrote a medley of crude ideas on 
 education and things in general, set forth in the feigned 
 personality of an old schoolmaster. This was partly 
 inspired by a vague dissatisfaction with what had 
 been called my education and by eagerness to unpack 
 my heart of swelling grudges against a world I found 
 ill arranged to my mind ; but its model was suggeste'd 
 by a book that shortly before had brought into note 
 one of the masters at my old school — D'Arcy W. 
 Thompson's Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster. The 
 deserved success of this book moved an enterprising 
 publisher who had heard by chance what I was at, to 
 ask for a look at my manuscript, and he published it 
 at his own expense, with a promise of profit to the 
 author, which proved rather a mirage in the cold light 
 of publishing|accounts.
 
 INTRODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 3 
 
 So easily I slipped into authorship, and with too 
 flattering result. My Book about Dominies was 
 published anonymously as by " a member of the pro- 
 fession," for which the only justification was that, 
 while at Edinburgh University, I had been acting as 
 a sort of tutor under my old schoolmaster, who had 
 conceived a too high opinion of my literary gifts, and 
 by an offer of partnership with himself, encouraged 
 me to think of schoolmastership, when I shrank from 
 what seemed the bonds of the Bar and the Church, 
 professions to a choice of which I had been destined. 
 But I always set my mind on being an author, none 
 the less fixedly for the surprising success of that first 
 serious attempt, and I have never taken to any other 
 craft unless in the way of amateur experiment. 
 
 The Book about Dominies took with the press and 
 the public ; it was well reviewed, went into several 
 editions, and came even to be quoted by grave writers 
 on education, who never quite forgave me when they 
 found out how they had been tricked by a youthful 
 sentimentalist. Soon, indeed, the secret of its author- 
 ship began to leak out, which I had sense enough to try 
 to keep bottled up as a chief asset of my effectual 
 imposture. I followed it up with a Book about Boys, 
 to which I now alB&xed the half-transparent pseudonym 
 of " Ascott R. Hope." This book, as far as I can 
 remember, was still more favoured by readers, though 
 some critics took occasion to punish me for having 
 once deceived them. 
 
 In this theme, I was still more of an outsider than 
 in the other. I never was a right schoolboy, but 
 passed from an imaginative and sensitive childhood 
 into a precociously reflective hobble-de-hoyhood, 
 driven in upon myself by the contempt of more 
 healthily brutal natures. I made but a tainted
 
 4 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 wether of that flock, butted at for being helplessly 
 short-sighted, a crime that brought trouble on me since 
 the days when I got whipped by my nurse as a naughty 
 little story-teller because I denied seeing a landmark 
 well within her range of vision. Withal, on the moral 
 and intellectual world I had long-sighted glimpses 
 that made me pass for mad among thoughtless school- 
 fellows. So my writing with a gush of sympathy 
 about Boys was rather an expression of revolt against 
 the hardness and meanness that pained me in Man ; 
 boys were to my blind eyes what the noble savage 
 was to the school of Rousseau. Yet this sentimental 
 philosophastering struck a responsive chord in many 
 hearts, as I learned by sympathetic and appreciative 
 letters from various parts of the English-speaking 
 world ; and I was led on to write stories of school-life 
 that had some vogue in their day, as well as other 
 essays in which like a young colt I took my fling at the 
 world that seemed to me so unsatisfactory. 
 
 Well is it for a youth with such dispositions to grow 
 up among those able to direct them, bred, like Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, among books as a stable-boy among 
 horses. That was not my case, in a home more familiar 
 with horses and dogs, of which I did not so much 
 care to learn. For my sins against the Muses, I may 
 plead " I had no mother and I fell." My father's 
 outlook on the world of books was bounded by the 
 adventures of Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Jorrocks. The 
 only thing like a literary judgment I recall from him 
 was his wonder what people saw in Adam Bede, then 
 rising on the literary horizon. At one time, probably 
 moved by well-meant advice, he found fault with my 
 reading so many of the standard novels that chiefly 
 filled his bookshelves, and would have had me apply 
 myself to graver works, but could not particularize
 
 INTRODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 5 
 
 on this head with authority. He did indeed put into 
 my hands some French memoirs which he understood 
 to be historically instructive, among them those of the 
 Count de Grammont and the Duchess d'Abrantes, to 
 the horror of a better informed teacher when I inno- 
 cently took those works to school as the proper place 
 for such study. Other books of the kind, indeed, I 
 had looked into for myself without being the wiser or 
 the worse for their scandalous implications. 
 
 My kind father never quite knew w^hat to make 
 of me, divided between a certain doubtful pride in 
 gifts which he inclined to exaggerate, and distrust of 
 a turn for wandering from the beaten paths of worldly 
 success. The only author I saw at home in the flesh, 
 was held up to me as an awful example of one who 
 had no other means of livelihood than that of writing 
 for papers and magazines ; and intimacy with such a 
 disreputable neighbour was so little encouraged that 
 I cannot even remember his name. My mother hav- 
 ing died before I knew her, my father also was taken 
 too soon, leaving me precociously independent. In 
 the family, literary aspirations found little fellowship ; 
 irreverent youngsters jeered, prudent elders frowned 
 or pooh-poohed ; but there was nobody able to guide 
 or control my bent. The schoolmaster, already men- 
 tioned, who fostered it more kindly than discreetly, 
 was not a man of high culture, nor did he much succeed 
 in getting me to devote my holiday hours to the study 
 of Josephus and Gibbon's Decline and Fall ; he was 
 more fortunate in forcing on my attention Carlyle's 
 Sartor and Buckle's History of Civilization, that went 
 to colour a somewhat drumly trickle of thought. 
 Not till I had left school, did I fall into the hands of 
 sympathetic and discriminating teachers able to 
 direct my reading, in which the like of me is not very
 
 6 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 ready to be directed. As with a good many other 
 idle pupils, I can tell how my true teachers were the 
 books which I read much at random, to stir up one 
 frothy ferment after another in my mind, till by and by 
 it could settle down into something like clearness. In 
 short, almost the whole craft of authorship I had to 
 learn for myself as best I could ; and that is a tale too 
 many of us have to tell. 
 
 All this I have written with downcast looks on a 
 cutty-stool of repentance ; but now I stand up to 
 avow something to my own credit. Before the public 
 had done patronizing those green sprouts of fancy, I 
 recognized their insipidity, and strove to root them 
 out like weeds. Having luckily not parted with the 
 copyright of most of them, I was able to withdraw 
 several of my early books from publication, as I did 
 at some expense. As far as I could, I buried them 
 fathoms deep in what I would fain make an ocean of 
 oblivion ; and only to myself in dark hours can the 
 literary wild oats of my youth rise up in rebuke against 
 me. ViTien I can no longer keep their tomb inviolate, 
 cursed be he that thinks it worth while to move those 
 bones ! 
 
 My slate thus wiped half -clean, I attempted fresh 
 designs with rather more consideration. The picturing 
 of school-life having so far succeeded with me, I 
 cast about for models and methods. I served some 
 terms of hard labour as assistant-master at a school, 
 learning at least as much as I taught. I read every- 
 thing I could find on the subject ; I made volumes 
 of notes and memoires pour servir ; I studied that 
 phase of human nature in which the evolving savage 
 is rapidly fitted with fetters of civilization ; as an 
 outsider I caught the humorous as well as the moral 
 aspects of youth. Thus better equipped, I wrote
 
 INTRODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 7 
 
 fresh stories of school-life, which I think worth much 
 more than my first ones, while the public that buys 
 Buch books has not agreed with me. I am not going 
 to argue with the many-headed on its want of apprecia- 
 tion ; but this much, since no one does it for me, I will 
 take leave to boast, that I am not only the most 
 voluminous author in this sort, but the one who has 
 treated the subject most fully from various points of 
 view. Nearly all the rivals who have eclipsed me 
 content themselves, I note, with describing one par- 
 ticular kind of school presumably familiar to them. 
 My study of the matter was more external. Never but 
 once had I in view, and then for a brief glance, the 
 school at which my years were spent. All school life 
 I have taken for my province, as no one else has done, 
 so far as I know. Some of my stories deal with English 
 public schools, a sort of institution in which I have 
 hardly set foot ; but here I had the secret help of a 
 friend, — selig ! — whose services and influence I must 
 always remember with gratitude. With more first- 
 hand knowledge, I have described the life of grammar- 
 school, as well as of private boarding-schools, the 
 latter, indeed, almost a terra incognita to me. Also, 
 I have laid my scene in the humblest class of schools, 
 and among rustic lads ; and would willingly have 
 done so oftener, but for lack of encouragement. In 
 books for this market, anything like liveliness or truth 
 to nature falls flat, other qualities being required by 
 the clerical or official patrons that are the distributors 
 of such wares. 
 
 Nor have my yarns been spun out of green hemp 
 alone. • I once wrote a novel ; it was a very poor one, 
 that rests in peace. I have made notes and studies 
 on the subject, as materials from which I hoped to do 
 better one day, were not life so short and art so long.
 
 8 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Sometimes, in reading the popular success of the 
 hour in this kind, I feel ready to take up again that 
 ambition, which is soon sobered as often as I turn to a 
 novel by Fielding or Scott, by Jane Austen or George 
 Sand, by Spielhagen or Cherbuliez. But indeed it 
 would take a volume as large as this, were I to give 
 an account of all the books I have outlined or planned, 
 enough to fill the working hours of a Methuselah. 
 
 While writing books for young readers, I was twist- 
 ing other strings to my bow, so as by and by to take 
 a shot at the interest of elders. It has been my lot 
 to go a good deal about the world from an early age. 
 After a boyish visit to Paris, my travels began with 
 a cruise in the Mediterranean and a stay in Italy, still 
 heaving from Garibaldi's exploits. A regret I feel in 
 looking back on my life is not having travelled more 
 while I could ; but in fact I have proved immune to 
 the mosquitoes of four continents. At home, too, 
 my short-sightedness drove me from other recreations 
 to the quiet ones of walking, or riding, making obser- 
 vations through spectacles that put me on a level with 
 other men. Such observations I could turn to account 
 by writing on topographical subjects. For one thing, 
 I have edited, that is mainly written, or re-written, 
 some dozens of guide-books, most of them appearing 
 in successive editions. For another, among my 
 literary baggage are geographies used in schools over 
 half the world. Several of my books have been 
 translated into foreign languages ; and nearly a dozen 
 of them are adapted as English reading books in 
 German and Dutch schools. And I have been able to 
 translate other people's writings from half a dozen 
 languages, which I learned for myself, largely in steam- 
 boats, trains and omnibuses, a course of study not 
 recommended by oculists.
 
 INTRODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 9 
 
 My worst enemy, then, could not accuse me of hav- 
 ing led an idle life. I shrink from making a census of 
 my productions ; but what with story-books, school- 
 books, picture-books, historical and topographical 
 books and miscellaneous writings, under half a dozen 
 different names, they cannot come far short of two 
 hundred volumes, perhaps above that number, at all 
 prices from pennies to pounds. For more than forty 
 years I have been an author of all work, what the con- 
 temptuous call a hack ; but I never went well in 
 harness, which accounts for the fact that no great 
 proportion of my output is lost in newspapers and 
 magazines, though I have written leading articles, 
 reviews and paragraphs in my day, and alas ! obit- 
 uary notices of most of the writers with whom I have 
 had much to do, as rival or colleague. Now that I am 
 somewhat turned out to grass, I can chew the cud of 
 recollection that in one year, as author, editor, trans- 
 lator or contributor, I was concerned with the prepara- 
 tion of a score of volumes. In another year, I brought 
 forth a dozen or so all my own, some of them, indeed, 
 rather dwarfish. My largest book was the main work 
 of years, a geographical compendium in six quarto 
 volumes, which, revised and brought up to date every 
 year or two, alone makes such a testimonial of industry 
 that I find sometimes doubted the fact of my having 
 written it all myself — save one page. From first to 
 last I must have shed as much ink with my own hand 
 as there was blood in Duncan's body, or in Falstaff's. 
 It has been calculated that if all the sheets I have 
 blotted were set end to end, they would reach, I for- 
 get whether it is to Pekin or Petersburg. My volumes 
 piled up w^ould form a column from which Marconi 
 might telegraph to Mars. Or is it that this mass of 
 paper would keep all the buttermen in Britain supplied
 
 10 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 for six weeks ? Boasting, indeed, is excluded, when 
 one compares the contemporaneous output of more 
 esteemed writers like Miss Braddon and Mrs. Oliphant, 
 not to speak of Anthony Trollope, who in a letter 
 to Alfred Austin expresses some doubt of being happy 
 in heaven, since there the beatified spirits may not 
 subscribe to circulating libraries. 
 
 In the course of half a century, I have taken at 
 least three separate tries at literary success, with a 
 fair result in two of them. But I do not mean to 
 extol my own industry, only to point out that after 
 having had so much to do with book-making for so 
 long, — not to speak of reading innumerable volumes 
 dealing with books and bookmen — I should be dull 
 indeed not to have picked up some knowledge of the 
 business, as of my fellow-practitioners. 
 
 This book, about a subject I cannot but understand, 
 I have written as a penance for that youthful sin of 
 writing in ignorance. What it costs me thus to stand in 
 a self-imposed pillory, like Dr. Johnson in the Lichfield 
 market-place, nobody knows so well as myself. Such 
 an avowal may be questioned by hasty readers who 
 find in other books of mine an air of intrusive egoism, 
 as if I loved exposing my personality to public view. 
 But that was only the trick of the conjuror who poses 
 as taking spectators into his confidence, while keep- 
 ing the card well hidden up his sleeve. I always had 
 a bent for assuming some personality, under which I 
 have generally been able to deceive the public, yea the 
 very elect, for I have a letter from such an expert as 
 Sir J. M. Barrie, in which he remarks of a story of mine 
 that it is evidently a personal reminiscence, yet in 
 fact it was a newspaper paragraph worked up by 
 my own fancy upon an imaginary scene. When I 
 brought out my first successful book, in the character
 
 INTRODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 11 
 
 of an old schoolmaster, few guessed it to come from an 
 inexperienced youth. On the next generation, I 
 repeated the same imposture, with more skill but less 
 applause, in a boolv called Caj) and Gown Comedy, the 
 hero of which, partly modelled this time on a real 
 character who was not in a position to recognize him- 
 self, related his experiences in several schools, all of 
 a kind unfamiliar to me : this book, when published 
 anonymously, was taken for genuine autobiography, 
 and some review^ers laughed at the way in which 
 the author seemed to reveal his own weaknesses. So 
 too another fiction of mine, describing from materials 
 supplied me the life of an Argentine settler, passed 
 hardly doubted for fact. With more or less success, I 
 have thus played various parts before my readers, 
 inviting them to apparent intimacy with a character 
 in disguise. 
 
 These are tricks of the trade. But all along I have 
 cared to hold my real self out of sight, while pulling the 
 strings of my puppets. I have even a whimsical 
 dislike to seeing my true name in print ; and hardly 
 ever appeared in public without some fig-leaf of 
 pseudonymity, writing under several aliases, or some- 
 times blankly anonymous. All the more for display- 
 ing a fictitious face so freely, I have been shy as to 
 keeping my real personality in the background. I 
 have tried to stand stiffly upon a point of literary 
 manners now much neglected, that the public has no 
 right to peep under any mask which an author may 
 choose to wear ; so I sympathized with " Lewis 
 Carroll " in his resentment against an editor who took 
 his true name as advertised urhi et orhi. My own motto 
 has always been " No foot over threshold of mine ! " 
 This privilege proves hard to secure, where every 
 journalist now thinks it fair to tickle the public with
 
 12 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 allusions to the privacy of its entertainers, who are 
 invited to set forth a sketch of their own recreations and 
 antecedents, along with their resorts and addresses. 
 Out of the works of reference that give such inform- 
 ation, I did my best to keep my name till the conductor 
 of one such took me by force, and a German editor 
 evolved an account of me from his inner consciousness. 
 It is most reluctantly, then, that for once I write what 
 I would rather have left unprinted till I should no 
 longer be able to read it. Thus then 
 
 The man hath penance done, 
 And penance more will do. 
 
 More than one publisher has invited me to write my 
 reminiscences of literary life, as is done nowadays by 
 many writers. But " story, God bless you, I have 
 none to tell, sir," or next to none worth telling. Of the 
 famous authors of my time, I can say but vidi tantum, 
 for the most part as a subaltern beholds plumed and 
 prancing generals. My lines of work, indeed, seldom 
 brought me much into contact with fellow-workmen ; 
 still less have I cultivated what is called smart society, 
 whose sayings and doings froth out so much printed 
 gossip. I have had little intimacy with notable per- 
 sonages of any kind to turn into copy. I never held 
 any public post or charge, unless as a volunteer officer 
 or a coroner's juryman. I have made awkward 
 attempts at more than one handicraft, with the view 
 of gathering straw for literary bricks ; in Canada I 
 have tried to follow the plough, but soon found my- 
 self wending a homeward way from this amateur 
 pursuit. My view of the world's affairs has been 
 mainly that of a looker-on, who, to be sure, may have 
 his chance of seeing the game. I have lived my life 
 in my own way, not a way that leads to moving
 
 INTRODUCTION— THE AUTHOR 13 
 
 accidents by flood or field ; and all my accomplished 
 work has been reading and writing. 
 
 What reminiscences of mine might interest others, 
 have been to a great extent scattered through books 
 already written. Now, instead of collecting them into 
 an insipid memoir, I offer the public a string of reflec- 
 tions, observations, readings and experiences picked 
 up in my half century and more of being concerned 
 with different sorts of authorship. It seems to me 
 that this may interest some readers and writers, as it 
 certainly interests myself. 
 
 All this about myself, to explain why I have written 
 it. So far has been pure Wahrheit ; in the following 
 pages I may fall into Dichtung, holding myself free 
 to do so here and there, should I mention names or 
 matters in which there might be offence to any now 
 living ; but as a rule I shall avoid naming writers 
 still at work. The shamefaced author now resumes 
 his mask to speak more resonantly of authors in 
 general.
 
 II 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 
 
 The flattering courtiers of King James would have him 
 know how the first Author wrote with Almighty 
 finger upon tables of stone ; while in the preface to 
 our best-read Book, its translators, inspired by hopes 
 of translation to rich bishoprics, style the Scottish 
 Solomon as " Author " of that work. The Jansenist 
 moralist NicoUe declares the devil to be " the greatest 
 author and the greatest writer in the world, as well as 
 the greatest speaker, since he has a share in most of the 
 writings and speeches of men ; " indeed that old 
 serpent is recorded as the first author of fiction. Lo 
 mio maestro e il mio autore / are the terms in which 
 Dante almost adores Virgil. " Our author " is Milton's 
 title for the father of mankind. The author of a 
 scandal is less to be respected than that craftsman 
 authentically described in Johnson's Dictionary as 
 " a harmless drudge." From various instances we 
 thus collect the prime idea of an author as a putter 
 forth of something that without him would be nothing 
 visible, audible or legible ; and in latter times the 
 word has tended to denote specially the only begetter 
 of a book, written and capable of being printed. 
 
 The definition of " Author," then, seems a sim^ple 
 enough matter : one who has written a book. But 
 most of us write now, learned and unlearned ; and a 
 
 14
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 15 
 
 world of authors would be like a hive of noisy drones. 
 As Charles Lamb had a catalogue of hihlia a-hihlia, 
 printed volumes fit only for a " gentleman's library," 
 so I should like to exclude from among authors, the 
 writers of Dictionaries, School-books, Hand-books, 
 Cookery-books, Guide-books and works of useful 
 information in general, the compilers of many his- 
 tories, of most memoirs, of some stories, in short of 
 all pages in which the material surpasses the work, 
 such as are written for mere pay, and to supply the 
 current demand at clubs and circulating libraries. 
 The true author is one who by brooding on himself 
 and the world, hatches some idea of his own, which 
 however raw and shapeless, he cannot but try to give 
 forth for the spiritual sustenance of his fellow-men, the 
 same instinct that guided him in the discovery for- 
 bidding him to keep it to himself. The author par 
 excellence is the poet or maker in verse or prose, albeit 
 he make little more than counterfeits of the coinage 
 minted by other brains. His power is a stirring 
 of some chord within him to a result seeming so 
 unaccountable that it will be taken as inspired from 
 without. No one can command this gift ; no one can 
 catch it in a test-tube ; no one can examine upon it ; 
 the only proof of it is that he so endowed can make 
 men laugh or cry, shape before their eyes the airy 
 nothings of his mental vision, keep his fellow-pilgrims 
 sitting up round the camp fire when they should be 
 courting dreams of their own. 
 
 All men, indeed, at some time, find themselves 
 marvellously endowed with imagination. No Shake- 
 speare, no Goethe has such vivid visions as come to the 
 dullest spirit in sleep, hardly remembered beyond 
 the moment when they glimmered through the gate 
 of ivory or horn, rarely to be held fast even by some
 
 16 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 drugged dreamer like Coleridge, some overwrought 
 seer like Blake. Children often wake as from a 
 " sleep and a forgetting " into momentary exaltations, 
 on which chosen spirits may look as " clouds of 
 glory." Love is winged to soar into an ethereal mood 
 where it comes easy to catch haloes invisible to the 
 workaday world. Nay, the very lunatic has been 
 coupled with the lover and the poet, as cunning by 
 fits and starts in bodiless creation. The merest 
 bookmaker has moments of glow, perhaps far off 
 touches of greatness, if only '' to know well he is not 
 great." The sublimest poets themselves have both 
 their hours of inspiration, and their seasons when 
 cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces appear not 
 to have left a rack behind. Were every man who 
 puts pen to paper always in eruption, even as a 
 sputtering solfatara, the world would be cursed by 
 such active authorship, blighting crops of corn and 
 safe pastures for cattle on a too volcanic soil. The 
 right author is he to whom such stirrings come with a 
 certain periodicity, in bursts of more or less sustained 
 force, not beyond measure and control. 
 
 Who can tell when and how the coils of a chim- 
 panzee-like brain were first moved to conceive an 
 idea, curdled out of a welter of vague instincts, 
 memories, curiosities and dull wonderments. The 
 man who had some such experience was the first 
 author, in the bud. Modern philosophers incline to 
 befoul his achievement, putting it down not to any 
 conscious effort, but to some nightmare of indigestion, 
 when, his belly being gorged after a bout of starvation, 
 his wits confused the objective and the subjective, 
 and some gruesome incubus of fancy oppressed him 
 as a fact. From this humble beginning it will be 
 long before he rises to solemn chanting and idyllic
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 17 
 
 rhyming ; but in each case some molecular disturb- 
 ance led to a pregnant quickening of the mental pulse. 
 There seems still, indeed, reason to suspect authorship 
 as an unhealthy secretion of human nature, that has for 
 its soundest instinct silently to keep itself going from 
 day to day, and from generation to generation. Shall 
 we call this ferment the yeast without which life 
 would hardly rise beyond a mass of crustless and 
 crumbless dough ? 
 
 A hint of science suggests how two kinds of inquir- 
 ing minds might soon be distinguished, one concerning 
 itself rather with thoughts, the other with things, both 
 too rarely united to make the true sage. Under the 
 shaping hand of Prometheus, some faculty of looking 
 upwards was what elevated the human animal from 
 saurians and gorillas ; yet man who must live by 
 bread has also to take a humbler attitude towards 
 the universe. One by choice raises his eyes, moon- 
 struck and star-dazzled, now and again setting his 
 fellows astare by notions that seem drawn from the 
 clouds ; another bends down, at first on all fours, 
 studying the lie of the land, the tracks of beasts, what 
 sticks and stones can be adapted for offence and 
 defence, by and by hitting on some plan for sharpening 
 those primitive weapons, for striking fire, for baking 
 and boiling flesh, in a word, for improving life by 
 rudimentary arts. Even now there is no one good 
 word to express this type of mind ; but in early ages, 
 long before the unsatisfactory scientist had been 
 foisted on us, he might well deserve the title of inventor, 
 while the man of thoughts proved a discoverer of 
 matters lying more at a distance, yet always to be 
 seen by who could see so far. Let us call them 
 Katmnetheus and Anametheus, the latter the first 
 artist in words, the former, by observation of his own 
 
 c
 
 18 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 fingers and toes, more apt to hit upon numbers — 
 Oxford and Cambridge in the germ. 
 
 The student of things was likely to be honoured in 
 his tribe, as a public asset of evident value, all the 
 more if he had strength and cunning to turn inventive 
 faculty to account in the practical business of blood- 
 shed. But even savage man does not live by bread 
 alone ; and fighting would rise above mere growling 
 and clawing, to be an art, dignified by a ritual, by 
 sentiments and names. Names being derived from 
 ideas, it would be the tribe's author who first 
 bestowed on the triumphant chief his title of " Man- 
 Mammoth," " Thunderbolt," " Far-shooter " or 
 what not. Adam commenced author when he named 
 the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air ; then, 
 long before verses came to be recited, some savage 
 genius would coin household words in calling a lake 
 after the fish it held, a season after the berries it 
 brought, a beast from some onomatopoeic imitation 
 of its roar. Names involved similes, metaphors, the 
 germs of all figures of speech. When Katametheus 
 had earned such applause by his contrivance of the 
 bow, the rude tribesmen might open astonished eyes 
 to hear Anametheus compare the flight of the arrow 
 to that of a bird — just what anyone could understand, 
 and this man had first understood ! The seeing of 
 likenesses was the birth of fables. It was a high 
 flight of embryo authorship to proclaim the moon for 
 the wife of the sun, the stars as souls of heroes, the sea 
 as the bath of the sky, and the thunder as the voice of 
 some being-not-ourselves whose lightnings shed the 
 awe that is held for foundation of righteousness. 
 When by happy accident, in China or elsewhere, man 
 learned the savour of roast pork, this invention would 
 be set down as communicated from heaven, but
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 19 
 
 hardly till the idea of a god had been conceived by- 
 some author. Katametheus would be more like to 
 hit on his devices by clumsy experiment and patient 
 cudgelling of his wits, while ideas might leap into the 
 head of Anametheus so surprisingly as to seem given 
 him from the unseen power. 
 
 With what grin of amazement, passing into nascent 
 amusement, would our author's savage comrades 
 listen to his novel rendering of everyday happenings ! 
 Anyone could be glib enough on matter-of-fact — who 
 knocked down the fat and foolish penguin that made 
 a joke as well as a supper for the shivering crew ; 
 what teeth and prickles the fish had which another 
 failed to bring to land. Not every hungry hunter, 
 however, might think of gloating over a whale or a 
 hippopotamus as a very godsend, the gift of a super- 
 natural power vaguely outlined in a mind that could 
 explain rain as the tears of some mighty mother 
 brooding overhead, and snow as feathers from some 
 great penguin-plucking in the sky. Such ideas would 
 take with the childhood of the world, in which the 
 myth-making faculty is so kindly fostered, and not 
 only any doll readily becomes a fetish endowed with 
 a quasi-sentient life, but imaginary beings may be 
 called forth from the air, shaped on the slightest hint 
 of perplexedly inquisitive experience. 
 
 Our children have something of this faculty, till the 
 prison-house of fact shuts up the boy's imagination. 
 Frances Power Cobbe in her Memoirs tells of an 
 imaginary being named Peter, whom her nurse 
 imposed on her as a Puck of childish superstition. He 
 who writes this can recall from nursery days how we 
 small chatterers created for ourselves a race of airy 
 personages as heroes of what_^must have V been an 
 embryo work of serial fiction. I remember clearly
 
 20 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 that we gave them the name of The Waiters, less 
 clearly how we attributed to them no doubt absurd 
 qualities and actions looming gigantically on the 
 horizon of real life, a sort of myth perhaps taking 
 origin in some stay at a large hotel where we might 
 have been impressed by the number and obsequious- 
 ness of the attendants, perhaps suggested by an 
 indiscreet nurse who may have had her own reasons 
 for being much concerned with a waiter, though in 
 the end she transferred her worship to a policeman 
 for better or worse. The present author should have 
 been most to blame for this queer romancing ; but 
 he seems to recall a tiny sister as throwing herself 
 with zest into the conception. Here we were doing 
 just what ignorant folk have done in all countries 
 and ages, are doing at this day where the world is 
 still agog in open-eyed youth among its puzzling 
 sensations and observations. Perhaps one errs in 
 imagining an author as already distinguished at the 
 childish age when most men might have a like gift 
 of grotesque day-dreams ; and it would only be after 
 much communal exercise that an individual here and 
 there began to evince marked faculty in this respect. 
 Katametheus saw clearly enough that the tree grew, 
 the stone fell and the water moved ; it took Aname- 
 theus to enounce how they, too, were alive, in a 
 manner, even if not going on legs. Personification 
 was the first great feat of authorship, not yet on the 
 grand Olympian scale of clearly-cut forms preserved 
 for us in Greek art. Vague and mutable were those 
 early imaginations as the lights and shades that cast 
 them upon earth, the threat of rustling branches that 
 gave them a flickering shape, the distant roar of 
 earthquake and volcano that might well seem the 
 voice of some angry monster. Our own well-fed and
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 21 
 
 well-regulated nurslings are best schooled in a kindly 
 or a jovial mythology, with Santa Claus or the Man 
 in the Moon for its most supernatural figures ; but 
 the world's child, naked as he was to all blasts of 
 fate, would find perilous shadows in the most familiar 
 aspects of nature and veritable bogeys in every mani- 
 festation of the unknown. The death-dealing darts 
 of the sun would long strike his eye more sharply than 
 its genial glow ; he would note rather the cruel 
 strength of the sea than its playful beauty ; the 
 tempest, the eclipse, the eruption would paint luridly 
 for his awe-struck mind. The more clearly man 
 comes to think, the more he fixes his wonder on the 
 common — the springing of the grass, the hatching of 
 the egg, the rise and fall of the tide. At the age of 
 feeling, he is excited rather by apparitions that seem 
 uncommon, and therefore terrific. 
 
 So, while life was mainly a melodrama, the author's 
 first creations were like to be bogeys, that would not 
 fail to catch contemporary taste in fiction. The 
 practical man of the period, looking down to his feet 
 with a keener eye for snakes and thorns, might speak 
 scornfully of that dreaming stumbler who stared up 
 into the clouds to see them backed like a camel or 
 cleaving the air like a whale. But the most earthly- 
 minded spirit is sooner or later hushed in his mockery 
 by a blow ever overhanging the best guarded life. 
 
 I cannot ease the burden of your fears, 
 Or make quick-coming death a little thing, 
 
 sings our wiser poet, whose remotest ancestor in art 
 was less modest. He, whose weird fancy had given 
 bodies to the spirits of earth and sky, seemed marked 
 out as the man called on to deal with them in the 
 way of invocation or propitiation. Thus youi* since
 
 22 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 esurient author became early connected with a most 
 respectable and sometimes lucrative profession, nay, 
 with all learned professions in their rudimentary 
 stage. He, sooner than another, might turn away 
 mysterious wrath by means of ceremonies, sacrifices, 
 taboos fit to please the creatures of his imagination. 
 Taking courage, as light dawned on a wider horizon, 
 he could call up more beneficent and august shapes 
 to rule the daylight, and drive those fearsome bogeys 
 back into the darkness. In fire and water, he found 
 a sacred blessing as well as a curse of destruction. 
 He published sanctities and cleansings, and bound up 
 the horror of death with rites that went at least to 
 take the mourners of! their helpless grief, if not to 
 numb it with promises of a new life. Thus we catch 
 the author grown into renown as the priest, who in 
 time may forge for himself keys of a heaven and a 
 hell, after making gods and demons in his own image, 
 with stories about them that will pass as orthodox till 
 some more aspiring architect in ideas builds a loftier 
 temple for our hopes and fears. We may suppose 
 that the first authors dealt with serious topics ; it 
 would be long before life presented any humorous 
 aspect ; and humanity was well on its upward way 
 when the ex-ape could be stirred into a hearty laugh. 
 We have guessed that the man of science would be 
 more honoured, sooner raised to the peerage of his 
 band, as furnishing it with clubs, missiles, cooking 
 apparatus, and rudimentary principles of biology 
 useful in indicating the haunts of a deer or the habits 
 of a bear. This indeed may not always have been so : 
 inventors are seldom rewarded after their desert ; 
 and in less unenlightened times, when their inventions 
 may be plagarized by sharp rivals or turned to the 
 profit of '' promoters," they have even been clapped
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 23 
 
 into prison, or starved in a garret, for not being 
 content to leave things as they are. It is still more 
 doubtful if the first author largely enjoyed what 
 rewards and distinctions were going in his time : he 
 must have had to live down some want of public 
 appreciation ; and one takes him as fain to cultivate 
 the chief's favour by skilfully enhancing reports of 
 heroic prowess in war or the chase, if he did not devote 
 his talent to stories of his own hunting and fishing 
 exploits. It is surmisable that more practically- 
 minded members of the community would be apt to 
 look askance on their day-dreamer as good for nothing 
 but to croon out his idle rigmaroles when the rest 
 were for sleeping or eating, or to ramble off on unsocial 
 wool-gatherings instead of picking whelks for the 
 common pot. There might well seem, however, to 
 be something uncanny in his flightiness, so it would be 
 his own fault if he could not ere long win the respect 
 bred of fear, or, among simple peoples, by a reputation 
 for madness. When he got the length of issuing 
 oracles and incantations, he faced the chief in a 
 sacred character, and claimed a voice in public policy, 
 where one can conceive dissensions, denunciations, 
 excommunications, depositions carried out in the 
 rough, not otherwise than as between Pope and 
 Emperor. The able pow-wow would know how to 
 magnify his office, so we see him playing many parts 
 as well as that of priest, — lawyer, of course, to codify 
 the overmastering will, astrologer to keep note of the 
 seasons, soothsayer to foretell events, physician to 
 drive out the evil spirits of disease, wizard to cast 
 spells as your wise man can, palavering orator to stir 
 up the warrior's heart, actor to figure in pantomine 
 dances, and a dash of the juggler, perhaps, coming in 
 useful for due performance of other functions. At
 
 24 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 this stage we catch some hint of Anametheus and 
 Katametheus going into partnership as a firm for 
 exploiting the ignorance of their fellow-tribesmen. 
 Those early authors, one doubts not, were general 
 dealers in marvel and mystery, with a strong tempta- 
 tion to exalt themselves by humbugging as well as 
 instructing the vulgar. 
 
 Such functions might in time become specialized, 
 as when a tribe advanced so far as to have its separate 
 colleges of spiritual and medical pow-wows ; but for 
 long the man of words was also a master of tricks, 
 antics and specially of tones. To help his memory, 
 and for the sake of emphasis, he would hit on some 
 scheme of rhythm, that naturally developed into 
 metre and rhyme. Were his own pulse beats hint 
 enough for systole and diastole of uttered breath ? 
 Was the beginning of it a rhythmic jerking of the 
 body, punctuated by grunts or yells that gradually 
 became articulate ? Or did the imitation of beasts 
 and birds suggest some rhyme such as the goo-goo or 
 ma-ma of nurseries, where, as I learn from experienced 
 matrons, our babes are susceptible to the lulling 
 chants of " Baby Bunting " or " Humpty Dumpty " 
 long before they can conceive any mental picture of 
 such personages ? Did the whole band begin by 
 howling in chorus like a pack of wolves or a troop of 
 monkeys, till some cock of the roost could win silence 
 for his higher-pitched solo ? In any case, accentuated 
 sounds made embryo verses, more easily remembered, 
 and let themselves be chanted or intoned with impres- 
 sive effect, enhanced by an accompaniment of such 
 twangings and thumpings in time as most readily 
 tickle ears insensible to elaborate harmonies : the first 
 musical performance may have been kicking one's 
 heels as one sat on a log. So music was born, the
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 25 
 
 twin of poetry ; and very early authors appeared 
 before their public as minstrels, accompanying them- 
 selves on rude tom-toms ere Mercury invented the 
 lyre or Pan wooed the reed -nymph Syrinx. 
 
 Meanwhile the men of rudimentary science had 
 hit on other shifts for marking time, counting by 
 fingers and toes, longer calculations by pebbles, by 
 bundles of twigs, by knotted cords, by belts of coloured 
 shells and so forth ; then by and by a further faculty 
 of genius began upon an invention that was to rob 
 the bard of his monopoly. The first artist who 
 scratched a rude figure of man or beast on a clean- 
 gnawed bone, or daubed a rock with coloured clay, 
 or gave a sharpened flint some less clumsy shape, 
 little knew what would come of such devices. It was 
 the author himself, in his quality of priest, who 
 developed pictures into hieroglyphs, hoping still to 
 impress the ignorant herd by the eye as by the ear. 
 But when thus an alphabet of conventional signs came 
 into use, it would only be matter of time that he who 
 chose to learn might read for himself. Oracles, 
 incantations, and musical hocus-pocus fell in value 
 with the rise of letters. A.B.C. headed a new primer 
 of civilization, when almost before he knew it, man 
 took to writing prose. Apollo still remains in title 
 the patron saint of authors ; but henceforth the ruck 
 of them would vow themselves to Mercury and 
 Minerva, if not to less ethereal inspiration. Before 
 letters were invented, indeed, science may have 
 scored by the introduction of telegraphy in the shape 
 of drum taps, far-heard trumpet-blasts or fire signals, 
 for the spreading of immediately useful information ; 
 but ages would pass before such contrivances would 
 be developed as fruitfully as more elaborate priestly 
 records.
 
 26 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 The author, though disengaged from his adventi- 
 tious roles as medicine-man or mystery-monger, is 
 still a singer when he first stands out in the twilight of 
 European history. The canons of Greek divinity 
 appear fixed rather by poets than by such priests as won 
 more power in the dreamy East, while on our horizon 
 the fame of Homer and Hesiod looms through a haze 
 in which they begin to be themselves taken for quasi- 
 mythological beings. We need not concern ourselves 
 here with the question whether the Iliad were the 
 work of a Homer or of " some other man of the same 
 name," or of a College of rhapsodists, gradually 
 licking into epic shape a wandering mass of ballad 
 episodes, as the Finnish Kalevalla was artfully put 
 together in our own age, as the legends of Arthur and 
 of Charlemagne were collected into books for less 
 critical times. The stories we have as Homer's had 
 at all events to be published through generations of 
 minstrels and reciters, in whose mouths they could 
 hardly escape undergoing some measure of adapta- 
 tion. There is at least reason to suppose them edited 
 into their present mould to make a holiday entertain- 
 ment for the Athenians, who would demand more 
 art and refinement than what passed muster with 
 provincial audiences. 
 
 The first books recorded as offered for sale, seem to 
 have been those of the Sibyl, an author who shared 
 the common fate of not being taken at her own 
 estimation, yet her works soon rose to a fancy price, 
 only to perish in the end like so many more authentic 
 volumes. But, whereas those Sibylline books were 
 reduced to a three-volumed form, the early Muses 
 multiplied into three times three ; and in the century 
 after the text of Homer appears to have been fi_xed in 
 writing, we have Herodotus reading out his nine books
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 27 
 
 of prose, which no strolling bard could be expected 
 to commit to memory, as might be the case with 
 opuscules like the fables attributed to iEsop, or the 
 laws and precepts of a Solon, who yet, when he wished 
 to stir the people's hearts, at some political crisis, is 
 said to have made his harangue in impassioned verse. 
 Surprisingly close to the half-fanciful records of 
 Herodotus, we find Thucydides and Xenophon helping 
 to make history and also writing it in a more serious 
 strain ; then in their age bursts upon us a galaxy of 
 authors never eclipsed by ancients or moderns — 
 dramatists purging the old superstitions by moving 
 pity and terror in keenly responsive natures — philo- 
 sophers sublimating the forms of unedifying gods into 
 ideas of the god-like — sages pondering upon phenom- 
 ena of life that set them theorizing as well as laughing 
 or crying — orators able to become the leaders of 
 mobile-minded freemen — and among the rest religious 
 innovators whose work, if not written down or if 
 reverting to the Orphic utterances of the priest, was 
 suffused into the popular mind in warmer moods of 
 worship and brighter hopes of an unseen world beyond 
 the grave. 
 
 Before Lucian came to sweep among the rubbish of 
 crumbling temples, the setting glory of Greece was 
 reflected from the solid grandeur of Rome, whose 
 institutions and its literature still stand as the founda- 
 tions of our own. With powerful and wealthy patrons 
 to applaud him, with an organized machinery of 
 copyists and booksellers to spread his works abroad, 
 the author is now seen fully conscious of a place in the 
 world. Cicero, among his varied ambitions, boasts 
 that he will set this obscure name above that of 
 Catos and Catuli ; Virgil undertakes embalming the 
 memory of an emperor's darling ; Horace makes sure
 
 28 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 he has built up for himself a monument more enduring 
 than brass, — a vaunt to be echoed in the heart of 
 many a poet, though not all durst declare it and few 
 make it good — 
 
 Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
 
 Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. 
 
 In our day his auto- epitaph has come to be toned with 
 modest joy as well as pride — 
 
 I hang 'mid men my needless head, 
 
 And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread ; 
 
 The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper 
 
 Time shall reap, but after the reaper 
 
 The world shall glean of me — me the sleeper ! 
 
 The shadow of Rome long lay upon the dark ages, 
 lit by a pale after-glow of pagan luminaries. That 
 mistress of the world below was model for Augustine's 
 City of God " where Christ is Roman ; " and Virgil, 
 while for the vulgar he became a magician, was half- 
 beatified as an illegitimate saint who could guide 
 Dante to the throne of the " Emperor of Heaven." 
 As Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had unconsciously 
 breathed a fresh moral air that blew from the East, so 
 the new doctrine did not disdain to blend with the old. 
 Fathers of the Church were fain to learn in classical 
 schools ; and monkish copyists had little to multiply 
 but time-honoured manuscripts, that by and by 
 would be needed as palimpsests for institutes of 
 sounder divinity. Under the hands of these scribes, 
 ancient literature underwent some expurgation, carried 
 out more sweepingly by the fire and sword of Moslem 
 censors. 
 
 All along the sock and the buskin had been at 
 odds, when a Euripides with his " dropping of warm
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 29 
 
 tears " might be irreverently parodied by the rival 
 who displayed Socrates hung up in a basket to public 
 derision ; and a good deal of wit must have been 
 always current of that kind suggesting to Ben Jonson 
 " the original dung-cart." Now clerical censorship 
 would winnow out the gaiety as well as the wisdom of 
 ancient days, preserving rather such writings as might 
 be adapted to Christian edification. When Christi- 
 anity began to produce a literature of its own, the 
 difference between the vein of Democritus and of 
 Heraclitus is accentuated by cloistered morality. 
 In exceptional works like the Gesta Romanorum, an 
 attempt is made to unite the utile with the dulce ; but 
 for the most part authors became rather sharply 
 divided between purposes of edification and of amuse- 
 ment. ^Vhen prose grew vernacular, Chaucer quali- 
 fies it as doubly fit for matter " in which there be some 
 mirth or some doctrine," and by his example we can 
 guess his conception of mirth. Tonsured teachers, 
 whatever their practice, had professions that drove 
 jesting jongleurs, errant troubadours, by and bylosel 
 novelists to another extreme. We all know what 
 was the chief bone of contention between those rivals. 
 Boccaccio gives a farcical turn to one of the earliest 
 stories of clerical authorship, in the Byzantine 
 romance Barlaam and Josaphat, where a young prince 
 kept shut up in the dark till his adolescence is then 
 brought out to behold the glories of the world, and of 
 all he sees for the first time admires most frankly 
 young women, though informed that they are " devils 
 who catch men." " Mulier est hommis confusio,'" 
 becomes translated by the sly poet " Woman is 
 manne's joy and manne's bliss ; " yet again Chaucer, 
 speaking in the character of his godly parson, is 
 boimd to say —
 
 30 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Thou gettest fable none y-told for me, 
 For Paul, that writeth unto Timothy, 
 Reproveth them that weive soothfastness, 
 And telle fables, and such wretchedness. 
 Why should I so we draff out of my fist, 
 When I may sowe wheat, if that me list ? 
 
 Such rebukes, too much deserved, the minstrels 
 resented in satire on their censors, whose own cloisters 
 were often not well adapted for the throwing of moral 
 stones, as witness Boccaccio's satire of the Jew con- 
 verted by a visit to Rome, which convinced him this 
 must be a divine religion that throve for all the vices 
 of its ministers. We need hardly be told, then, on 
 what sort of stories the mere story-tellers would try 
 their hand, when from sterner moralizers like Dante, 
 we learn how the teachings of the Church were poisoned 
 by hypocrisy, and when such a satirist as Rabelais 
 was fain to turn hypocrisy inside out, putting on a 
 grinning mask from beneath which he could more 
 safely insinuate a lesson to his age. This jarring 
 between teachers and ticklers of the mind would go 
 on for long, most clearly shown on the stage that sets 
 itself up against the pulpit ; and not yet is it fully 
 seen how no teaching profits unless it be true, and how 
 no humour is wholesome unless infused by sympathy. 
 It is a hoary jest that of the limited stock of amusing 
 stories authors have to turn about in their kaleido- 
 scopes—the whole number variously counted from 
 seven to thirty-nine — only one third are fit to be told 
 before ladies. No wonder that minstrels, like actors, 
 came to be legally classed with rogues and vagabonds ! 
 
 The most approved literature of that age, before 
 ladies' ears became more delicate, appears to have been 
 the romances whose flights of long-winded fancy 
 would be laughed away by Cervantes ; but the
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 31 
 
 rhymers and chroniclers of chivalry deserved in the 
 main to be the most popular authors of their period. 
 They wrote as gentlemen for gentlemen, and ladies, 
 adapting classical scholarship, too, to their purposes, 
 when Alexander and Theseus could serve them as 
 chivalric heroes. Nor on them need the Church 
 frown, for their heroes as a rule duly kept vigils and 
 fasts, before turning consecrated weapons chiefly 
 against paynim giants and caitiffs ; or, if now and 
 then they lapsed into sin, that could be set right by 
 retirement into a hermitage and founding masses to 
 pray for souls too venturous to be saintly. Dante's 
 great work, after all, is but a pious romance, a comedy 
 with its happy ending in heaven ; and if some of the 
 tales Chaucer was ashamed to look back on seem fit 
 rather for the tap-room of the Tabard, most of his 
 work could kindle the brightest eye without bringing 
 a blush to the softest cheek. Poetry would clear its 
 own atmosphere without help from the fumigations of 
 theology. Meanwhile, such heterodox teachers as 
 Huss and Bruno must expect to be duly burned ; but 
 your Aretinos and the like will not be much persecuted 
 for mere obscenity. Such were the ps and qs authors 
 had to mind in those ages of faith, when the faults of 
 rulers or pastors might be most safely touched in 
 chuckling over Reynard the Fox's sly tricks on power 
 and dignity. 
 
 By this time the Universities had undertaken to 
 share with the monasteries the work of book produc- 
 tion, while serious literature was still in the hands of 
 Doctors of Divinity, brooding owlishly upon what 
 Erasmus mocks at as '' Niceties of Notions, Relations, 
 Quantities, Formalities, Quiddities, Haeccities, and 
 such like Abstrusities." The Schoolmen, however 
 subtle, seraphic, irrefragable, or invincible, had read
 
 32 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 themselves blind over their syllogisms, sophisms, and 
 distinctions, when the Renaissance came to quicken 
 the pulse of learning with a fever that would soon 
 drive doctors and scholars into two hostile camps. 
 Just as men's minds were ready for a new crop of 
 doctrine, there stole into our world an invention for 
 disseminating it. Who first thought of stamping 
 blocks on paper, then of printing from metal types, 
 may be matter of controversy, as in the case of that 
 blacker business of gunpowder : both inventions 
 appear to have been anticipated in China, where 
 neither of them as yet has worked such revolution as 
 in the progressive West. The British Museum boasts 
 a book well printed in China about the time King 
 John was putting his seal to Magna Charta — for 
 eventual exhibition at another of our public institu- 
 tions. There seems reason to suppose that in Europe 
 the first essay of printing was by blocks used to stamp 
 figures on playing-cards, which have been called the 
 devil's books. Typography comes to full light about 
 the middle of the 15th century, its first notable artisan 
 being one Gutenberg of Mentz, furthered and pro- 
 moted by a certain pecunious Fust, whose name 
 might well be confused by the vulgar with that of 
 Faust. The art could indeed pass for magical, by 
 which books were at once cheapened to a sixth or so of 
 their former price, not at once improved, for prentice 
 typography would seem coarse beside the careful 
 work of practised scribes; and we hear of fastidious 
 scholars who despised the new volumes, as their like 
 nowadays may prefer Aldines and Elzevirs to cheap 
 popular editions. What the scribes themselves 
 thought and said of printed books, may be guessed by 
 any student of vested interests ; but they, scattered 
 over Europe, could not make such an uproar as those
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 33 
 
 craftsmen who lived by the worship of Ephesian 
 Diana. 
 
 Luther was the Paul who would now start a wider 
 and louder uproar, swelled and spread abroad by- 
 printed books, which in the northern half of Europe 
 had the most eager readers. That the new doctrine 
 found many readers here goes to show how the 
 Church, hitherto their sole teacher, could not have 
 been so much concerned to keep them in ignorance as is 
 fondly thought by true-blue Protestants. The Church 
 had at first patronized the printing press, as an engine 
 for giving fresh momentum to its teaching. But 
 when that engine could be so easily turned against its 
 own authority, it began to hold in suspicion the 
 rebellious force too well handled by its adversaries. So, 
 no sooner did the author's arm become strengthened 
 manifold, as by the use of a pulley or a lever, than he 
 felt it heavily shackled in chains, not always, every- 
 where and by all men to be burst. 
 
 Inquisition, imprimatur and Index Expurgatorius 
 were fetters that held firm on half the mind of Europe, 
 while the other half but slowly learned what Cicero 
 could have told them long before Milton, how " though 
 all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon 
 the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously 
 by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength." 
 Even yet it is not clear to some that no infallible 
 power on earth, vested in one or many, seated at 
 Rome or Geneva, speaking through flesh and blood 
 or from printed paper, can soundly dogmatize to the 
 soul, whose nature is growth in wisdom. Nobody in 
 Luther's time understood how creeds had to be 
 snuffed like candles, from hour to hour ; and those 
 who took upon themselves this useful office were then 
 very like to burn their fingers, or singe their wigs.
 
 34 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Shortsighted beyond all other students seem the 
 official censors, when the most authentic Index, as 
 brought up to date, frowns at Milton, at Gibbon, at 
 Heine, but winks at Tom Paine and Shelley, bars Kant 
 and Comte while overlooking Huxley and Tyndall, 
 and duly notes the heresies of Erasmus Darwin with 
 blinking eyes blind to those of his grandson. The 
 faithful may read Dickens with a clear conscience, 
 though not Dumas, father or son ; George Sand is 
 suspect, as not George Eliot ; Gil Bias passes the 
 examination at which Le Pere Goriot is plucked ; and 
 Maeterlinck has lately been put under a ban that does 
 not extend to the farces of the Palais Royal. But 
 such oversights matter little, now that so ill-aimed 
 artillery is served mainly by blank cartridge. 
 
 Luther himself little guessed all that would come of 
 throwing his inkstand at the devil's head. It would 
 be long before the Reformation grew conscious of its 
 true spirit ; but then was set afoot the struggle for 
 free thought and free speech which must end in com- 
 plete victory, or in once more enslaving man's mind 
 as books themselves were chained in those ages of 
 dark faith. The fires of persecution fizzed and splut- 
 tered upon earth, while the stars in their courses lit 
 up the triumphant march of reason from battle-field 
 to battle-field. In those battles the white plumes of 
 kings shine before the ranks ; the oriflammes of either 
 side are held up by statesmen and churchmen ; but 
 the trumpets of the victors were sounded by authors, 
 who presently take on themselves to be teachers 
 without being preachers. And, when books, grave 
 as well as gay, are written in vernacular tongues, the 
 heavy batteries of folios and quartos become rein- 
 forced by smaller pieces, down to broadsheets and fly 
 leaves, on which he who runs can read and learn to
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 35 
 
 think. Time will corae, indeed, when he may be 
 helped to read without thinking ; but the first con- 
 cern of the printing-press was with serious thoughts 
 to breed momentous deeds, even where for centuries 
 they might be stifled in the dank vaults of the Inqui- 
 sition. The first volume printed, as beseems, was the 
 Vulgate translation of our Book of Books, held up 
 by Reformers as text for all truth, so now translated 
 into familiar speech in which learned or unlearned 
 might undertake to commentate or expound ; but 
 for generations its critics, higher or lower, would be 
 expelled from all synagogues, even those that in their 
 taller pulpits set reason above ritual. 
 
 While mere authors thus found a new place and 
 dignity in the modern world, they had missed attend- 
 ing to their material interests after a manner that 
 went to bring them into contempt with the vulgar 
 of all ranks. What had seemed worth buying and 
 selling in almost authorless ages was the copy of 
 some approved work treasured by monks, who for 
 love or money might be willing to multiply it. The 
 author who would guard his right of property in the 
 child of his brain, had in old days only to keep his 
 handiwork to himself, a protection as little welcome 
 as the judgment of Solomon to the true mother. 
 When printed books began to get abroad, the profit 
 of them was at first a matter of licensed monopoly or 
 other privilege, that fell into the hands of the printer 
 rather than of the author, then of the publisher who 
 found his account in employing them both. In 
 what proved somewhat of a confused scramble for 
 the gains of the new trade, the author came worst off, 
 as most willing to take his pay in coinage of promise 
 and bills of fame, not always honoured. His share of 
 the material gains he looked for rather by the indirect
 
 36 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 way of place or pension, courting the favour of royal 
 and noble patrons with fulsome dedications, some- 
 times rewarded, but seldom according to his own 
 estimate of desert ; and more often his fate was like 
 Spenser's, of whom the legend goes that he died in 
 destitution — 
 
 To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, 
 To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs. 
 To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
 To spend, to give, to want, to be undone. 
 
 Little was to be got, then, by appealing to the 
 public as patron. Robert Greene, best remembered 
 by his spiteful hit at Shakespeare as an " upstart 
 crow," is supposed to have been the first English 
 author that tried to make a livelihood by his pen, 
 and he came to a poverty-stricken death-bed. Shake- 
 speare, who throve as a dramatist and actor-manager, 
 seems hardly to have thought it worth while to look 
 after the publication of his plays. Ben Jonson, who 
 also made money by the stage, was glad of a salary as 
 poet laureate, eked out by windfalls of bounty. Otway 
 is said to have choked himself on his first eager bite 
 after a spell of starvation. But one need not heap up 
 instances of genius fated to starve on a diet of praise, 
 that old story of laudatur et alget. 
 
 Clerical and academic authors had a better chance 
 to be provided for by preferment. A lay-poet or 
 philosopher thought himself lucky to succeed the jester 
 or the chaplain in households of the great, as Hobbes 
 was entertained by the Devonshire family, and Gay 
 by the Duchess of Queensberry. Less fortunate were 
 those who had to wait in the ante-chambers of lords, 
 to stomach stony condescension as sauce for meat 
 and drink, or to be paid off with a purse of gold,
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 37 
 
 too long owed to tailor or tavern-keeper. Gil Bias, 
 among his varied experiences of patronage, has to tell 
 how even an actress, in receiving a poet whose tragedy 
 was accepted, would say " Keep your seats, gentle- 
 men ; it is only an author." Fielding in his Author'' s 
 Farce makes poor Luckless hear from his landlady 
 how " my floor is all spoiled with ink, my windows 
 with verses, and my door has been almost beat down 
 with duns," so as soon as she can get rid of him, she 
 will hang over her door " No lodgings for poets ! " 
 Richard Savage's An Author to he Let is of course 
 an ill-natured caricature of his fellows in misfortune ; 
 but that its charges were not much exaggerated is 
 shown by his friend Dr. Johnson's life of this author, 
 fain to prostitute his muse in rancorous flattery of the 
 great, and in such flights of a hungry genius as " The 
 Animalcule, a Tale occasioned by his Grace the Duke 
 of Rutland's receiving the Small-pox by Inoculation." 
 The first record of money paid on a bargain for 
 copyright, seems to have been that beggarly account 
 that made the price of Paradise Lost. England had 
 been before other countries in recognizing some vague 
 right, at common law, belonging to an author in what 
 profit could be made out of his works. This was first 
 defined by a statute of 1709, granting a scrimp period 
 of copyright. But though thus the matter began to 
 be better organized, the business partner in literary 
 enterprise still got the lion's share of the booty, thanks 
 to the carelessness, the unworldliness, the neediness of 
 dwellers in Grub Street, who had to console themselves 
 by setting up the publisher as target of their lampoons. 
 A prudent poet, indeed, well off for acquaintances in 
 the world where Pope and Addison made their footing 
 good, might do well enough for himself by printing on 
 the basis of a subscription list, which, in some cases,
 
 38 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 had no superstructure, and proved merely " a hand- 
 some way of asking one's friends for a guinea ; " 
 Goldsmith records an author whose only works were 
 proposals, on which he had lived comfortably for a 
 dozen years. But the rank and file of authors had to 
 hurry to sell their work for what they could get from 
 the publisher, who came in time to be their patron. 
 Such fine gentlemen as took the trouble to write, were 
 ashamed to figure in the ranks of so ragged a regiment, 
 and for long scorned to draw the poor pay of a not 
 too reputable service. In the reviews and magazines 
 of the early nineteenth century, it was first made a 
 rule that every contributor should willy-nilly pocket 
 his honorarium, gilded by some such refinement of 
 title. By this time my Lord Byron was not above 
 bargaining with Mr. John Murray ; and Sir Walter 
 Scott, whose muse had already yielded him half-a- 
 crown per line, was unluckily tempted to go ultra 
 crepidam in passing paper for gold. And now that 
 the lottery of authorship was seen to contain rich 
 prizes as well as blanks, the nobility and gentry 
 proved not less ready to put into it than the hungry 
 drudges of Grub Street. 
 
 It may seem questionable how far the author gains 
 in freedom and self-respect when he exchanges the 
 service of the patron for that of the bookseller. The 
 patron, if a right prince or lord, might be a more 
 appreciative employer ; and in any case, for his own 
 credit, would be concerned for the brilliancy of his 
 literary satellite. The bookseller's eye is chiefly on his 
 customers, to please whom he brings forth bad as well 
 as good, so long as either pays. A certain author of 
 our time is not singular in having spent a good part of 
 his life over a book, which ought to be published as a 
 valuable asset for scholarship : so every publisher
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 39 
 
 to whom it has been submitted allows, but refuses to 
 " touch " it as almost certain to prove a heavy loss. 
 Per contra, a peer who was his own patron ruined 
 himself by a sumptuous work in which he vainly hoped 
 to play the part of Columbus for the Lost Tribes of 
 Israel, I could tell tales also of publishers who have 
 played the disinterested patron to books that deserved 
 success without commanding it ; but publishing is of 
 course a business that must be carried on with a clear 
 balance-sheet. So some authors would prefer a 
 patron, if they could pick the patron, to that many- 
 headed supporter that sometimes sees their merits 
 aright, yet est uhi fcccat. This question falls to be 
 treated later on, when we come to the by-products 
 of authorship. 
 
 That only bad writers have any cause to regret 
 patronage is the emphatic opinion of a famous author, 
 who did not live into an age when his " every school- 
 boy " no longer " thumbs to pieces classics like Don 
 Quixote." Anyhow, for good or evil, by Macaulay's 
 cheque for twenty thousand pounds was signed and 
 sealed the title of an author to consideration as 
 dependent on public favour alone. Since then, Acts 
 of Parliament, Judicial decisions, Copyright conven- 
 tions, Authors' trade-unions, literary agents and other 
 machinery have been at work to enhance the value of 
 his property. He had never been backward in think- 
 ing highly of himself ; and now contemporaries are 
 disposed at last to think well of his work, recognizing 
 that tiny weapon, the pen, as in the long run mightier 
 than the sword, and having a far wider scope than the 
 eloquence that could move Areopagus or Forum when 
 a small city and its environs made a famous state. 
 As far back as 1760, a denizen of Grub Street, James 
 Ralph, seems to have been the first who modestly
 
 40 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 boasted, " The Pen has its power and may do some 
 sort of execution as well as a sword ; " but two genera- 
 tions had to pass before that pretension was brought to 
 note. Yet in quite mediaeval days, we may see the 
 pen often moving the sword, when mailed lords had 
 an eye to fame at the hand of scribes or minstrels 
 hanging on to courts and camps, and more than one 
 feather-brained prince was stirred to war by the 
 reading of romances. 
 
 The author is sometimes inclined to complain that 
 his craft does not rank among learned professions ; 
 yet he may remember how, even from his Grub Street 
 garret, he has been the teacher of those dignitaries 
 that still take precedence of him in the world's 
 honour, if not in its heart, while now there is no wig or 
 coronet worn so high but that a feather of authorship 
 may be stuck in it with public applause. All the old 
 abuses and stupidities were shown in their true light 
 by authors, while the learned doctors, sergeants and 
 pedagogues whose business it had been to reform them 
 were still blinded by use and wont or professional 
 prejudice. In the good old days, not so far gone, 
 when the doctor believed in drugging, the dominie in 
 drubbing, and the divine's motto also began with a 
 d., out-at-elbows scribblers are once and again found 
 speaking up for what is now seen to be common sense 
 and humanity. The new theologies and larger hopes 
 of our lower-pitched pulpits, were long ago preached 
 by authors, often at sore risk of their skins, from the 
 days when the prophets of Israel taught that a contrite 
 heart was more to the purpose than all the blood of 
 priestly sacrifices. Long before physicians found out 
 how nothing in their pharmacopoeias was more effectual 
 than the vix medicatrix naturae, novelists and play- 
 writers needed no diploma to see through the humbug
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF AUTHORS 41 
 
 of a Diafoirus or a Sangrado ; Petrarch did not stick 
 at criticizing the materia medica of his time. The 
 growing mildness of the law, too, was first prompted 
 by authors, who had in their own persons a good 
 chance of being clapped into prison along with the 
 Reverend Mr. Primrose and Mr. Pickwick : the big- 
 wigs did not hurry themselves to sweep out the dusty 
 Court of Chancery till they were poked up by Dickens, 
 who helped Thackeray to shame us from the brutality 
 of public executions. 
 
 There is indeed no institution of Church or State 
 which bold authors have feared to attack with tears 
 or laughter, that in the end could conquer or convert 
 the stiff-neckedness of official defenders. Statesmen 
 have to remember what a Rousseau and a Voltaire 
 did to undermine throne and altar. By the pen, that 
 can call out the sword, even kings have been schooled 
 to understand that there is a lith in their necks ; wise 
 Canutes draw back their thrones from the advancing 
 tide of public opinion, whose waves roar and dash in 
 the voice of the press ; and parliaments are fain to 
 recognize that once despised army as a fourth estate 
 of the realm. Oratory, without a reporter, carries no 
 further than ear-shot ; but the artillery that uses ink 
 for powder has all the world as its range, and may 
 reach its mark through centuries. The schoolmaster, 
 so notoriously abroad nowadays, is but the clerk, the 
 dispenser, the usher of the author, when those who can 
 write what other men care to read are, for good or ill, 
 the rulers and instructors of their people. 
 
 Not that it is by direct instruction authors most 
 make their influence felt. Their work goes to raise as 
 well as to register the intellectual temperature of the 
 world, till men feel themselves able to lay aside the 
 wrappings of prejudice and bigotry they once drew
 
 42 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 about them all tlie closer for sharp winds of criticism. 
 The arguments against persecution, against super- 
 stition, against class-privilege, were as sound and 
 strong in the days of the Star-chamber and the Bastille 
 as they are now ; but our eyes had to be opened to 
 them through the heart by quite other methods than 
 those of dogma and reasoning. One bugbear of 
 humanity after another has vanished like the iceberg 
 that comes drifting down from glacial tracts of ignorance 
 and fear. No battering availed to sink that mighty 
 mass, pitilessly crushing whatever lies in its path, and 
 chilling all around with its shadow. But ever it 
 moves to its own destruction in more genial latitudes. 
 Always it goes imperceptibly trickling away, its line 
 of flotation altering as some corner slips off into schism 
 with a great cackling of black and white penguins, or a 
 growling of bears vociferous over the ruin of their 
 castle ; then these sections in turn may collide with a 
 grinding crash, or glue themselves together afresh in 
 some still imposing form. But their end is sure if slow, 
 a quiet vanishing, or a sudden splitting to pieces that 
 stirs wide waves of commotion by the last sinking 
 struggles. About such a berg a poet can say pretty 
 things, having an eye for its graceful outlines, for its 
 glistening pinnacles, for its glowing tints, even for its 
 fearsome majesty. But, consciously or unconsciously, 
 he himself is the minister of the sun-god that smites 
 into water the brood of darkness and cold. 
 
 The author's mission is to warm and enlighten the 
 life of man, conceiving and shaping, expanding and 
 colouring for him the ideas that enrich his soul. 
 Since man is superior to all other animals chiefly in the 
 gifts of thought and speech, authors, as the most 
 articulate of men, ought to rank — but here one must 
 remember how beasts are not capable of such crimes 
 and follies as so basely alloy human nature.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 
 
 So much to show how, through the ages, authors have 
 helped to make men better and wiser. The next step, 
 then, should be to set forth the author as himself the 
 best and wisest of men. But alas ! there are preachers 
 who do not practise the virtues of which they may 
 keenly feel the need, and priests who eat and drink 
 their own damnation in unworthy ministering to the 
 spiritual wants of others. Thus of teachers in print 
 it must be confessed that they not only share the 
 imperfection of humanity, but are liable to special 
 blemishes of character, congenital weaknesses, speckles 
 and ringstrakings that too much mark them ofi among 
 the common herd. 
 
 A very authoritative voice in ancient days was 
 Apollo's oracle, whose priestess, intoxicated by mephi- 
 tic vapour, would be taken as possessed by the god to 
 utter judgments and prophecies. Even so, an eloquent 
 author often seems the unconscious mouthpiece 
 of some invisible spirit. Genius we call this posses- 
 sion, to be distinguished from the talents cultivatable 
 by the mass of men. I make bold to differ from the 
 definition of genius as an infinite capacity for taking 
 pains. Carlyle took infinite pains to work up his 
 utterances into oracular impressiveness, but he would 
 have strained language in vain had he not been in- 
 
 43
 
 44 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 spired by a power that made him a poet " wanting the 
 accomplishment of verse ; " and indeed greater 
 accuracy of narration could be attained by more care- 
 ful historians without his gift for moving minds that 
 questioned his facts and rejected his conclusions. 
 Accuracy, lucidity, correctness may be striven for ; 
 but genius comes of itself, and not to all men, which is 
 by no means to say that the genius will make much 
 of his faculty without taking pains in its development. 
 The diamond fetches its price through cutting, polish- 
 ing and setting ; but you must have your diamond to 
 begin with, of which imitations are not uncommon ; 
 and the purest gem is akin to humbler forms of carbon. 
 To be capable of sparkling in words, one must have 
 the properties of genius, except perhaps height, 
 breadth or length. On consideration, I withdraw the 
 metaphor of the diamond, to replace it by that of a 
 pearl, now and then found secreted unexpectedly from 
 dull and flabby tissues. Bitter tongues have even 
 compared the author to a spiteful and venomous toad 
 that may yet wear a precious jewel in his head. 
 
 " I can only gather wood and lay it on the altar," said 
 Goethe : " the fire must descend from heaven." Every 
 right author — setting aside the majority of authors to 
 be treated as no authors — ^has a spark of genius, how- 
 ever faint, a gift differing in kind rather than in degree 
 from the abilities of which other men are conscious. 
 It comes, indeed, like fire from heaven, or elsewhere, 
 falling upon a nature that more or less readily proves 
 tinder to flash up or smoulder out ; and the kindling of 
 a blaze depends on fuel artfully disposed to catch the 
 flickering flame. By rubbing two sticks together, 
 and in time by utilizing chemical affinities, you can 
 also call forth hidden seeds of fire, but certain bodies 
 and most heads might be rubbed or thumped for ever
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTPIOKS 45 
 
 without striking out the least flash, though these 
 bodies may burn briskly enough in a bonfire set well 
 light. 
 
 Genius, then, I would define as a shining manifesta- 
 tion of the creative faculty, existing in many minds, 
 but oftenest more obscurely. All right authors must 
 have some vein of more or less pure carbon in their 
 composition ; Shakespeare and Scribe differ not so 
 much in kind as in degree. " Talent is that which is 
 in a man's power ; Genius is that in whose power a 
 man is," declares a sounder critic than Carlyle. Shall 
 we put it that genius implies an overmastering pro- 
 pensity to something out of the common and to a great 
 extent beyond calculation. The flowers and the fruits 
 of it may depend on labour, on patience, on skilful 
 tendence, on opportunity ; but the root of the matter 
 seems hidden in earth, soiled by a fertilizing tempera- 
 ment from which all the imaginative arts draw their 
 sap. 
 
 Another metaphor for interpreting the author's 
 nature is a chord, that responds to external influences 
 like an iEolian harp. Not sense but sensibility is his 
 forte, as his foible may be not to recognize his gamut 
 of emotions. The great poet seems in tune with all 
 the music of the spheres, from the sublimest paean 
 to the saddest and stillest music of humanity. The 
 small story-teller but fitfully and feebly catches 
 broken notes of inspiration. Both depend for applause 
 on a certain practised power of giving out, more or 
 less resonantly, the harmonies stirred within them. 
 There are poets also 
 
 that never sing, 
 But die with all their music in them. 
 
 Every human soul, to be sure, is fitted with a barrel-
 
 46 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 organ that in most cases plays but two or three familiar 
 tunes, a dull, monotonous strumming for business 
 hours, quickened at the home fireside, falling into a 
 minor key by death-beds, perhaps rising to a higher 
 pitched strain on Sundays and in lovers' lanes. The 
 author would seem to have several such airs, or snatches 
 of them, in his machinery, which he can play in turn, 
 and perhaps plays much the same tune over and over 
 again with variations. He is Hamlet, or a bit of him, 
 as well as himself ; he may be Falstaff , Shylock, or 
 Lady Macbeth by turning on the proper stop ; in one 
 mood he can rage like a tyrant in Hercules' vein, as in 
 another take the voice of some gentle lady married to a 
 Moor, or sneer and lie for the nonce with the cunning 
 of an lago. Cervantes is a potential Don Quixote, 
 doubled with a Sancho Panza. The living musical box 
 is a Goldsmith, more limited in its selection of parts, 
 or a Byron that resolves into catching harmony the 
 echoes of a discordant self, or a Cowper with a few 
 symphonies of more softness than compass. These 
 resources he has in different degrees of imperfection, 
 and as his power is to be measured by the range of 
 them, the pleasing of his audience will depend much 
 on his ability to produce his strong notes with effect, 
 while keeping away from or slurring over the gaps 
 there must be in most such keyboards. However clear 
 the strain given forth, there will be much inward 
 jarring of which the author himself is most conscious, 
 yet sometimes the dullest hearer also can detect a 
 false note.^ 
 
 ^ Pereant isti — nay, indeed, but what a pity that one has to 
 glean in fields left bare by so many keen sickles ! After stum- 
 bling, as 1 believed, on that original figure of a barrel-organ, 
 I take up a favourite author, already quoted in these pages, and 
 find him playing on the same instrument, its strain perhaps echo-
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 47 
 
 It is the music of the author's life that often gives 
 audible discords, as if the effort to ring a peal of 
 fancies left his own bells jangling out of tune. The 
 name of this irritable genus has always passed as a 
 proverb for certain defects of character, though at 
 most times its sons have been in circumstances to call 
 for the practice of Christian graces. Such besetting 
 sins as inconsistency, jealousy, querulousness and 
 quarrelsomeness are the badge of all their tribe. Great 
 wits have been authoritatively pronounced near akin 
 to madness, a story as old as Plato and Aristotle, not 
 to speak of Pythian oracles. The multitudinous 
 memoirs of the race give one the idea that, as a 
 rule, they must have been hard to live with, harder 
 still to do business with. And in case I be accused of 
 an itch for slandering my betters in this craft, let me 
 take a text from Leslie Stephen, a critic of wide 
 sympathy, who as Editor of our National Biography, 
 had much occasion for considering the subject under 
 consideration. 
 
 Literature is, in all cases, a demoralizing occupation, though 
 some people can resist its evil influences. It is demoralizing 
 
 ing unconsciously in my memory. " Life turns the winch, and 
 fancy or accident pulls out the stops. I come under your windows 
 some fine spring morning, and play you one of my adagio move- 
 ments, and some of you say, — This is good — play us so always. 
 But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop sometimes, the 
 machine would wear out in one part and rust in another. How 
 easily this or that tune flows ! You say — there must be no 
 end of just such melodies in him. I will open the poor machine for 
 you one moment, and you shall look. Ah 1 Every note marks 
 where a spm* of steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind 
 out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make it 
 was the painful task of time." 0. W. Holmes : Axitocrat of the 
 Breakfast Table.
 
 48 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 because success implies publicity. A poet has to turn himself 
 inside out by the very conditions of his art, and sufiers from the 
 incessant stimulants applied to his self-consciousness. The 
 temptation is inevitable, and is, of course, the stronger and the 
 more corrupting as the right to satisfy a vulgar curiosity is more 
 generally admitted. Formerly, if a man wanted to talk about 
 himself, he wrote an autobiography to be published posthumously, 
 and there was therefore some safeguard, in so far as he was not 
 to be directly conscious of the eSect produced. Now the auto- 
 biography is being superseded by the ' reminiscences,' in which 
 every one is invited to explain what a genial and charming creature 
 he is, how thoroughly he appreciates his contemporaries, and how 
 superior he is to any desire for popular praise. If reminiscing is 
 not a name for hypocritical attitudinizing, it shows, as I am glad 
 to believe, what charming and excellent people many of our 
 contemporaries still are, in spite of all the corrupting influences to 
 which they are exposed. Studies of a Biographer, III. 30. 
 
 Better tban other kinds of celebrities, authors are 
 known to us by their works, even if they write no 
 express memoirs, in which they may naturally try to 
 put the best face on themselves, yet are not always 
 successful in hiding the warts. Sometimes the auto- 
 biographer's humour is to pose in puris naturalibus, as 
 a Cellini or a Rousseau professes to strip himself bare, 
 yet leaves some rags covering perhaps as many blem- 
 ishes as he displays. Sometimes we get a fair idea of 
 our hero from familiar letters, written in slippers and 
 night-cap, if only we could be sure that they were not 
 indirectly addressed to the public. We must not be 
 too ready to trust all that may be said about himself 
 by one whose craft is fiction, which is not the same 
 thing as falsehood. Yet as truth may be stranger 
 than fiction, so fiction is sometimes truer than truth, 
 an experience squaring with Aristotle's dictum about 
 impossible probabilities and improbable possibilities. 
 
 A poet who stuck strictly to matter of fact might 
 be pronounced by Herbert Spencer " unthinkable."
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 49 
 
 The romancer is naturally bound to be untruthful, in 
 the vulgar sense of the word. Such an honest gentle- 
 man as Walter Scott owned that he could not repeat 
 an anecdote without fitting it out with a cocked hat 
 and stick ; and when the poor author gets a job to 
 dress out liis own story, dearest of all to himself, be 
 sure he will not lose the chance of sending it abroad in 
 what finery he can command, however tattered and 
 tarnished. In estimating his claims and confessions 
 we must consider the laws of refraction, and the imper- 
 fect mirror on which he reflects his own nature ; with 
 such help it may be possible to get to the facts of the 
 case, even though distorted and blurred in his highly 
 coloured statements. 
 
 This itch for fibbing is an accusation against us, for 
 which extenuating circumstances may be pleaded. 
 Your dull honest man often speaks the truth for want 
 of imagination, or if he do make up a lie it is as like 
 as not so ill-made that nobody will be taken in by it. 
 Genius has a temptation for which allowance should 
 be conceded. All the same, a certain now neglected 
 poet says well, " I give him joy that's awkward at a 
 lie ! " The wise liar by trade does well to keep a watch 
 over his speech in hours out of business. It was said 
 of Sothern that when acting Lord Dundreary for 
 hundreds of nights, he regularly practised himself in 
 careful reading aloud that his tongue might not grow 
 crippled into a permanent stammer. So authors, 
 when they fold their wings from flight, should take 
 wholesome exercise by waddling upon stony realities. 
 An hour a day, for instance, might with advantage be 
 given to reading the reports of mining companies, the 
 speeches of candidates for parliament, or the evidence 
 of scientific experts on both sides. By some such 
 course of strenuous attention to prosaic facts, the 
 
 E
 
 50 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Muses' son could correct a propensity often detri- 
 mental to the character of his temperament. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten that there are two kinds of 
 lies, as of truths, answering to Aristotle's distinction 
 between history and poetry. The one comes straight 
 from hell ; the other brings airs from a higher quarter, 
 whence issue also true dreams through a gate of horn. 
 White lies and black lies are not to be judged with the 
 same severity. By all means hang the smiler who 
 comes with fair words on his lips and a knife hid under 
 his cloak. The schemer who sells me for ready money 
 a potentiality of growing rich which he knows to be 
 due on the Greek Calends, deserves whipping at the 
 cart-tail of public opinion. The tradesman who 
 exhibits in his window a live turtle as earnest of soup 
 to be concocted from conger eels in the back shop, 
 ought to be pilloried before all Billingsgate. But the 
 trustful youth who, beholding such an eel, brings back 
 to his cronies the report " Rejoice with me, for I have 
 seen an elephant ! " should, face the Reverend Mr. 
 Chadband, be heard with a smile as well as a frown. 
 Here is a perilous yet pardonable gift of picturesque 
 statement, a not unpraiseworthy effort to exalt common 
 and unclean things, a desire to arouse interest even at 
 the expense of matter-of-fact measurements. So too 
 may the professional seer of Gorgons and hydras and 
 chimaeras claim some benefit of clergy for his hyperboles 
 and eidola. Whole nations have the same talent 
 in some degree, those of Celtic blood, for instance, 
 that leavens the heavy dough of Saxon understanding. 
 The imaginative writer is, among his fellow-men, a sort 
 of Celt dw^elling apart upon mountains, where all hard 
 outlines become often veiled behind mists against 
 which his own shadow may loom out in magnified pro- 
 portions edged^with^brilliant haloes. We^need^not too
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 51 
 
 harshly condemn the enchanter who, in placing his 
 personality before the world, would fain make himself 
 out as he wishes to be rather than as he is. And with 
 all his pains, he himself is the most likely to be deceived, 
 he who repeats from age to age that self-knowledge 
 forms the crown of wisdom. See how ready he is to 
 believe his lead transmuted into gold by the smoky 
 crackle he takes for an alchemist's furnace ! 
 
 Self-deception comes so easy to one whose business 
 it is to deceive. Perhaps the most harmless lies of the 
 author — least harmful to himself — have been those 
 hoaxes which he has often loved to play on the public 
 — Chatterton's fabrications, and Ireland's, imitated by 
 William Harrison Ainsworth, Edgar Allan Poe's 
 balloon story, Defoe's apparition of Mrs. Veal, and so 
 forth. These are mere feats of acting that wash of! the 
 character, even though a man black himself all over 
 to play Othello. The worst of it is such stain as comes 
 to the dyer's hand, by daily dabbling in his honest 
 trade. The greatest authors appear to have most 
 aptitude for keeping clear of their own concoctions. 
 The mass of us find too many opportunities for being 
 imbued with humbug, becoming intoxicated by the 
 " exuberance of our own verbosity," practising on our 
 souls solitary vices that are ruinous to moral health. 
 
 If we wish to make others weep, we must have 
 tears in our own voice, we are told, and some of us 
 cultivate a dangerous faculty of weeping at any hour. 
 Those of us who have to make our living by it cannot 
 always afford to wait for the melting mood. If 
 natural emotion do not flow freely, we must pump it 
 up,- and a sweating job that is when the pump begins 
 to go rusty. Even when our pumps are sucking freely, 
 we get into the way of looking out for all showers that 
 will help to fill cisterns of invention. Many_^authors
 
 52 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 have been fain to confess how in crises of personal 
 agitation, under the darkest storms of fate, at the 
 very death-bed of their dear ones, they caught them- 
 selves keeping a tear-dimmed eye half open for symp- 
 toms and sensations that would make copy. " If I 
 was going to be hanged myself," confesses Thackeray, 
 " I think I should take an accurate note of my sensa- 
 tions, request to stop at some public-house on the road 
 to Tyburn, and be provided with a private room and 
 writing materials, and give an account of my state of 
 mind." Nothing is too sacred to go into a description. 
 No friend is too kind to be studied for a character, when 
 enemies are not at hand. No memory is so precious 
 but that it may be set in a sonnet. Even the tender- 
 est ties of home serve to bind up our communications 
 to the public. Victor Hugo's Contemplations were 
 over the grave of his child. Can one hear without pain 
 how Dickens caricatured his friends, and exhibited 
 the weaknesses of his father and mother, however 
 humorously ? I knew one celebrated writer who con- 
 fessed to me that his own father had sat to him as 
 villain of a novel, which he had the grace to keep back 
 from publication during the old man's life. The 
 natural emotions may even grow perverted in an 
 over-wrought heart. Landor raged against his wife 
 and children as bitterest of the many enemies he 
 made for himself. And when it comes to Sterne's 
 snivelling over a dead ass, with his back turned 
 upon wife and mother, to Rousseau's giving ex- 
 cellent counsel for mothers while carrying his own 
 babes to the Foundling, to Coleridge moralizing in 
 fine words that did not butter parsnips for his 
 family, — alas ! it too plainly appears how we have 
 this treasure of ours in earthen vessels. 
 
 Some authors seem not unaware of their own incon-
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 53 
 
 sistency. Take Alfieri, " taciturn and calm, petulant 
 and talkative by turns, my spirits always in extremes," 
 as he describes himself, and shows clearly how he 
 could be generous or selfish, idle or laborious, resentful 
 or forgiving, as the fit took him. He glorified virtue, 
 and ruined the peace of families. He denounced 
 tyranny and class -distinctions, yet once he illustrated 
 the rights of man by cutting his valet's head open with 
 a candlestick, because the poor fellow had twitched 
 his hair. He expatriated himself by way of renounc- 
 ing allegiance to the king whose uniform he continued 
 to wear as becoming him. He ardently championed 
 popular liberty and hailed the French Revolution, but 
 soon loathed the Frankenstein's monster he had helped 
 to bring forth. His works are consistently lofty and 
 austere ; but he was so conscious of his weakness that 
 he had his hair cut ludicrously short, or would make 
 his servant tie him up in a chair to keep him from going 
 out to make a fool of himself. So far his own confes- 
 sions : to one of his biographers he appears " to have 
 had no principles, good or bad, but only passions," 
 running to utter waste had not genius transfigured 
 them to noble verse. Strange alchemy of human 
 natui^e ! An idle, ill-taught schoolboy was to make 
 Greece and Rome live again on his pages. A dissi- 
 pated nobleman was to be the herald of liberty. A 
 morbid, turbulent, capricious nature was to ferment 
 with the regenerating spirit that would breathe life 
 into his motherland, dead image of beauty as it was. 
 
 Scusa i trasporti insani ; ai detti suoi 
 Non badar punto : e fuor di se. 
 
 It is in the best clothes and with the most winning 
 simper, that most authors choose to sit to themselves 
 for their own portraits. But however they may try
 
 54 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 to dissemble or carry off their own shortcomings, they 
 have a keen eye for kindred failings, and the accounts 
 they give of one another do not often err on the side 
 of flattery, though these may be no more faithful than 
 their autobiographical pictures. We need not go 
 back to the quarrelsome days of the Dunciad, nor rake 
 up the mud thrown by Decker at Ben Jonson, and by 
 iSash at Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's " Hobinol." Note, 
 for example, how Balzac shows up his fellow -craftsmen 
 in those private Lettres a V Etrangere ; and what a full- 
 length portrait of " Immortals " Alphonse Daudet 
 draws, while Zola was proclaiming Mes Haines, and 
 the Goncourt brothers leered at moral nakedness with 
 which they kept company. Recall what Thackeray 
 thought of Bulwer Lytton, and Disraeli of Thackeray, 
 when literary gentlemei^ xetorted epithets like " School- 
 miss Alfred "to " the padded man that wears the 
 stays." Our generation, indeed, has studied a re- 
 straint in the expression of such sentiments, so that it 
 is with a shock of surprise we read in current pages 
 what Dr. G. M. Gould has to say of his friend Lafcadio 
 Hearn, whose work he praises warmly for rare 
 excellencies, while describing the man as " deprived by 
 nature, by the necessities of his life, or by conscious 
 intention, of religion, of morality, scholarship, magna- 
 nimity, loyalty, character, benevolence and the other 
 constituents of personal greatness." This is quoted 
 only to show how the character of one author may 
 strike the eye of another ; for a rival embalmer of 
 Hearne's memory, Miss Bisland, shows more of the 
 induced autobiographic spirit by laying on sweeter 
 unguents. 
 
 Dr. Gould's censure seems a rare admission, since 
 our present-day convention exalts superstitiously the 
 canon De mortuis nil nisi honum. The literary world
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 56 
 
 was shocked when Swinburne laid a wreath of nettles 
 upon the grave of John Addington Symonds — mortuo 
 moriturus. Eyes were turned up when Henley, writing 
 about his dead friend R. L. Stevenson, hinted at him 
 as somewhat fallen from artistic grace since the days 
 of their Bohemian comradeship. Stevenson himself 
 is said to have written for the Encyclofcedia Britannica 
 an article on Burns that had to be suppressed as too 
 critical ; and we remember what an outcry there was 
 among perfervid Scots against Henley's plain dealing 
 with the frailties of that darling memory. More 
 recently, again, Goldwin Smith's outspoken estimates 
 of some contemporaries came with a sour relish. But 
 anyone who has access to the conversation of authors, 
 knows how it is civility rather than charity that 
 dictates many an obituary notice. 
 
 Leaving out of sight for the moment what this 
 brotherhood write of themselves or of one another, we 
 need not search far for examples how an author looks 
 to men of the world and their flunkeys. " Bon Dieu ? 
 comme les hommes de lettres sont hetes ? " exclaimed 
 Napoleon, who had a taste for rubbishy novels and 
 such gushing poetry as Ossian's. That " shrewd 
 coxcomb," Horace Walpole, author as he was himself, 
 had no desire to parade in so ragged a regiment. A 
 dandy of the day describes Sam Johnson as the " most 
 disgusting voice and person you almost ever beheld." 
 Lord Byron hated your author who was all author, 
 " in foolscap livery turned up with ink." And his 
 lordship himself would be unaware what a keen-eyed 
 critic was at his side in Edward Trelawney, who after 
 seeing a good deal of authors, lets out this account of 
 them, — to which he notes his friend Shelley as one 
 " grand exception." — " To know an author personally, 
 is but too often to destroy the illusion created by
 
 66 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 his works ; if you withdraw the veil of your idol's 
 sanctuary, and see him in his night-cap, you discover 
 a querulous old crone, a sour pedant, a supercilious 
 coxcomb, a servile tuft-hunter, a saucy snob, or, at 
 the best, an ordinary mortal. Instead of the high- 
 minded seeker after truth and abstract knowledge, 
 with a nature too refined to bear the vidgarities of life, 
 as we had imagined, we find him full of egotism and 
 vanity, and eternally fretting and fuming about 
 trifles. As a general rule, therefore, it is well to avoid 
 writers whose works amuse or delight you." ^ 
 
 jSurely it is not so bad as all that ; yet in truth your 
 man of the world has had too much opportunity for 
 forming a mean idea of authors. This is an old- 
 standing reproach against them, their attitude towards 
 the great. Plato complains of poets as too apt to be 
 tools for a tyrant ; and Homer had a keener eye for 
 the faults of Thersites than of Agamemnon. St. 
 Gregory, who spoke so prettily of Englishmen and of 
 angels, among his edifying works wrote most compli- 
 mentary letters to more than one potentate whose 
 actions he should have denounced as diabolic. Stern 
 Dante, who put Justinian in paradise above better men, 
 found in his hell an oasis for Saladin, quartered there 
 along with Julius Caesar, and other famous ancients 
 whose own poets knew of no Elysian Fields unless 
 for illustrious mortals. Here seem to be touches 
 of the same weakness as tempted Shakespeare to 
 seek a grant of arms, Scott to build a baronial hall, 
 Voltaire and Beaumarchais to fig out their bourgeois 
 
 ^ This critical observer would not have liked to hear what 
 Byron said of him — as reported by Finlay to Frances Power 
 Cobbe ; — " If we could but make Trelawney wash his hands and 
 speak the truth, we might make a gentleman of him."
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 57 
 
 names with an aristocratic particle such as Goethe 
 did not disdain at the hands of his princely patron. 
 At all events, ever since minstrels and jesters as 
 well as chaplains made part of a nobleman's house- 
 hold, nay, since Virgil and Horace sang the praise of 
 Augustus, and followed in the train of Maecenas, your 
 ill-fed son of the Muses has been somewhat in danger 
 of becoming a parasite. Spenser and Shakespeare 
 fooled Elizabeth to the top of her bent. Dryden 
 flattered Oliver, Charles and James in turn. Pope, 
 Swift, Addison and the rest liked to correspond with 
 St. James, were even proud to quarrel with ministers 
 and courtiers ; Gray hailed the cloudy " Star of 
 Brunswick " ; outspoken Johnson was civil to men of 
 family, and picked his words before the king, in whom 
 Fanny Burney could see no fault, though her small 
 pension was so hardly earned. Other surly scholars 
 have been noted as 
 
 rough to common men, 
 But honeying at the whisper of a lord. 
 
 Moore and Sheridan sat gladly at George IV's board, 
 where even Scott's clear eyes were dazzled by that 
 bloated and befouled majesty. Poet-laureates of 
 course are pledged to loyalty and laudation. But 
 also the smaller fry of authorship have often shown 
 an undue love of good society, when they can get into 
 it. " Wenham" and " Wagg " play toady to a marquis, 
 if no longer content to wait in his ante -chambers. 
 Gigadibs is proud to sit at wine with a bishop, when 
 not invited by a duke. The gentleman whose address 
 used to be Grub Street E.G. has been noted as alter- 
 nately a bit of a sloven and of a fop, but he will always 
 put on his best coat and his clean shirt for the Lord 
 Steyne's dinner table or Lady Fanny Flummery's rout.
 
 68 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 If we are to trust an enemy's caricature, Thackeray 
 himself in his salad days hankered after such 
 invitations. The cynic Carlyle, too, went willingly 
 among nobility and gentry among whom his wife, like 
 Tom Moore's, seems not to have been made at home. 
 It is the old tradition of the guild, among whom affec- 
 tations of gentility are so infectious that some authors 
 have shown themselves painfully ashamed of a humble 
 origin, ashamed even, like Congreve, of the trade that 
 brought them into society. The truest poet himself is 
 not above taking one small boon at the hand of 
 wealth and power — 
 
 " Ich singe, als der Vogel singt, 
 Der in den Zweigen wohnet, 
 Das Lied das aus der Kehle dringt, 
 Ist Lolin der reichlich lohnet ; 
 Doch darf ich bitten, bitt' ich eins; 
 Last mir den besten Becher Weins 
 In purem Golde reichen ! " 
 
 Making a drop from the pomp of chivalry to the 
 Toman bourgeois, one recalls a Fleet Street coterie — 
 long ago gone to keep company in the shades with 
 Tullus and Ancus — whose excursions from Bohemia 
 were bounded by the castle of a certain nouveau riche, 
 playing the patron of literature. He [had the mis- 
 fortune to be very deaf, and those not invited to his 
 hospitality declared it to have an amari aliquid in that 
 none of the witty guests could be seen to smile without 
 danger of finding a footman at his elbow with paper 
 and pencil on a silver salver, by which the stale jest 
 might be passed to their host. 
 
 There is something to be said in defence of this 
 apparent weakness of flattering dependence alternating 
 with touchy readiness to take offence at the Lord 
 Chesterfields and Horace Walpoleslof this world. The
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 69 
 
 author's business is to know all sorts and conditions of 
 men. It is but too easy for him to enter huts where 
 poor men lie, and the doors of the middling class are 
 often open to him ; then shall he not take his hardly- 
 won chance to spy on the manners of the rich and 
 powerful ? He feels as an exile in this world of base 
 realities, so willingly lets himself be entertained by its 
 princes, whose choicer fare he can cheat his taste into 
 taking for nectar and ambrosia. His fine ears are 
 more open than another's to the Siren strains of the 
 upper circles. His common lot having been a kind 
 of starvation, he has a natural curiosity for the opposite 
 extreme. He can so well relish the leisure, honour, 
 refinement that seldom come his way. For once to 
 drink good w^ine in a golden cup may be a temptation 
 too strong for his self-respect. His observant waiting 
 on the givers of such boons began, did it not ? in 
 honest admiration for feats of strength and courage be- 
 yond his own scope, and only in time became degraded 
 by contemplation of the good things won by such 
 qualities. At one end of the story we have the prowess 
 of Achilles and the adventures of Ulysses ; at the 
 other the ducal upholstery which made a modern 
 fairy tale for the author of Alroy. Your philosopher 
 in his tub may pride himself on making cynical 
 estimates of transitory greatness ; but the poetic gaze 
 turns readily to conspicuous figures, either looming in 
 the distance, or filling the eye close at hand. 
 
 The worst of it is when he whose gift is for fabling, 
 tells conscious lies to earn the guineas and the dinners 
 of his patron, or lashes himself up to such half-con- 
 scious lies as will be expected of him on occasions of 
 triumph or mourning. One likes Burns better when 
 among ranting cronies he is tasting the barley bree 
 that also sapped his manhood, than when he is intoxi-
 
 60 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 eating his genius into hyperboles of gratitude to a lord, 
 at whose table, on another occasion, he sat sulky for 
 want of the civil notice that seemed due to him. 
 
 The bridgegroom may forget the bride 
 Was made his wedded wife yestreen ; 
 The monarch may forget the crown 
 That on his head an hour has been ; 
 The mother may forget the child 
 That smiles sae sweetly on her knee ; 
 But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 
 And all that thou hast done for me ! 
 
 But mark this, that while the author in his hours of 
 ease would fain lie soft and fare fatly at the expense of 
 the few, when the call comes he seldom deserts the 
 cause of the many. The voice that speaks most loudly 
 through him is on the side of the people. For a 
 moment flattered by the attentions of " Yon birkie 
 called a lord," he soon remembers how " a man's a 
 man for a' that." His heart goes with the " squire 
 of low degree," who makes the right hero for his love- 
 romance. Whatever he may hope from the kings of 
 this world, he can speak for them no word but what 
 the Lord puts into his mouth ; and not Balak's house 
 full of silver and gold tempts him to curse the blessed 
 of heaven. The minstrels of Rome were no doubt 
 bound to celebrate Claudian and Fabian prowess ; but 
 from them Livy must have got so much to tell of 
 plebeian virtues. Show him any case of cruelty or 
 injustice, and the true-bred poet's manners have not 
 that repose that marks the caste of Vere de Vere. 
 When speaking from his tripod, he is bound to be on 
 the side of the angels, however in uninspred hours he 
 may flatter mortal bigwigs. Voltaire was vain, spite- 
 ful, jealous, fond of mischief and scandal, as greedy of 
 money as of court favour and renown, yet this heart-
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 61 
 
 less snob, as he might seem in many aspects, " often 
 enjoyed a pleasure dear to the better part of his nature, 
 the pleasure of vindicating innocence which had no 
 other helper — of repairing cruel wrongs — of punishing 
 tyranny in high places." Rousseau was a thief, an 
 idler, a hanger-on, a reed shaken with every wind of 
 temper, yet he stirred millions to stand up for the 
 rights of man. Another morbid mind, Cowper, helped 
 to bring contemporaries back to sane and wholesome 
 ways of nature. Coleridge left his wife and family 
 to be cared for by others, but he preached to edifica- 
 tion on many grave texts, as this, " he prayeth best 
 who loveth best." George Eliot taught an austere 
 gospel to her generation, albeit herself taking another 
 wife's husband. So the author's actions may be 
 contemptible, questionable or hateful, while yet his 
 words peal forth a high vox humana, thrilling our hearts 
 as with the music of the spheres. 
 
 The same inconsistency appears in the author's 
 relation to what is called politics, a subject as to which 
 he proves often ill-informed or indifferent on its prac- 
 tical side : sometimes, like Goethe, he is found oddly 
 lukewarm amid a glow of patriotic emotion ; but 
 again, like Scott, he blows the trumpet lustily for a 
 native land ever so stern and wild. Often his political 
 views are like Froude's, whose servant characterized 
 him as a Liberal when the Conservatives were in office, 
 and a Conservative under a Liberal government. 
 Men rather than measures master his heart to love or 
 hate : Browning and his wife were both keen Liberals, 
 yet the one extolled Louis Napoleon as extravagantly 
 as the other detested Gladstone. History is strewn 
 with examples of how the man of words wrecks 
 himself when called on for deeds. He is apt to be a 
 laudator of the Past, one of his favourite commonplaces
 
 62 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 being a loving look back at that golden age that never 
 was on sea or land, when under Saturn men lived 
 innocent, content and at peace, till death came to them 
 welcome as sleep. Yet, in spite of himself, he is moved 
 to be a prophet of the Future, picturing it with colours 
 of hope, left behind in Pandora's box for his special 
 endowment. Perhaps he is no more inconsistent 
 than other men in revolutionizing his formal opinions 
 between youth and age, as Wordsworth and Southey 
 began with dreams of fraternity and equality but 
 ended as sound adherents of John Bull's Church and 
 State. But all along he has his eye more or less 
 steadily on the best aims of the world, not on its baser 
 policies ; and he would soon fall dumb, had he not 
 good words to speak for heartening his fellows in their 
 struggle after growth in righteousness. He is a 
 dynamic rather than a static force. Yet while he utters 
 the oracles of Apollo, his own private opinions, if he 
 cherish any, may count for so little that students of 
 Shakespeare can still wrangle whether his sympathies 
 went with Catholic or Protestant, with the White 
 Rose or the Red, with the old or with the new, the 
 best likelihood, indeed, seeming to be that the refor- 
 mation that fostered his genius was looked on by him 
 rather as a stepmother to his common mood. Those 
 who knew Browning in the flesh differ as to whether 
 he were an Agnostic at heart, or truly saw " reasons 
 and reasons " for keeping his seat in chapel. Milton 
 and Dante, to be sure, make no secret of their con- 
 victions ; but so much the less were they great poets 
 as taking a side in the controversies of their time. 
 
 It is human nature to take a side, steadily or fitfully, 
 in controversies that last beyond our time ; we flock 
 together for pasture as goats or sheep, and can't even 
 play a boyish game but under some assumed colours
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 63 
 
 of red or blue. Men have a natural leaning towards 
 optimism or pessimism, turn for light to Rome or to 
 reason, are unconscious disciples of Plato or of Aris- 
 totle, hot admirers of Dickens or Thackeray, of Pope 
 or Wordsworth. It looks as if authors, for their part, 
 had a dreamy trick of playing off-side, or even kick- 
 ing for both sides as the spirit moves them ; but it is 
 the weaker side on which they kick more heartily, for 
 what in the long run is like to be the winning game. 
 A contemporary poet lays down as a fact that every 
 child is born a " little Liberal or else a little Conser- 
 vative ; " but grown men often turn out somewhat 
 childish in making a mess of their avowed principles. 
 One need not look far to see Tories catching at rash 
 innovations ; and Radicals blindly reverencing a 
 leader or a cry. A better division of human nature in 
 its attitude to progress, would be as Whats and Whys^ 
 parties that as yet make no marked figure in history, 
 though its course is regulated by their conflict. One 
 of these parties asks sedulously what is said or thought, 
 what is believed, what is done in this world ; and its 
 obedience to custom and tradition has for reward the 
 largest share of what worldly goods are going. The 
 other appears moved to ask rather why is this or that 
 said, thought, believed or done, and its portion is 
 more likely to be all sorts of ill-usage, from cutting 
 to crucifixion, at the hands of more contented contem- 
 poraries. As gifted with inquiring minds, authors are 
 almost bound to stand among the Whys, but for whom 
 we should all be savages to this day, wearing the oldest 
 patterns of tattoo and nose-rings, eating our grand- 
 fathers as a sacred duty, robbing and being robbed by 
 our neighbours as matter of course, and worshipping 
 Mumbo-Jumbo instead of Mrs. Grundy or whatever 
 other idol dominates our tribe. That pregnant ques-
 
 64 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 tion Why ? asked by reformers at their peril, leads on 
 to Why not ? then the Columbuses of the old world 
 need some imagination as well as seamanship to guide 
 and hearten them in the search for shores unseen by 
 the bodily eye. 
 
 In practical navigation, to be sure, the author often 
 shows himself a lubberly greenhorn. His mind is 
 like a top-gallant sail that catches the first breath of 
 whatever fresh wind may stir his environment ; but he 
 commonly wants the experience of everyday life and 
 affairs that qualify him to take a trick at the wheel. 
 He seldom knows how to steer for those Utopias that 
 by and by melt into a cloud ; then he readily changes 
 his hopeful mood for one of despair or helpless dis- 
 appointment. He has no patience with the tacks 
 humanity must make on its voyage to a New World. 
 His own weakness is often betrayed by the vehemence 
 with which he calls out for a strong captain to rule the 
 blatant crew — " aristocrat, democrat, autocrat, . . . 
 what care I ? " — whose first act of authority might be 
 to put talkative persons in irons. Or another temper 
 ends by lapsing into professed indifference, exclaiming 
 with Theo Gautier that he cares not whether he be 
 ruled by the sword of a Bonaparte or an umbrella as 
 bourgeois sceptre of Louis Philippe. 
 
 In our day the prevailing airs are vague stirrings 
 after socialism and democracy, coming from a quarter 
 of the compass which some take for heaven, others for 
 its antipodes. We see how those breezes catch many 
 popular writers, setting them adrift from the anchorage 
 of old faiths and conventions. We might note also 
 how they fail as pilots by taking their own mobile 
 artistic temperament for a standard of human nature, 
 and exaggerating the evils that loom so darkly over
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 65 
 
 their shifting horizon. They themselves fret under 
 monotonous drudgery ; they kick against social laws ; 
 they help themselves to other men's wives when tired 
 of their own ; but they hardly understand how the 
 average man makes the best of bad jobs, goes out 
 daily, wet or fine, to his work, and comes home to be 
 fairly content with his wife and kids, cutting his coat 
 according to his cloth, and taking life as it comes with 
 the grit and growling good-humour that hitherto have 
 been John Bull's most notable virtues. 
 
 It appears indeed as if our solid and stable national 
 character were altering, for better or worse, passing 
 from stolid homogeneity into a more heterogeneous 
 and restless state, reflected by poets and novelists who 
 are first to feel and express the change. New sym- 
 pathies awake among us, even a morbid sympathy with 
 crime as well as misfortune. Old virtues are dis- 
 credited, old lamps of life are exchanged for new ones ; 
 dammed-up faith flows into stagnant pools of super- 
 stition, where it cannot burst out in shallow eddies of 
 fanaticism ; and the main drift of such movement, as its 
 cross-currents, backwaters and over-flowings, we may 
 look for in the pages most welcome to our generation. 
 It may be but a flaw of wind that fills this or that trim 
 sail ; the sea-breeze from one quarter may shift in 
 turn to blow off the land ; the upper and the lower 
 air may stir in different directions ; swells, catspaws, 
 and ripples die out in the shadow of the craft to which 
 they give " a short uneasy motion" ; then at times 
 it seems as if all the blasts of iEolus were let wildly 
 loose for wreck and ruin ; yet the welter has a general 
 tendency that some day will be marked as the spirit 
 of our age. And, for good or evil, popular authors 
 make at least the vanes that show how the winds veer, 
 while some less popular may play the part of beacons
 
 66 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 warning us, perhaps in vain, to keep clear of wave- 
 washed rocks. 
 
 Nay more, the best authors shape as well as reflect 
 the spirit of their age. They set the course which 
 practical men must steer, sooner or later, with more 
 or less good-will. They keep the state moving from 
 ideal to ideal, leaving to clear-eyed skippers the task 
 of finding landmarks in precedent after precedent. 
 Your rough tar is better at reading the compass and 
 noting the signs of the weather ; but it takes a cloud- 
 gazing dreamer to hitch the vessel to a star. It is 
 when he undertakes to handle the ropes, or breaks 
 down after a short spell at the pump, that the dreamer 
 may not show himself a handy man. 
 
 " We live by admiration, hope and love," says a 
 great author ; and on his fellowship falls the duty of 
 feeding man's spirit, than which is no nobler office. 
 But to themselves may come a blight in handling 
 holy things as a matter of trade. Their stock consists 
 in words, ideas, emotions rather than in the facts of 
 life, with which they are often too little conversant. 
 Feeling without acting must be an unhealthy exercise. 
 I was instructed by my nurse that every tear shed 
 means a drop of blood lost, which may not be sound 
 physiology ; but had she been a psychologist, she 
 might have observed that a weak nature fatally drains 
 itself away in fine emotions, while even to the strong 
 there is danger in the artificial manufacture of senti- 
 ment, which often proves a canker on honest manli- 
 ness. 
 
 The paradox of Diderot has it that an actor should 
 not himself feel the emotions he imitates, which indeed 
 in acting would, if real, overwhelm the words of his 
 part ; yet we are told Macready played Virginia better 
 for the death of his own daughter. However this
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 67 
 
 may be with actors, it is not so with authors. It was 
 more so of old when imagination shaped statuesque 
 figures of classical clearness in line and relief, not 
 romantic pictures of light and shade lit up by coloured 
 windows rather than by open sunlight. As the 
 enthusiasm of romanticism ebbed into realism, natural- 
 ism, or however may be styled the school that looks 
 to earth rather than to heaven, authors are found 
 concerned to mirror their own moods in their views of 
 life, and do not so often find here a pleasing reflection. 
 Goethe boldly opposes classicism and romanticism as 
 health and disease, a text which seems to be thus 
 expounded by J. R. Lowell — " Modern imaginative 
 literature has become so self-conscious, and there- 
 fore so melancholy, that Art, which should be 'the 
 world's sweet inn,' whither we repair for refreshment 
 and repose, has become rather a watering-place, where 
 one's own private touch of the liver-complaint is 
 exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose 
 talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have 
 forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less 
 than of life, is learning to burn your own smoke ; 
 that the way to be original is to be healthy ; that the 
 fresh colour so delightful in all good writing, is won 
 by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk 
 atmosphere of universal sentiments ; and that to make 
 the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is 
 the test of genius." 
 
 In our time, does not genius tend too much to be 
 introspective, morbid and insincere ? The more a 
 man considers himself rather than the world around 
 him, the more he is prone to be deceived. Some of 
 our recent novelists have been very conscious of this 
 weak point in the artistic nature, so hatefully revealed, 
 for instance in Alphonse Daudet's d'Argenton, the
 
 68 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 vain, self-indulgent philanderer, crossed with an ill- 
 tempered cynic, whose motto for others is La vie rCest 
 fas un roman, though he has not the moral energy to 
 write his " Daughter of Faust " nor to practise his 
 own Credo de F Amour. Thus it is that authors help 
 to perform their own anatomy, sometimes more 
 instructively than is done in formal biographies. 
 
 It has already been pointed out how literary tomb- 
 stones erected nowadays follow a fashion of presenting 
 few but flattering epitaphs, as was by no means the 
 rule in old graveyards of reputation. Memoirs 
 seem almost bound to be complimentary, all the more 
 since, as often as not, they come to be written of men 
 still alive to correct the proofs. In our generation 
 indeed the biographer is expected to champion his 
 hero through thick and thin, while it is the way with 
 fond readers to work themselves up to such a heat 
 of admiration that they resent any attempt to dull 
 the halo of their beatified author. So I fear to stir a 
 hornets' nest in declaring that the advocatus didboli 
 would seldom find it hard to show the most beloved 
 poet at least no better than the average man ; and 
 about the greatest we have hints that they often 
 showed the defects of their qualities. 
 
 Of Homer we know nothing, except that his rival 
 fellow-citizens must have waited for some time before 
 claiming the honour due to his birthplace. Horace 
 does not care to conceal faults winked at by worldly 
 wisdom. Seneca, usurer and philosopher, wrote 
 very moral maxims while in exile, it is said, for an 
 intrigue of which the less said the better. Nero, who 
 made such havoc among contemporary authors, was 
 himself a most awful example of the artistic tempera- 
 ment. Marcus Aurelius seems an exceptional case of 
 blamelessness, unless for shortsighted indulgence to
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 69 
 
 the faults of his family. We cannot ccnsuie Dante 
 if his life's work made him lean ; but he could never 
 have been a very genial personage whom an admiring 
 contemporary describes as haughty and ungracious 
 in manners, and who owns to envy among his beset- 
 ting sins, while indeed he had some right to look down 
 on his rivals. Chaucer, on the other hand, must have 
 been only too sociable with Wives of Bath, Hosts of 
 the Tabard and such like, to get material for some 
 stories he was sorry for in the end. Shakespeare, of 
 whose inner life we glean so little, may be also guessed 
 at as keeping bad as well as good company : to be so 
 familiar with FalstafEs and Bardolphs, he must surely 
 have spent too much time in the taverns of Bankaide 
 and Stratford, even if it be not true that he died of a 
 drinking bout, after showing himself a hard creditor 
 and a faithless husband. His ill-wisher, Robert 
 Green, wrote moral warnings as well as plays and 
 " love-pamphlets," but the most edifying of his works 
 is that Repentance that on his death-bed accuses him- 
 self of inordinate drunkenness, gluttony, whoredom 
 and profanity, considerations which John Bunyan 
 took in time to whip the off ending Adam out of him. 
 Austere Milton does not seem to have commanded so 
 much domestic affection as did his Adam ; and be- 
 neath the stately swell of his organ music, we catch 
 jarring strains of controversial Billingsgate. It is an 
 ungrateful task even to suspect that the great ones of 
 old were not all we should like them to be, as to 
 remember how Villon and too many other poets down 
 to Verlaine were frank scoundrels. Carlyle, true to 
 his hero-worship, would have us bow down before 
 time-honoured idols as cast in solid metal from top 
 to toe, and understand that feet of clay are the fashion 
 of a degenerate age ; but more to be trusted seem the
 
 70 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOKS 
 
 scriptures declaring how as it was in the beginning is 
 now and ever shall be with human nature. 
 
 Alas ! the nearer we come to our literary heroes, 
 revealed in an age of not yet faded documents, the 
 clearer we see them in unheroic attitudes. Pope, poor 
 fellow, had his good points,but was spiteful and crooked 
 in mind as well as in body. Swift was a good hater 
 and a very questionable lover. The elegant Addison 
 was almost as fond of his bottle as kindly Dick Steele. 
 The moral Johnson must be owned to have been lazy, 
 greedy, slovenly and overbearing. Coleridge was a 
 moral wreck. There are queer stories to tell about 
 Hazlitt, who, in his Liber amoris, plays the eaves- 
 dropper on himself. The Rev. Charles C. Colton, 
 absentee vicar of Kew and surreptitious wine-merchant, 
 who so much edified our grandfathers by a collection 
 of sententious maxims entitled Lacon, came to con- 
 tradict the most impressive of them by his end as 
 a gambler and suicide. Chateaubriand, who wrote so 
 movingly about the genius of Christianity, did not well 
 illustrate this theme in his character. Carlyle scowled 
 at a weakness in Charles Lamb, as to which gentler 
 critics have no answer but charitable silence. Shelley — 
 but indeed we have had enough of " chatter about 
 Harriet." We may not know all the truth of Byron's 
 mystery, but we see into it so far as not to be edified 
 by the ''pageant of a bleeding heart" he dragged 
 before the public, at home and abroad, when he 
 owned to Hobhouse how his naturally quick feelings 
 had been " all absorbed." The author of Faust played 
 the devil with several Gretchens' hearts. The blame- 
 less Wordsworth gives one the impression of being too 
 self-satisfied. The one author of that period who 
 stands out as a full-blooded man, not without his 
 human weakness, but wholesome, honest and kindly
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 71 
 
 as if he were no genius, is Walter Scott, the most 
 totus, teres, rotundus statue in our gallery of literaiy 
 fame. With him too Carlyle had fault to find, who 
 began in his moorland solitude by extolling authors 
 as a modern priesthood, but, once introduced to their 
 metropolitan temple, wrote in splenetic haste, " Of all 
 the deplorables and despicables of this city and time, 
 the saddest are the literary men. ... I have hardly 
 found a man of common sense or common honesty. 
 They are the devil's own vermin." And Diogenes 
 might find failings in himself by the light of his own 
 lantern ! 
 
 We need not come down to names of our generation, 
 when I myself have laiown more than one edifying 
 author sent to prison through vulgar crime. For 
 evidence of the indictment, see such documents as 
 Disraeli the Elder's Quarrels of Authors and Calamities 
 of Authors, quarrels shown to be unduly exasperated, 
 and calamities too much the fault of those they befell, 
 farcical tragedies commented on by this voluminous 
 bookworm with a profusion of illustrative instances. 
 " What a moral paradox, but what an unquestionable 
 fact, is the wayward irritability of some of the finest 
 geniuses, which is often weak to effeminacy, and 
 capricious to childishness ! while minds of a less deli- 
 cate texture are not frayed and fretted by casual fric- 
 tions ; and plain sense with a coarser grain is sufficient 
 to keep down these aberrations of their feelings. . . . 
 Those who give so many sensations to others must 
 themselves possess an excess and a variety of feel- 
 ings." In a word they may carry too much sail, and 
 not always enough ballast. 
 
 For further illustration, the reader may search 
 Disraeli's erudite volumes. His unsparing exposure 
 of authors seems so far deficient in that he has little
 
 72 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 or nothing to say about authoresses, a word banned 
 by liteiary purists, but the thing exists and can no 
 longer be treated as a mere " curiosity of literature." 
 In his fii'mament, a woman-writer was still a rare 
 phenomenon. From the days of Sappho, hardly 
 such a meteor appears till those of the Empress 
 Eudocia, then of the Princess Anna Comnena ; and 
 ladies swimming into the ken of literary annalists up 
 to the nineteenth century are usually noticed in virtue 
 of being queens, at least duchesses or abbesses, 
 as well as scribblers. Vittoria Colonna seems the 
 first modern authoress in her own right. But since 
 Queen Margaret of Navarre, Queen Elizabeth, and 
 Queen Mary of Scots took to wiling away hours of 
 captivity by writing stories or verses, if only with a 
 diamond on a window pane, a monstrous regiment of 
 Amazons has rushed into the field, at first as single 
 spies, but now in battalions, claiming review among 
 the inky ranks. 
 
 If the present writer have followed his precursors 
 in hitherto ignoring the sexual anatomy of authors, 
 it is for want of subjects, without having recourse to 
 vivisection. Till recent days women, unless perhaps 
 in France, were not much given to be autobiographical, 
 while the accounts of them rendered by men had often 
 an effect of flickering between flattery and scandal. 
 " The pen has been in their hands !" sighs Jane Austen, 
 before whose day only a Lady Jane Grey or a Dorothy 
 Osborne here and there gives us chance disclosures of 
 maiden meditation. Mrs. Hutchinson's memoirs put 
 her husband in the foreground, before herself ; Madame 
 Roland's are bloodshot with the heat of her time ; 
 Madame de Genlis shows more of an author's weak- 
 ness in an overweening conceit of her own talents 
 and merits, less evident to her contemporaries. The
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 73 
 
 heiresses of Sappho used even to be rather ashamed 
 of their character as bluestockings, taking authorship 
 as a trait needing apology, and hushing up the sensi- 
 bilities in which they must have exceeded the lot of 
 common womanhood. Instances are wanting, then, 
 for dissection of the authoress, unless carried out on 
 fictile models like the Blanche Amory of Pendennis. 
 But now that in every newspaper we hear of the " new 
 woman" struggling to burst loose from the stays and 
 skirts that swaddled her freedom, from another genera- 
 tion we may expect a crop of memoirs that will take 
 the public for father confessor. Already, we have 
 several self-revelations of the kind from the Con- 
 tinent, such as Marie Bashkirtseff's Diary, aud Sonia 
 Kovalefsky's Souvenirs. But indeed the voluminous 
 life history of a George Sand tells us hardly more than 
 do the confessions of her many romances, reflecting 
 Sturm und Drang periods both of her own life and her 
 country's. And on our side the Channel, George 
 Eliot, for instance, has in the first part of the Mill on 
 the Floss, in her Brother and Sister sonnets, and else- 
 where, given us memoir es pour servir for an auto- 
 biography of her young days, as did Charlotte Bronte 
 in her novels. One could easily name half a dozen 
 ladies of our time, whose books are so many peepshows 
 into their vie intime. Perhaps more than one of them, 
 if they told the whole truth, might own, like Madame 
 de Stael, that they w^ould barter literary renown for the 
 commoner gift of beauty, or, like poor "L. E. L.", 
 that they found celebrity a poor exchange for domestic 
 happiness. 
 
 A singularly frank confession is presented by Mrs. 
 Lynn Linton's Christopher Kirhland, which in the form 
 of a novel sets forth the author's own autobiography, 
 doubly disguised by a change of sex. But, however
 
 74 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 she may puzzle the reader by mixing up real names 
 with aliases, a woman's heart constantly betrays 
 itself under the assumption of doublet and hose ; and 
 this half -feigned fiction makes a valuable document 
 for studying a literary career. The book deserves to 
 be better known than it is for its extraordinary picture 
 of the crowd of acquaintances among whom the 
 author fell in her youth, reformers, revolutionists, 
 freethinkers, free lovers, secularists, spiritualists, 
 fanatics of unbelief, philanderers with enthusiasm, — 
 like one Sibyl who " was a kind of palimpsest of all 
 the crazy faiths that float about the world," her 
 latest being " always her final revelation," — moral 
 Bohemians, many of whom she found not only flighty 
 and unsettled, but also thoughtful, kindly, cultivated 
 and conscientious, albeit " the ordinary theological 
 writ of the depravity of the human heart did not run 
 among them." In such society, a generation before 
 our theosophies and morbid humanitarianisms, that 
 orthodox squarson's daughter got her head and heart 
 scraped clear of the " superstitious white-wash plas- 
 tered over them," to become a dogmatist turned inside 
 out, hardened to a somewhat critical and cynical 
 temper, veined by erratic streaks of sentimentality. 
 I have a recollection of this lady that throws a flash 
 of light on her prolific authorship. In St. Peter's at 
 Rome, we were standing beside a tomb that illustrates 
 a woman's sufierings in child-birth, which seemed to 
 move her strangely. She had been expatiating on a 
 favourite subject, the faults of man : "I have tried 
 them in every relation of life — but one — and I have 
 found them false in all ! " Then she turned her head, 
 and I know not if she meant me to hear what she 
 sighed out aside — " I never had a son ! " Those who 
 knew that accomplished controversialist, whose novels
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 75 
 
 are less a holding up the mirror to nature than an 
 arguing with circumstances, those who saw how 
 heartily she tried to be a mother to another woman's 
 children, can have little doubt that had she had 
 children of her own to rear, she would have fluttered 
 less fiercely certain dovecots of her period. 
 
 Here appears a hint why the authoress is sometimes 
 not so much of an author, who, after publishing works 
 in flesh and blood, has been observed to be henceforth 
 less concerned with the writing desk than with the 
 perambulator and other motherly cares : not that 
 this rule always holds good. The male author, for 
 his part, is not always strong in the duties of a family 
 man, the reason perhaps being that his affection often 
 goes out more fondly to the creatures of his imagina- 
 tion or his labour. He has been known to leave his 
 real offspring hungry, to let his own character go 
 ragged, while he hung lovingly over the works, stunted 
 or deformed as they might be, that were produced 
 with travail of mind and spirit known only to himself. 
 Every book he brings forth he would fain have ac- 
 knowledged as the finest baby ever seen, that prodigy 
 of every-day occurrence among actual births. This 
 paternal storge, indeed, varies both in kind and in 
 degree. There are authors with whom it lasts little 
 longer than the unfledged period till the youngster 
 be out in the world to take its chance ; others, like 
 Balzac or Herbert Spencer, may all their lives hang 
 anxiously and correctingly over their mental offspring. 
 
 Among the woefullest tragedies of literary life have 
 been the death of such infants in the cradle, or their 
 overlaying by some heavy chance, as when Carlyle's 
 manuscript of a volume of the French Revolution was 
 burnt by John Stuart Mill's maidservant. Another 
 such tragic case, where a naughty schoolboy took
 
 76 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 the part of malignant fate, is shadowed out in one of 
 Farrar's school tales. Many Goths and Vandals 
 must have played Herod with luckless authors' 
 bantlings since the days when the Roman soldiers, 
 flushed by lust of destruction, burst into Archimedes' 
 study. A Niobe among modern authors appears to 
 be Sir Thomas Urquhart, translator of Rabelais, who 
 kept his manuscripts so closely under his wing as to 
 take some trunks full of them to the battlefield of 
 Worcester, where they went to light the pipes of 
 Roundhead troopers, while their parent was laid by the 
 heels in the Tower ; but Cromwell proved kinder than 
 Artemis, for he gave back one remnant, dearest of all 
 to a Scots writer, as enabling him to trace out a pedi- 
 gree that showed him one hundred and forty-third in 
 direct descent from Adam. And consider the agony 
 of those authors, who with their own hands have had 
 to stifle their darling progeny, or to stand by and see 
 it committed to the flames, to save the afilicted 
 parent from himself figuring in some auto de fe ! 
 The she-bear robbed of her cubs, the eagle defend- 
 ing its nest, the fowl brooding over its eggs, the cat 
 licking her kittens, are all emblems of the author's 
 parental fondness for the book by which he is to live 
 after death. Such love seems not always shown in pro- 
 portion to the sturdiness of the offspring ; rather the 
 puny and the deformed may be chosen for darlings. 
 Shakespeare was apparently as careless of publication 
 as of wedlock, who left a second-best bed to his wife, 
 and his plays to who would print them. He perhaps 
 valued his sonnets more, yet he could not more surely 
 have hoped immortality from " this powerful rhyme " 
 than did poor Percival Stockdale, not the only despised 
 rhymer that has believed his fame set on adamantine 
 foundations. There may be poets among us to-day
 
 THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORS 77 
 
 who bear up against contemporary neglect in fitfully 
 certain hope that their names will rise from the dead. 
 Literary memoirs are too thickly packed with warn- 
 ing examples for authors, great and small, who do not 
 always fail to lay them to heart. Their besetting 
 sins are correctable and often corrected. Many of 
 them will be found not without common sense to pick 
 their way through the world, even when they have 
 means to outsoar the " owl-winged faculty of calcu- 
 lation," as Shelley belittles it. If not by a sense of 
 awe to keep them in their right place as regards in- 
 finite greatness, they may have the luck to be schooled 
 by a sense of humour, which implies an eye for pro- 
 portion. Ill-disciplined, self-absorbed, and given to 
 deceit in the way of business as they are, we yet find 
 them after all turning out not infrequently dutiful 
 citizens, good family men, and respectable church- 
 goers in spite of all temptation to the contrary. But 
 enough has been said to mark the author as liable 
 to peculiar moral infection, so that to be a good man, 
 he would need to be more of a man than other men. 
 
 Tanto piu maligno e piu silvestro 
 
 Si fa il terren col mal seme e non colto, 
 
 Quant' egli ha piu del buon vigor terrestro.
 
 IV 
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 
 
 So much as to the anatomy of authors, as revealed 
 in their own works and by the observation of unsym- 
 pathetic critics. But rather than insist on defects, in 
 satirizing which an author may be conscious of fouUng 
 his own nest, I prefer to dwell on excuses and explana- 
 tions for the faults found in this character that in vain 
 has such a good chance of presenting itself to advant- 
 age. Let us take the blots on it one by one, and see 
 how; they may be accounted for by much dipping into 
 ink. 
 
 Mrs. Lynn Linton, who knew them both, and what 
 was thought of them in their circles, tells us that 
 Thackeray, the satirist, was the more generous, 
 unsuspicious and sympathetic, while Dickens, the 
 sentimentalist, had " a strain of hardness in his 
 nature," which certainly came out in his dealings 
 with publishers, and perhaps in his long bar- 
 gaining with this lady for Gad's Hill. Aithony 
 TroUope was an impetuous person, rather robustious 
 in his manners, and apparently very ready to make up 
 his mind ; yet how much does he dwell on heroes 
 shilly-shallying between two bundles of matrimonial 
 hay, and on the fine-drawn scruples of heroines who 
 hardly know what they would be at. Tennyson was 
 gruff, moody, somewhat coarse in his tastes, by no 
 
 78
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 79 
 
 means " faultily faultless " in a temper which yet 
 he was able to transmute into shining ingots of 
 courtesy, charity, and purity coined as verse that 
 enriches the world. His rival Browning struck chance 
 acquaintances as more a man of the world than a 
 thoughtful poet. These examples, culled from the 
 most eminent laurels of one generation, all point the 
 same way. In the reading of literary biography, 
 Walter Scott and Charles Lamb seem exceptional 
 instances of men whose books were closely akin to 
 themselves. When we turn to the sons of sister 
 Muses, we find again that the sweetest strains and the 
 finest forms may come from natures not beautiful or 
 melodious as their works : take Turner and Wagner 
 as examples. Inconsistency seems to be the most 
 common flaw in the artistic temperament. 
 
 I myself, as a kind of author for well-nigh half a 
 century, cannot but have known or known about 
 many authors in my time, not indeed of the first class ; 
 and what has struck me in most of them is how unlike 
 they were to what one might expect of them. The 
 refined poet had coarse tastes in private life. The 
 urbane essayist was apt to be rude and bumptious. 
 The humorist that tickled two continents was a bit 
 of a bore in conversation. The keen critic was a hog 
 of Epicurus' sty at table. The earnest moralist used 
 very bad language. The passionate romancer had 
 married for money. The satirist of the great was a bit 
 of a toady ; and the novelist of smart society dropped 
 her hs. The singer of a joyous life on the ocean wave 
 was sometimes afraid to cross the Channel. The 
 gusher on domestic affection bullied his wife and 
 children. The despiser of money, in print, had a 
 sharp if not always clear eye to a bargain. The 
 pensive pilgrim ,through life was ludicrously vain.
 
 80 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 The Socialist champion of horny-handed toil loved 
 champagne when he could get it, and would fain have 
 been trusted by a tailor. So, too, the writer of 
 scandalous stories might be a paterfamilias irre- 
 proachable in any suburb ; the glorifier of crime 
 worked diligently in his office hours ; the chronicler 
 of gory adventure came punctually home to tea. 
 Some authors I have met whose life seemed more in 
 keeping with their pages, but often one is disap- 
 pointed in this respect ; so that, when one admires 
 a book, one comes, after experience, to be less eager 
 for the acquaintance of its begetter, than was the 
 way in one's confident youth. Distance rather lends 
 enchantment to that view. 
 
 Can we find an apology, or at least a reason, for such 
 inconsistency ? Is it not natural that a surface hardly 
 reflects the same rays as it absorbs ? Will not a 
 reflective spirit exalt and envy the qualities it half- 
 consciously lacks ? Opposite states of feeling attract 
 each other, as the mobile and turbulent Athenians 
 looked approvingly on Spartan discipline that had 
 cost them dear. A tall man and a dumpy woman 
 feel themselves well matched. Johnson was true to 
 a " Tetty " who needed a good deal of idealizing. 
 Goethe found his affinity, or one of them, far beneath 
 him even in conventional rank. The brooding 
 Hamlet took to his heart the firm-minded Horatio. 
 Wolfe is said to have exclaimed that he would rather 
 have written Gray's " Elegy " than be the conqueror 
 of Quebec ; perhaps the poet, brooding in his draughty 
 college rooms, thought what a fine thing it might be 
 to strut a major-general. 
 
 That was a rhetorical question vainly put to 
 Maecenas : how does it come about that men, not 
 content with their own lot, are apt to hanker after
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 81 
 
 that of others ? But it is only in imagination that 
 the soldier would be a merchant, the citizen a farmer : 
 should some god appear to grant their desire off- 
 hand — licet esse heatis ! — they stand silent, they 
 shrink away, each on his beaten path. The author, 
 for his part, can prolong his dream, and with gain 
 rather than loss, if only in repairing the defects of 
 nature. More or less aware of being an Osric, it 
 pleases him well to take the robust part of a Laertes ; 
 wedded happily to a paragon of virtue, it tickles his 
 lower nature to toy unsuspected with some Fifine 
 at the fair ; liable to rheumatism and catarrh in 
 the flesh, he the more rejoices to defy the elements 
 vicariously in the person of his hardy hero ; in 
 the body being slow of speech, he has the greater 
 satisfaction in attaining eloquence on paper. We can 
 all be ourselves any day, but the maker of airy shapes 
 can be another, and often by choice takes a shape not 
 his own. 
 
 " Much he imagined : somewhat I possess ! " 
 quoth Bishop Blougram, belittling Shakespeare's life 
 in comparison with his own. But that sophistical 
 prelate's trip across the Alps might well be spoilt by 
 gout, avalanches, restive mules or what not, while our 
 poet's flights of fancy were enjoyed at his ease, and 
 after all he could settle down in the " trimmest house 
 in Stratford town," to make himself none the less 
 snug for having had towers and gorgeous palaces at 
 his will. Blougram did not forget that among the 
 many parts a poet could play in his mind's eye was the 
 bishop's own, easily exalted to a cardinal's, which 
 would be just the sort of part an unbelieving and 
 unreverenced author might choose to play as a change 
 from the vexatious realities of a garret haunted by 
 printer's devils. And of all the characters he presents, 
 
 a
 
 82 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 the one he is least acquainted with may be sometimes 
 his own real self, an amalgam of so many. 
 
 Have I not said enough to outline some reason for 
 incoherency between the man and his book ? A 
 more serious reproach against him is inconstancy in 
 his affections. The poetic nature is bound to be 
 somewhat chameleon-like, apt to change colour from 
 its surroundings. I once knew an author so much 
 wrapped in imagination that one could guess at what 
 he was about by the fashion of his dress. When he 
 went attired like Mr. Hobson Newcome in the plain, 
 solid style of a country squire, one understood him as 
 engaged on some Conservative organ, concerned to 
 defend landed property and our old institutions. 
 Again he would go decked out in all the elegancy of 
 fashion, so as to be suspected of a literary excursion 
 into smart society. But when he wore squashed 
 sombrero and loose neckgear, presenting a mixture of 
 the flamboyant and the ready-made, one made sure of 
 him as having dropped into poetry or art criticism ; 
 and one has even met him seedy and down-at-heels, as 
 if conscientiously enacting the stock part of the hack- 
 writer out of luck. This hint I leave to be enlarged 
 on by some second Sartor Resartus expanding the 
 Philosophy of Clothes. The point is that while an 
 author may not have many suits to trick himself in 
 according to his mood of the moment, it would seem 
 as if more than other men he wears his heart upon his 
 sleeve. 
 
 There is a general impression abroad that the poet 
 does not shine as husband and father, that the mistress 
 who gets the warmest sonnets addressed to her eye- 
 brow is most likely ere long to find herself neglected 
 or forsaken, that the darlings who figure as angels in 
 print run greater risk than other children of being
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 83 
 
 whipped and sent to bed on the slightest provocation. 
 Against the fine things authors have been ready to say 
 about their loves, must be balanced mean acts 
 recorded in too many scandalous cases. Burns, 
 Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt, Byron — let some Lepoi-ella 
 undertake to complete the catalogue. In the Credit 
 column, let us not forget to add up the peaceful 
 households of Wordsworth, Southey, Tennyson, and a 
 hundred more such, that could be quoted from any 
 Biographical Dictionary. Yet scientific works will 
 bear out the experiences of every kitchen-maid that 
 what kindles quickest is like to burn out soonest, 
 leaving only smudge and smoke before the duller fuel 
 has got well aglow. 
 
 To judge the unconstant author more indulgently 
 than is the practice of the Divorce Court, let us 
 remember what a tricksy sprite is this Ariel that leads 
 him so often astray. He is much the slave of moods 
 that seem to come and go at the wind's will. So long 
 as it blows steady from the west, it minds him of his 
 Jean ; but when it sits in another quarter, he can vow 
 with all his soul — 
 
 Never ranging, still unchanging 
 I adore my bonny Bell. 
 
 The south wind again may well bring to memory 
 some Mariana that in that direction sleeps forgotten 
 and wakes forlorn ; but as it shifts about, his respon- 
 sive heart becomes aware how dark and true and 
 tender is the north. Like a weathercock, he stands 
 exposed to all airs of sentiment. Love, that is the 
 common citizen's holiday delight, is a leading line of 
 the poet's stock-in-trade. He becomes apprenticed to 
 sighs and raptures, as another to tools or ledgers. 
 One of his first necessities is to find a Dulcinea, whom
 
 84 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 a glowing imagination, untempered by callow judg- 
 ment, hastens to fit with a jewelled veil and decks her 
 with charms beyond the means of prosaic wooers. 
 When Dulcinea comes home to him for better or worse, 
 familiarity soon wears out her trousseau as a goddess, 
 and the disillusioned swain may not appreciate her 
 talents as a housekeeper. Some of the most lasting, 
 at least the most long and loudly proclaimed attach- 
 ments of poets have been to ladies beyond their 
 reach, as wives of other men, or safely beatified in 
 Paradise. One can guess how, had things been 
 otherwise, Laura's sense of humour might have been 
 keyed so as to jar with her husband's, or Beatrice 
 might have tried him by her different standard of 
 sound church principles, and Astrophel's Stella might 
 have sniffed at a habit of smoking taught her swain 
 by Sir Walter Raleigh. Perhaps the author is 
 happier for wedding none but the nymphs of his 
 imagination ; and many authors have had the sense 
 to recognize how marriage is for them more of a 
 lottery than for laymen. Some, to be sure, have 
 drawn a lucky lot in a housewife of no particular 
 charm or talent beyond kindliness and common sense, 
 gifts complementary to his own, so as to cushion for 
 him the observatory from which he watches for his 
 starry Delilahs and Dulcineas. 
 
 The more eager the man of feeling is to embrace his 
 ideal bride, the more disappointed will he be when he 
 misses those airy perfections with which his own 
 imagination invested her under hawthorn shades and 
 on flowery banks with the sun in their hopeful eyes. 
 After waking from love's young dream, all wedded 
 couples have something to get over in settling down 
 together for every-day life ; but the poet has more 
 than most. The mere fact that his work lies much at
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 85 
 
 home is unfavourable to domestic harmony. Absence 
 makes the heart grow fonder, if it be only from break- 
 fast till dinner-time. The cares of shop or office 
 sharpen a man's appetite for the welcome that waits 
 him at that bower where a bride's love may be whetted 
 in counting the hours till his train from the city. 
 Thus Adam and Eve wisely agreed to divide their 
 labours — 
 
 For solitude sometimes is best society. 
 And short retirement urges sweet return. 
 
 This Darby's work lies a good deal within his own 
 doors ; and perhaps it is as well for Joan not to see 
 too much of her husband at his business. She has a 
 general licence to be inconstant, coy and hard to 
 please ; but the nature of this man's occupation goes 
 to set his nerves on edge and to wring his brow with 
 megrims not always medicable by the gentlest minis- 
 tering angel. His dream of caverns measureless to 
 man may be shattered by the want of a button on his 
 shirt, or his glimpse of an Abyssinian maid playing on a 
 dulcimer vanishes beyond recall at the rate-collector's 
 knock. Just as he has caught his rhyme, he is called 
 away to study a rash on baby's arm ; the fount of 
 imagination may be tapped by the chill actuality of a 
 leaking roof or befouled by a smoky chimney. Sheet 
 after sheet of copy is flowing from his fountain pen, 
 till he has at last got the hero on his knees to pour an 
 impassioned appeal to Angelica, when the Angelica 
 of real life opens the door to ask if it shall be leg of 
 mutton or loin of veal — " Aroint thee witch ! " 
 
 As I was carving images from the clouds 
 
 And tinting them with soft ethereal dyes 
 
 Pressed from the pulp of dreams, one comes, and cries : — 
 
 " Forbear ! " and all my heaven with gloom enshrouds.
 
 86 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 And when baby after baby enlivens his home, it may 
 echo with carols and choruses that cannot fetch a 
 price per thousand yells to pay the doctor. Pity the 
 poor author whose idyll must be worked out upon a 
 homespun tapestry, and who is sometimes tempted to 
 try a palimpsest on a pattern of which he has grown 
 weary ! It cannot be denied that authors are apt to 
 become selfish. They have to spin their webs much 
 out of themselves ; then the fly entangled in this 
 precarious network is like to be less of a mate than 
 a victim. Hence many tears published as the story 
 of Elle et Lui, to which may be retorted the tale of 
 Lui et Elle.^ 
 
 Sappho seems to have been more fortunate than 
 
 ^ So far I had written at a venture of impressions, when I had 
 the luck to read a magazine article by Mr. Sidney Low, who 
 has taken the trouble to work out the question in figures. He 
 enumerates some seventy of our distinguished authors, from 
 Shakespeare to William Morris, as to whom can be stated more or 
 less certainly their " condition as to marriage." Among them 
 he finds that twenty-five are not known to have married ; twenty- 
 three committed matrimony without making happy homes ; and 
 only a score, giving two or three cases the benefit of a doubt, 
 " lived in ordinary content and comfort with their wives." The 
 last head might have been added to, had he taken into account 
 American authors, or subtracted from by calculations made across 
 the English Channel ; but the other two would contain a good many 
 women writers, left out of his list. As a practical cause of so much 
 domestic unhappiness, he blames the " literary habit " rather than 
 the " Hterary temperament " — your author is too much " about 
 the house." Had Carlyle had to be out of the way from ten to 
 four in an office, he and his wife might not have " got on one 
 another's nerves." This considerate writer also anticipates one of 
 my suggestions : " not all wives would resist interrupting the com- 
 position of an epic by deferring till the late evening the announce- 
 ment that the cook was drunk, or that the kitchen boiler had 
 burst ; and not all authors would accept the interruption in the 
 ri^t spirit."
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 87 
 
 Socrates, in that it did not come to a marriage with the 
 commonplace, unresponsive ferryman whom she 
 idealized so imaginatively, for his sake, if tales be true, 
 snubbing the more distinguished suitors that may 
 have revenged themselves on her coldness by 
 tainting her with unnatural affection. Yet, had she 
 made a match of it with Alcaeus, might she not all 
 the same have taken that fatal leap in which her 
 example has been followed by how many an unmusical 
 maid ? The conditions, to be sure, seem not so 
 unfavourable in the case of an authoress who gives 
 her hand to a fellow-author. This case, apparently 
 somewhat rare, suggests a happy union of interests 
 as well as souls, in the notable example of the Brown- 
 ings, both, indeed, personalities of blood and judg- 
 ment so well commingled as not to make pipes for 
 fortune's finger to sound what stop she pleased. 
 One thinks also of Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, of the 
 Howitts, of the Cowden Clarkes. As for mortals 
 married to a Muse, I incline from personal observation, 
 but without statistics, to credit them with a frequently 
 steadfast attitude of admiration for the divinity that 
 may bring a valuable asset into the matrimonial 
 settlement. Poor " L.E.L.", George Sand, and Mrs. 
 Lynn Linton rise in mind as leading instances to the 
 contrary ; but one has sometimes been touched, now 
 and then bored, by faithful marital worship of a not 
 always appreciated genius, seeming to make her 
 Tithonus, too, immortal with a kiss, so that the 
 earth-born husband was well pleased to be known 
 as henchman of his wife, to fetch and carry for her 
 gladly all their lives, to advertise her in season and 
 out, and jealously to guard her tripod from draughts, 
 duns or other disturbing visitors. On the other hand, 
 I have known more than one author spoilt by a
 
 88 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 wife whose adulation made too congenial society for 
 him, petting him up into a futile hermit. 
 
 Even the politest ordinary visitors, take notice, may 
 be moths and cankers of this life. The author's 
 house is his office, as well-meaning friends forget when 
 they drop in just to see how he is getting on. There 
 are authors who have to spend an hour or two in 
 getting up steam before their pistons and wheels of 
 imagination will work freely ; then all that time may 
 be wasted by an interruption of three minutes. Not 
 every historian can tranquilly pursue his task, like 
 Dr. Arnold, with his youngsters chattering and 
 gambolling about him. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, as a 
 novelist, appears to have had the same happy faculty. 
 I forget the name of an exceptional author that 
 could best cloister his mind amid an uproar. Was it 
 not Charles Maturin that used to stick a wafer on his 
 forehead as a sign of his being in the clouds and not to 
 be spoken to ? I have seen a would-be genius staring 
 up to the ceiling for an hour or so, all his well-schooled 
 family sitting silently around, and the visitor, 
 too, was expected to look on in hushed reverence — 
 joBUum hdbet in cornu ! I once knew a voluminous 
 author who, living ten miles out of London, hired a 
 room in town for his writing, but would not tell me 
 where : if I understood him aright, not even his own 
 household was trusted with the clue to this labyrinth. 
 
 There seems some want of economy in that the 
 hermits of old had not means, taste, or encouragement 
 for turning their abundant leisure to account as 
 authors. The common doom of this penance is 
 solitary confinement. " The man of letters," says 
 Froude, " lives alone, thinks alone, works alone. He 
 must listen to his own mind, for no other mind can 
 help him. He requires correction as others do ; but
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 89 
 
 he must be his own schoolmaster. His peculiarities 
 are part of his originality, and may not be eradicated." 
 So the poor man has some reason for his aloofness 
 from a chattering world, if he is to help it to chatter. 
 What with his sedentary habits and his keen nerves, 
 he is very apt to have a bad temper, and needs a 
 " growlery " in which to cage himself when the wind is 
 in the east, like Dickens' "Boy thorn " — said to have 
 been modelled on a famous author. We have seen 
 Alfieri's confessions as to his fits of fury. Ugo 
 Foscolo, we are told, used literally to tear his hair and 
 fling the pieces about the room, when he had been 
 beaten at chess. Such want of self-restraint seems 
 an inheritance from the greatest of their line, for 
 Boccaccio describes the austere Dante as provoked to 
 throw stones at mocking children. But we need not 
 go to excitable Latin peoples for examples of a weak- 
 ness too often displayed by stodgy British authors, 
 when matters do not turn out to their mind. 
 
 By fits and starts, though, the author may prove 
 boisterously or effusively sociable, flying from himself 
 and his airy fancies to rub up with real flesh and 
 blood, sometimes in vulgar revelry, though those 
 there be that like Antseus draw fresh strength rather 
 from the bosom of their mother-earth. These latter 
 may be called the temperate authors ; others are, or 
 have been more ready to mix their Helicon with less 
 ethereal liquors. Even in our decent day there are 
 poets who too much haunt the shrines of Bacchus and 
 Ceres. Our late laureate, de facto if not de jure, made 
 a daily pilgrimage to a public-house on Wimbledon 
 Common. I remember a very diligent litterateur who 
 kept his den with notable regularity, but once a week 
 punctually treated himself to a sort of devil's Sabbath, 
 taking an excur&i<m into town with frequent halts,
 
 90 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 of such result that his friends described these holidays 
 as " going on the war path." One inclines to suppose, 
 without statistics, that the weakness hinted at is 
 more common among journalists than real authors. 
 I have put the point to an experienced adventurer in 
 Fleet Street, who rejects my suspicion with the 
 cryptic remark, " He would be fired " — in which this 
 ready writer used more classic English than he perhaps 
 knew, quoting Shakespeare's sonnet to wit — 
 
 'rill my bad angel fire my good one out. 
 
 One has known journalists who were often " fired," 
 yet could rise from their ashes like the tormented 
 souls in Dante's Malebolge. Another authority 
 informs us of a revolution in the morals and manners 
 of Fleet Street, come about in the last dozen years. 
 The baser sort of pressmen, at least, till lately clung 
 fondlier to the rites of a Bohemianism that had debt 
 and drink as its sacraments. The strain on the news- 
 paper man is more constant ; and he has more 
 pressing temptation to gear up his machinery by 
 applications of fusel oil. What a wear and tear is 
 that of the mind bound to feed the looms and shuttles 
 of the daily press, by day or night, without the glow 
 of interest or novelty to cheer a monotonous task ! 
 The solitary craftsman, doing work that delights him, 
 at his own hours, taking his time to touch and retouch, 
 has a better chance of despising artificial stimulants. 
 But the lordliest poet, too, may come to rot in the 
 dungeons of that false enchanter, the Duessa that so 
 fatally imitates Fidessa's fitful inspiration. It proves 
 so easy to emend one's life with what for the moment 
 patches a ragged and threadbare imagination. Here 
 is a glass to make the world's outlines clearer and 
 brighter to an eye dulled over ink and paper. All
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 91 
 
 the associations of wine are romantic ; and how well 
 it has been advertised by the poets ! Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes— who in his festive Ode as revised by a 
 Temperance Society, has given us " backward mut- 
 terings of the spell reversed " — shows how it takes a 
 poet to bring out all the flavour of wine, that indeed 
 may flush the dullest mind with an evanescent glow. 
 
 Beneath these waves of crimson lie, 
 In rosy fetters prisoned fast, 
 Those flitting shapes that never die, 
 The swift-winged visions of the past 
 Kiss but the crystal's mystic rim, 
 Each shadow rends its flowery chain, 
 Springs in a bubble from its brim. 
 And walks the chambers of the brain. 
 
 In the consulship of Plancus, I dealt with a poet as 
 wine merchant, Sydney Dobell, to wit, who at Chelten- 
 ham carried on this prosaic business along with that 
 of a Coryphaeus in the so-called " spasmodic school " 
 of poetry, turned into such ridicule by the author of 
 Firmilian. In his double character, Dobell made a 
 speciality of classical wines : it was doubtless scandal 
 that represented a consignment of these exotic brands 
 as delivered at the back door in the solid form of 
 English apples. I confess to having cultivated a 
 sympathetic taste for his " Hymettus " and " Faler- 
 nian", not approved by more mature judgment. 
 Horace's favourite tipple, if I remember right, tasted 
 not unhke Australian Burgundy, and had so much 
 body that one did ill to quaff it, unmixed, in true 
 heroic measure ; but the wine of Hymettus, once 
 uncorked, went sour so soon that it invited to drink 
 deep or taste not that Pierian spring. Since then 
 wider experience has taught me that Greek wines 
 often smack of resin, and that those of Italy, as we
 
 92 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 get them, are not always pure juice of the grape. But 
 all vintages of the sunny south bring a bouquet of 
 sentiment exhaled from lyric and idyllic allusion — 
 
 Tasting of Flora and the country green, 
 Dance and Proven9al song and sunburnt mirth. 
 
 The coarser fumes of John Barleycorn appeal not less 
 flatteringly to patriotic or traditional chords strummed 
 on by famous writers ; and I know a country where 
 one native spirit has been almost consecrated by 
 genius. 
 
 Wi' tippeny, we fear nae evil, 
 Wi' usquebae, we'll face the devil ! 
 
 The devil, alas ! is not so Hghtly to be faced. For 
 my part I may not take a Pharisaical view of his 
 victims to this dear delusion. I confess to having 
 drunk good ale, like a jolly post-boy, even though it 
 did not agree with me, at the instigation of Kingsley 
 and Borrow ; but before imagination tempted me far 
 on that slippery path I was brought up with a round 
 turn by an inward monitor that lassoes one's con- 
 science in the lithic acid diathesis. If ever I were 
 tempted thus, I should have eloquent advocacy for 
 temperance at hand in the recalling of how often, 
 during half a century of converse with men of the 
 facile " artistic temperament," I have seen noble 
 spirits adulterated, clear minds clouded, and strong 
 hearts shattered by a curse that insinuates itself in the 
 guise of a blessing. Many well-rigged lives go to 
 wreck beyond repair on that reef hidden beneath such 
 sparkling waves ; while others, more happy, are 
 hailed by well-wishers as staggering off to put about, 
 and stop their leak, and spread their sails to another 
 wind that brings them after all safe and sound to port.
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 93 
 
 A generation ago, an old friend of mine, William 
 Sawyer, then well known in Fleet Street and on the 
 lower slopes of Parnassus, told me how his father had 
 taken him to the studio of an artist, whom they found 
 in a state of intoxication that seemed chronic. As 
 they came away, the careful father told his boy that 
 he had shown him this man as a Helot, by way of 
 beacon against wasting rich talents and bright 
 prospects on a vice which then seemed like to cut 
 short his life. The artist was George Cruickshank, 
 who lived for two generations more, to be famous as 
 a fanatical champion against his old enemy, " the 
 Bottle " ! 
 
 Such an artist, one supposes, has a better chance of 
 pulling himself up on this smooth descent to Avernus, 
 since intemperance brings swifter and more signal 
 ruin to one whose hand must be steady as well as his 
 head. Literature offers too many warning cases 
 like that of Edgar Allan Poe, or of " bright, broken 
 Maginn." But if the author has often fraternized 
 with an enemy that would steal away his brains, let us 
 remember how little may go to his head, if taken on an 
 empty stomach. Even a dose of flattery will intoxi- 
 cate his responsive nature. And as to the fatal habit 
 to which the like of him has too often given way, I 
 would again quote wise words from a favourite author 
 of mine, who was at once poet and physician. 
 
 The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic ; 
 we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for 
 the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus 
 the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming. 
 If mind and body were both healthy, and had food enough and 
 fair play, I doubt whether any man would be more temperate 
 than the imaginative classes. But body and mind often flag, — 
 perhaps they are ill-made to begin with, under-fed with bread or 
 ideas, overworked, or abused in some way. The automatic action
 
 94 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 by which genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only one 
 thing which can rouse the machine ; not will — that cannot reach 
 it ; nothing but a ruinous agent, which hurries the wheels awhile, 
 and soon eats out the heart of the mechanism. The dreaming 
 faculties are always the dangerous ones, because their mode of 
 action can be imitated by artificial excitement ; the reasoning 
 ones are safe, because they imply continued voluntary efiort. 
 (0. W. Holmes, Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.) 
 
 Enough of a weakness less often depicted by the 
 pencil than by the pen, as in the most tragic of 
 Trollope's Editor's Tales. Gormandizing seems not 
 such a common snare of this temperament, being here 
 contra -indicated, as doctors say, by feeble stomachs 
 and lean purses. Authors, who more often have 
 Daniel's pulse for their daily portion, are seldom 
 unwilling on occasion to sit at good men's feasts ; 
 but food does not inspire them like wine. Homer, 
 to be sure, can gloat over hecatombs and the ensuing 
 " equal banquets ; " but Circe's island smiles not for 
 the modern poet's frugal fancy. He chooses rather to 
 celebrate such cates as the " savoury fruits " and 
 " dulcet creams " which Eve set before that " affable 
 archangel." The romancers are no milksops, yet 
 their tables do not often groan under more savoury 
 dishes than barons of beef and venison pasties. There 
 is an exceptional amount of choice eating and drinking 
 in Peacock's lively novels ; and Dickens keeps Christ- 
 mas with much good cheer. As for those Gargantuan 
 suppers of the Nodes Amhrosiance, they may be 
 taken as largely stage-banquets. Christopher North, 
 in the flesh, came to penitential abstinence in his latter 
 days. One of the last of that crew of revellers was 
 his son-in-law, Aytoun, who wooed and won a bride 
 labelled by her father " with the author's compli- 
 ments." I pointed to him a little way back as the 
 pseudonymous author of Firmilian ; and I might
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 95 
 
 have said that he was a preceptor of my youth, when 
 he appeared a monument of a more convivial genera- 
 tion. Among fellow-students were the late King 
 Edward and his brother Prince Alfred, in whose time 
 a wicked and probably false rumour passed among 
 us youngsters, that our Epicurean professor, being 
 bidden to an evening with his princely pupils, fasted 
 all day to relish the feast the more royally, but at 
 the palace was regaled with tea and bread and 
 butter. 
 
 Another of my instructors was the genial Greek 
 professor, who scored off his impudent disciples when 
 he, having chalked up the notice " Professor Blackie 
 cannot meet his classes to-day," one of them rrbbed 
 out a letter, leaving the word lasses till the ready-witted 
 senior, with a whisk of his plaid, turned it to asses. 
 I could tell less well-worn stories of that scholar and 
 poet, more clearly illustrating the freaks of genius, as 
 for instance how one day in reading with his class 
 some chorus from a Greek tragedy, he astonished us 
 by breaking out — " Poor stuff this ! — I once wrote a 
 translation of it, that was better than the original. 
 WTiat are you making that noise about — it was much 
 better, as you shall hear ! " Thereon he dived off the 
 platform into his sanctum, brought back the book, and 
 the rest of the hour was passed, not ungratefully to 
 idle Grecians, in reciting his own verses. Blackie 
 had his weaknesses, but he shone among authors as 
 following Aristotle's virtue of a mean in the enjoyment 
 of good cheer ; also as showing the classical wisdom of 
 self-knowledge when he described himself as " an 
 excitable gentleman of such agility of limb, such 
 eccentricity of sentiment, such explosiveness of 
 passion, and such volubility of tongue." 
 
 Blackie kept the tradition of the elders only in
 
 96 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 flowing locks like " Christoplier North's," and tke 
 Ettrick Shepherd-like plaid in which he draped his 
 customary suit of black. His thin and smooth-shaved 
 face had rather an ascetic effect : "a beard does not 
 suit my style of beauty " he informed his class. But 
 to one of his fellow-professors, fate had been spitefully 
 unfair. This was a reverend signor, grave and godly, 
 as befitted the subject of his prelections, kindly and 
 genial, too, while temperate in all things, yet it must 
 have been a thorn in his flesh that he displayed a 
 nose like Bardolph's to stir misconceptions in those 
 who knew him not. By his day, Bacchanalian rites 
 no longer seemed becoming in professors of Moral 
 Philosophy and the like, while they were still honoured 
 among a band of editors and authors, whose names are 
 not yet forgotten in Edinburgh, nor always in a wider 
 sphere. Of their revels in latter day " Noctes," 
 I could tell some queer stories, but " not before Mrs. 
 Boffin." One of them, a man who made his mark 
 on the world successively as quarry man, preacher, 
 professor, able-editor and member of parliament, has 
 left a fragment of autobiography, in which, recording 
 the first time he tasted whisky, he drily adds a 
 reflection that it would have been better for him 
 had this been the last time. 
 
 Quo musa tendis ? I had been discussing the 
 creature comforts of authors, when thus gone astray 
 into mere anecdotage. But another reminiscence 
 crops up to the purpose, how forty years ago or 
 more I sat a fellow guest with R. H. Home — the 
 poet who published his epic Orion at the price of a 
 farthing, as a practical jest on a long-eared public — 
 and how with secret scorn I heard him expatiate on 
 delicate flavours of choice tea, a beverage then known 
 to me only as the rank infusion that seemed fit for
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 97 
 
 women, and for children, when well sweetened. I 
 have changed my mind and my taste since then, and 
 know what Home meant by denouncing the cup of 
 that day as good neither to cheer nor inebriate. 
 Many authors have taken kindly to tea, as to the coffee 
 that at one time baited their common places of resort. 
 As for tobacco, one need hardly say how dear it is to a 
 race that loves to have its head in a cloud, and is not 
 averse to an excuse for idleness. In our generation, 
 princes have backed poets to bring into fashion this 
 gentle vice. The finest of fine ladies would no longer 
 affect such ignorance as is shown, in one of Robertson's 
 comedies, by the hostess of a Bohemian author when 
 he drops a pipe in her drawing-room, and the footman 
 is rung for to sweep it away. Laurence Oliphant 
 has the credit of introducing cigarettes among us 
 after the Crimean war that brought England in rude 
 touch with the near East. I saw a play of Robertson's 
 the other day, which had that war for its date, but in 
 which all the gentlemen smoked freely before ladies, 
 unconscious of their anachronism. Actors seem to 
 take cigarettes for a grace of elegant life, while 
 authors, I think, are more at home wih pipes : they 
 certainly cannot often afford cigars. The first time 
 I ventured to appear before my father with a cigar in 
 my mouth, I came delicately, like Agag, not quite 
 knowing what he might say of it ; but all this old 
 cigar-smoker said was — " I should advise you to take to 
 a pipe, which does not cost so much and you will like 
 it just as well " — advice which I hand on to prudent 
 youth. 
 
 But enough of such a smoke-dried subject ! If we 
 are to linger over confessions of opium-eaters, and 
 the slavery of other strange stimulants, this apology 
 for authors may read too much like an accusation. It 
 
 H
 
 98 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 seems a painful fact that the working of the imagin- 
 ative faculty may sometimes depend on throwing 
 wholesome nature out of gear, as in Schiller's case by 
 wine, and in Balzac's by the coffee which Voltaire's 
 long life showed to be at least for him a slow poison. 
 Schiller is also understood to have been strangely 
 stimulated by the smell of rotten apples. An 
 artist in another sort sought to provoke nightmare 
 fancy by supping on pork chops. Byron stooped to 
 gin ; and he can tell how soon he ran through his 
 noble birthright in feverish wooings of the Muse. 
 
 There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away, 
 When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay ; 
 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek alone the blush, which fades 
 
 so fast 
 But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past. 
 
 The author perhaps takes to smoking as a sociable 
 carrying-off of his silence in company, where he 
 has often less to say than might be looked for. 
 " The conversation of a poet is that of a man of sense, 
 while his actions are those of a fool," rashly quoth 
 Goldsmith, of whom it was said that he " wrote like 
 an angel but talked like poor Poll." Was it Johnson, 
 or who ? said that a genius might be able to draw for 
 a thousand pounds, yet not have small change in his 
 pocket. Many eloquent writers have been noticed 
 as unready or stammering in talk ; some have even 
 passed for glum and sullen ; a common case is being 
 liable to frosts of silence, thawed easily by genial 
 voices. Perhaps if they kept much company with 
 other authors, they had learned to store their good 
 things in petto, else in danger of seeding for another 
 man's garden. Perhaps they sit tired of giving out, 
 willing rather to take in. On the other hand it has 
 been noted of brilliant conversationalists that their
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 99 
 
 sparkle may disappear when they try to fix it on 
 paper. Macaulay seems an exception, and so was 
 Sydney Smith, who said of him that he talked like 
 a " book in breeches." But no rule can be laid down 
 for relation between the fluency of voice and pen. 
 Sometimes grave and thoughtful authors have been 
 noticed as chattering like magpies in their hours of 
 ease ; while skittish humorists may prove more apt 
 to hold their tongues. The comic Muse is not always 
 a jovial companion ; and he who stirs laughter in 
 others may be as heavy of heart as that clown recom- 
 mended by a physician to take a tonic in his own 
 performances. 
 
 Whether they shine in company or no, authors have 
 always been much seen at public places, gymnasiums, 
 forums, taverns, coffee-houses, tobacco -parliaments, 
 Vauxhall Gardens, clubs and so forth ; then the 
 inconsiderate are apt to set them down as an idle 
 crew. The creator of airy nothings, indeed, cannot 
 be always at his desk. His work must often be done 
 by spasms, sometimes by half-unconscious processes 
 that ripen through hours of careless gossip as well as 
 in lonely idle saunterings. 
 
 The Muse, no poet ever found her, 
 Till by himself he learned to wander 
 Adown some trotting burn's meander 
 An' no think lang. 
 
 The more delicate his craftsmanship, the more such a 
 one depends on times and seasons for plucking his 
 flowers with the dew on them, or catching at shy 
 fancies that flit by tender shades of twilight. In 
 broad daylight, he may pursue his ideal in vain, but 
 no sooner does he lie down to rest than he finds it 
 clasped in his arms. For hours and days, his mind
 
 100 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 blots and scratches like an ill-working stilograph ; 
 then of a sudden his thoughts come flowing faster 
 than they can be set on paper. The muddy dribble 
 of to-day becomes to-morrow the Nile flood rushing 
 from unseen sources, that may flow by before he can 
 dam it up and turn it on to his thirsty fields. He may 
 hunt for weeks after some elusive shape of fancy, till 
 lo ! all unawares he finds it full blown to his hand, 
 suddenly revealed like an evening primrose. The 
 moral is that the prudent author should study his 
 means and opportunities, using up uninspired hours 
 for the more mechanical parts of his work, as Rousseau, 
 by way of travail de manoeuvre, copied music, and 
 Spinoza polished optical glasses for a livelihood he 
 could not make out of lenses for other men's minds. 
 Any experienced servant of the Muses can learn how 
 to take the cream off his thoughts, and set aside the 
 skim milk for marketable uses. Southey boasted his 
 ability to turn from one task to another, letting his 
 various faculties lie fallow in rotation, and so fully 
 filling up a long working day with different subjects 
 that it might well be asked when he had time to think. 
 Wordsworth composed verses in walking to set them 
 down at leisure by the fireside, as Milton rolled out 
 long-linked harmonies in his mind to wait the chance 
 of an amanuensis. That counsel of perfection, indeed, 
 implies a well-breathed memory which is not always 
 the imaginative mind's strong point. Is it possible 
 that a verse which has moved generations of hearts, 
 a thought that still sparkles like a jewel on the 
 finger of time, was once in its chrysalis state pencilled 
 on a poet's shirt cuff, or pocketed in a knot on his 
 handkerchief ! 
 
 Now if any man of so-called business accuses the 
 author as idle, has he ever considered what a hard
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 101 
 
 slavery it is to be one's own master ? Other sons of 
 Adam are driven to their tasks, so made easier ; they 
 have to keep hours, to catch trains, to copy what is 
 prescribed them, to sell what is asked for, to see 
 patients and clients who will not be kept waiting. 
 The author, for the most part, is left to put his own 
 machinery in motion, and can turn the steam off and 
 on when and how he pleases. He has no employer, 
 except the public, who as often as not will readily 
 forgive him for being idle ; he has no assistants, as a 
 rule, though Dumas, who at the worst must have been 
 a monster of industry, is said to have had a good deal 
 of work washed in for him by mercenary hands, when 
 it has been calculated that the mere handwriting of 
 his countless tomes was too much for the waking hours 
 of a lifetime. No boy in buttons can be trusted to 
 open one's door to the Muses, if they kindly call. 
 Early or late, the author has to catch his Pegasus, 
 perhaps by shaking a publisher's sieve of oats in its 
 restive ear, to saddle and bridle it for himself, before 
 he can ride to market with his fragile wares. Bellero- 
 phon, it will be remembered, had experience how 
 hard this winged steed always was to mount, till he 
 got a leg up from Athene. Pegasus may prove par- 
 ticularly hard to catch after being out at grass too 
 long. Only when they are both young and fresh does 
 his mount run neighing to meet the poet. And the 
 sorriest jade of a Pegasus may be most ready to kick 
 up its heels, when its unmasterful master has a head- 
 ache after sitting up too late the night before — but 
 nay, that is hardly so in all cases, for rude health and 
 sound sleep seem not always favourable to the hectic 
 fever he counts as inspiration. Then, once set on the 
 back of his more or less mettled steed, after a prelude 
 of shying and jibbing, the author may whip and spur
 
 102 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 it so furiously, that the half-starved beast comes home 
 foundered or broken-winded ; and his reckless rider 
 has for a time to content himself with pedestrian 
 paces. 
 
 Dr. Johnson declared that any man could write if 
 he only sat down to it doggedly ; but that great bear, 
 after he might suck his paws on a pension, did not 
 much illustrate his own doctrine. The outside public, 
 for its part, rather sniffs at a genius setting itself up 
 above the old rule about invita Minerva. Anthony 
 Trollope in his autobiography confessed to business- 
 like methods of industry, which appear to have cost 
 him much of his favour with novel-readers. Yet they 
 should have considered how the more spirited and 
 high-paced Scott, also, put himself into regular harness 
 to break the back of the day's work before breakfast. 
 Thackeray, on the other hand, seems to have dawdled 
 over his work, forced to bring it up with a rush at the 
 last moment. Milton thought he could woo the Muse 
 to advantage only in winter. Some poets, on the 
 contrary, sing their best with the birds in spring, while 
 Rousseau, for his part, found his imagination provoked 
 by dull surroundings, moins riant quand tout rit autour 
 de moi, so could paint blossoms by the fireside, as 
 Moore is said to have been stimulated by an English 
 winter for the glowing scenery of Lalla Rookh. Some 
 insurgents against nature are most wide-awake when 
 they ought to be in bed ; others keep regular hours, like 
 Kant. One might expect to find Harriet Martineau 
 in the latter class ; but I have talked to a bucolic 
 neighbour of hers who was scandalized to see her 
 roaming the hills at night. Some seem most readily 
 haunted by ideas in the dark ; perhaps, like lazy 
 James Thomson, write their descriptions of sunrise 
 snug under the blankets. Milton and Alfieri were
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 103 
 
 inspired by music as De Quiney by opium. Some put 
 their best foot foremost in a panting spurt, while some 
 cover more ground at a steady tramp, or a careful 
 crawl. Zola, like Trollope, set himself a daily task, 
 so many pages of so many words. Tarn o'Shanter is 
 said to have been dashed oft" in a day or so, while Sam 
 Rogers hung over his highly veneered ver.ies for the 
 Horatian nine years. Flaubert might have picked 
 out words for a cancelled paragraph or so in the time 
 it took Harrison Ainsworth to spur Dick Turpin's ride 
 to York, a hundred pages done at a heat in hardly 
 more hours than he gives for that fabulous exploit. 
 Some writers feel miserable while not at work ; others 
 require long intervals of hibernation, in which their 
 genius lives on its own fat. Men differ in such habits ; 
 but it were a wholesome rule for young authors not to 
 lay the blame of their own idleness on coy Minerva's 
 back. 
 
 The creative mind has its cryptic processes as well 
 as its not always forecastable seasons for budding, 
 flowering and seeding. There have been authors who 
 persuaded themselves that they could not write except 
 with certain implements, in certain attitudes, even in 
 certain costumes. There are many who cannot spin 
 a verse or a paragraph unless pen in hand. Goldsmith 
 tried dictation, but gave it up in despair, and dismissed 
 his amanuensis with a guinea. But I knew an indus- 
 trious story-teller of our time who kept two shorthand 
 writers at work, one up and the other down. Some 
 sons of Apollo are so fortunate as to be able to pour 
 forth their thoughts through a type-writer, as easily as 
 Orpheus extemporizing on his lyre. Some flounder to 
 firm clearness over a bog of scrawlings and blottings ; 
 others, like Scott and Shakespeare, seldom blot a line 
 of their manuscript. Some win to land not without
 
 104 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 struggling in the breakers of type, a feat little admired 
 by their publishers. Before the day of proof sheets, 
 Virgil told of himself that he brought forth his verses 
 like rough bear-cubs, to be licked into shape by 
 parental pains. Balzac, after altering in proof perhaps 
 a dozen times, could still find plenty to weed out of 
 his printed volumes. Some pens flow their smoothest 
 on folio sheets neatly ruled and margined ; one writer 
 indulges his genius with thick quires of cream -laid 
 post, in this or that tint ; another, like " paper-saving 
 Pope," jots down his verses on the backs of odd 
 scraps. I have heard of an author who professed to 
 get paper for nothing by taking one share in a Rubber 
 Company, then dozens of such poured in upon him 
 their prospectuses, the blank pages of which were 
 suitable for MS. Dickens' blue ink and paper were 
 notable ; and Rousseau wrote his novel on gilt-edged 
 quires tied up with blue ribbon. Buffon, it is related, 
 could not write his best unless in full dress with all 
 his decorations on to inspire him. 
 
 While on this head of ways and means, let me 
 repeat a very practical hint I once got from Grant 
 Allen, who suffered from writers' cramp, which he 
 attributed to the constant use of such devices as 
 fountain-pens, bringing only one set of muscles into 
 fatiguing use, so advised his fellow-craftsmen to try 
 varying their tools. The quill that is the author's 
 crest may in our practical age take the form of a lead 
 pencil. The most economical pen would seem to be 
 the sharpened finger-nail of an oriental letter-writer, 
 who works in no keen need for saving time. In writ- 
 ing, as in other tasks, the more haste may prove the 
 worse speed. A biographer states that Ruskin could 
 write " anywhere, on anything, with anything," but 
 admits that such ready writing proved hard reading
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 105 
 
 for the printer. As for ink, the author must dip into 
 his heart's blood for the most fluid and indelible script. 
 Does the unsympathetic layman ever reckon up 
 what pangs go to the conceiving, the gestation, the 
 bringing forth of even a weakly book, not to speak of 
 the care and anxiety with which it must be reared 
 from the swaddling-clothes of manuscript, and sent 
 out on its feet to face dubious fortunes ? A little 
 experience of such pangs, not common to all minds, 
 might call forth more charity towards that self-satis- 
 faction with which the author is often taxed. Conceit 
 should be born like a caul with every child of the 
 thankless Muse. He will need it as a bladder to bear 
 him up on the sea of troubles in which his destiny 
 sets him tossing against wind and tide. The labour, 
 the pains, the risks, through which a book is brought 
 to birth, could seldom be borne by son or daughter of 
 Eve, unless as heartened by love and admiration for a 
 mental offspring that may even strike the parent and 
 partial friends as the finest birth the world has yet 
 seen. The topic is such a moving one that I must be 
 suffered to mix my metaphors like Hamlet's in his 
 most recited soliloquy. Every conscript in our army 
 of martyrs carries a laureate's wreath in his knap- 
 sack, else how could he hold out through its first try- 
 ing marches ? At this stage, unless it be some fond 
 relative or fidus Achates, he finds no one to believe in 
 him, and must make shift to believe in himself. Look- 
 ing iDack from a day of disenchantment, the mediocre 
 poet may smile to see how he would never have 
 started on that race but for some imaginary carrot 
 dangling before his nose, some spur of future fame 
 prodding him on round laborious laps, some garland 
 at the goal to make him scorn the thistles that others 
 take for guerdon enough. But his evident vanity,
 
 106 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 remember, may be all on the surface, sweated out of 
 him by laborious scampers, whereas other skins, 
 sleeker and whiter to view, have their pores more 
 clogged by dirt that would come of! thickly under the 
 hands of a shampooer. 
 
 There are two textures of good opinion of themselves 
 which men display to the world. One is bumptious, 
 insolent, defiant, thick enough to throw off all but the 
 sharpest points of contumely. This is not the common 
 wear of the author, whose looser woven motley, so 
 easily going threadbare and tattered, makes a less 
 serviceable defence against the weather. His vanity 
 is apt to be of milder nature : it is often tame and 
 timid ; so much so as sometimes to seem even modest : 
 it turns a hungry look on the observer ; it crops from 
 commons and hedgerows when fenced out of richer 
 pastures. It is kept too lean for want of assurance, 
 seldom starved outright, but still more seldom fully 
 satisfied. \Vlien stuffed with praise like a Strasbourg 
 goose, it still gapes for more with the appetite of an 
 Oliver Twist. Its pleasures are not equal to the 
 pains with which it has to pick up a precarious exist- 
 ence in prickly places. The most succulent mouth- 
 fuls are like dust and ashes, when it cocks a wistful 
 eye on some tuft out of reach. All the patting of its 
 kind patrons goes to the winds, as often as some mis- 
 chievous urchin of a critic sticks his thorn-branch 
 under its tail. The struggle for existence, to be sure, 
 equips the poor author with a fleece of self-satisfaction 
 that, by the tempering of providence, may grow again 
 as often as cut away by critical shears. Yet this fell, 
 however thick, is apt to prove a ragged cloak for a 
 tender skin, into which burrs work their way, rankling 
 the more sorely for his helplessness to rub them off. 
 And the burrs hardest to get rid of are his recurrent
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 107 
 
 suspicions of himself that stick about him even as he 
 raises his voice to let the world know what it might 
 listen to, if it would. 
 
 Ach, die Natur schuf micli im Grimme ! 
 Sie gab mir nichts — als eine schone Stimme ! 
 
 As for true pride, the man of letters, if not of the 
 baser sort, has a good chance to find antidote for that 
 mortal sin. An author of any authority must live in 
 the light of great thoughts to which he cannot but 
 refer his own ; he is in trade relation with great minds 
 that should be the touchstones and models for his own 
 workmanship ; he is fain to look before and after more 
 intently than the layman, and in the very way of 
 business seeks ideals far above himself. Imagination, 
 where learning and modesty fail, may help him to some 
 flash of revelation upon the unbounded darkness of 
 time and space in which a human life so blindly takes 
 itself as central point. Then the slightest sense of 
 proportion is like to make him wisely aware, at least 
 by humbling glimpses, what an insignificant atom in 
 the universe is this particular psychide of carbon 
 that shows his name on title-pages. 
 
 The author is charged with a trick of advertising 
 his self-esteem by touches of the pride that apes 
 humility. We know this mock-modest " we," and 
 the devices by which "the present writer" avoids 
 coming out with the shortest word in our language, 
 always apt to be the most prominent in his thoughts. 
 There was one popular author of our time, as to whose 
 lucubrations it used to be jestingly told how his printer 
 would run out of capital Vs. But it seems a sign of 
 good sense in our generation that the author no longer 
 so much affects to keep himself in the background, 
 hooded and gowned in some time-honoured peri-
 
 108 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 phrasis. Ego et rex mens is his true grammatical style ; 
 and his patron would be foolish to expect a show of 
 false deference, as in the days when a sovereign had to 
 be grandiloquently addressed not only as " high and 
 mighty Prince " but as " principal Mover and Author 
 of the Work," while the plainest citizen should be 
 flattered as " the indulgent reader," the " intelligent 
 public " or such-like. 
 
 Then we have all spied upon that way authors have 
 of masking themselves under some alias, pseudonym, 
 or other more or less thin disguise, sooner or later to 
 be stripped ofi, unless in the exceptional case of a 
 " Junius " or an Imitatio devotee who succeeds in 
 puzzling generations, and echoing his renown by call- 
 ing forth guesses at an invisible personality. There 
 may be good reasons for wearing such a domino. 
 A Veiled Prophet speaks more impressively in Khor- 
 assan or elsewhere ; and a " Thomas Little " does well 
 to hide his face in putting forth verses he should blush 
 for. Sometimes your " Plain-speakers," " Martin 
 Mar Prelates " and " Peter Pindars " have had every 
 excuse for not caring to set themselves in a pillory 
 of publicity. There is a natural timidity, not ungrace- 
 ful in young writers, which prompts them to make 
 their first appearances as " Boz," " Titmarsh," or 
 what not. Thus the new-made knight rode out to win 
 his princess incognito, entering the lists with a blank 
 shield that might by and by bear glorious blazonry. 
 There was one veteran author well pleased to be " The 
 Great Unknown" long after he had won his spurs. 
 Among the female champions now pressing into these 
 lists, many seem fain to own a literary Salic law by 
 disguising their sex under a masculine pseudonym, 
 George, it would appear, for choice, perhaps through 
 some trick of unconscious cerebration suggesting the
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 109 
 
 idea of a husbandman. Much, more rare, let the " New 
 Woman " note, is the case of a male author choosing 
 to pass for a she, as did " Fiona Macleod " with singu- 
 larly mystifying effect. 
 
 Confusion has frequently arisen through authors 
 bearing the same patronymic, like two poets of our 
 day of whom one was invidiously distinguished as 
 " of Parnassus " when the other styled himself " of 
 Penbr^m." The son of the first Lord Lytton did well to 
 take the alias of " Owen Meredith," when the family 
 name was already rather intricate. Balzac did not so 
 well to write himself de Balzac, when another sieur of 
 that ilk had been in the field long before him. Crebillon 
 fere may conceivably not desire to be confused with 
 Crebillon -fils. There were two Rousseaus of note, 
 one of them well satisfied to emphasize his Jean- 
 Jacques in contradistinction to Jean-Baftiste, and to 
 a Pierre Rousseau who wrote what is now forgotten. 
 Also there were two Corneilles, for one of whom it 
 seems rather awkward that the other is the Grand 
 Corneille. So in our day we have had the two 
 brothers Daudet, of whom the more voluminous can 
 laugh to quote himself qualified as U Autre. A most 
 extraordinary freak of fame seems to be in setting 
 Winston Churchills to face each other from opposite 
 sides of the English-writing world. Of Dumas fils 
 it is wickedly told that, to his father asking " Have 
 you read my last story ? " he answered " No, sir, 
 have you ? " — the bitter jest here being that Dumas 
 pere was believed capable of giving his name as an 
 alias for the work of some diligent ghost, such as that 
 Maquet whose original patronymic seems to have been 
 Mackay, and his origin of the same family, as, accord- 
 ing to one author, sent soldiers of fortune to Troy, 
 among them an Andrew Mackay, whose daughter
 
 no A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 was married " on " Hector. Moliere, we know, had 
 for his real name Poquelin, which is said to have come 
 from Fife as PocMing. 
 
 In Moliere's vocation, an assumed name seems 
 rather the rule than the exception ; but I am not sure if 
 I can call actors in evidence to a character of modesty. 
 WTien young and innocent, I once fell in with an 
 operatic singer who named himself Campobello or 
 the like, which was my cue for turning the conversation 
 to Italy, till my new acquaintance bluntly confessed 
 that he was at home in no country but one whose 
 skies are not Italian. We must all admire the courage 
 of artistes who come before the public to warble 
 exotic strains under such native names as McGuckin 
 or Thudicum ; but I don't see why we should blame 
 an author who, happening to be registered in life as 
 " Snooks," chooses rather to be known as " Seven- 
 oaks," or even takes for himself a name of fine associa- 
 tions like " Norfolk Howard." One can conceive 
 Bacon coveting the nom de flume of Shakespeare. 
 In more practical lines of business than the arts, the 
 pardonable deceit is quite common. Even your 
 staid family lawyer may have succeeded to the firm 
 of " Brown and Jones," his real name being Robin- 
 son ; and when Lady Clara Vere de Vere goes into 
 trade, she imitates Miss Smith by taking some such 
 style as "Clare" or Madame CAose, if her wares are 
 to have a smack of Paris. May not scribbling Harry, 
 then, elect to be Dick or Tom as he please, and to 
 public convenience if there be already half a dozen 
 Richmonds in the field. And poets, of all people, 
 are aware that in the classic age men might be known 
 to the gods by one name, and by quite another to 
 mortals. It is romancers rather than poets, indeed, 
 who affect pseudonymity in our time ; but where
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 111 
 
 should a touch of fiction be in place if not on the title- 
 page of a story ? What's in a name, is thus expounded 
 by an author of common sense as marked as his 
 contempt for sentimental affectation. 
 
 Fame loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on 
 the tongue, like Spenserian, Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, 
 there is a great deal in names, and when the fairies come with 
 their gifts to the cradle of the selected child, let one, wiser than 
 the rest, choose a name for him from which well-sounding deriva- 
 tions can be made, and best of all with a termination in on. Men 
 judge the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are readier to 
 take without question whatever is Platonic, Baconian, Newtonian, 
 Johnsonian, Washingtonian, JefEersonian, Napoleonic, and all the 
 rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of Keats— the more 
 pity — and to say a thing is Keatsy is to condemn it. Fortune 
 likes fine names. 
 
 These are the words of James Russell Lowell, who 
 had no cause to be ashamed of his nomen darum et 
 venerabile, yet may sometimes have regretted its 
 superabundance of L's, and foreseen with humorous 
 regret that it would not slide into the metre of any 
 more stately " Fable for critics." Some American 
 writers have little to thank their god-parents for in 
 a Puritan commodity of " given " names. Phineas T. 
 Barnum seems well enough suited with his, but hardly 
 so Timothy D wight or Nathaniel P. Willis. " Mark 
 Twain " sounds more fit for a household word than 
 Samuel L. Clemens ; nor might C. F. Browne have 
 moved laughter so readily as did " Artemus Ward." 
 
 While on the head of American authors, let me 
 recall an experience illustrating the awkwardness of 
 two or more authors bearing the same name. 0. W. 
 Holmes in one of his " medicated novels " has an amus- 
 ing episode of a young man who, visiting an austere 
 deacon, declares his favourite author to be Scott. The 
 deacon's reading is much in Scott the Commentator, so
 
 112 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 lie conceives a good opinion of his guest as weaned from 
 the frivolity of youth. Both of them being at cross 
 purposes, the visitor mentions Ivanhoe as in his opinion 
 Scott's best work, and quotes from it a passage — 
 " \A^en Israel of the Lord beloved " etc. which sounds 
 so scriptural, that his host borrows this hitherto un- 
 familiar volume of the great Scott. Next day, being 
 Sabbath, the deacon does not appear at church, an 
 absence portentous enough to bring the minister on a 
 visit of inquiry ; and he finds his truant sheep deep 
 in the clover of Ivanhoe, which he reports to be most 
 interesting, though he has " not come to the scheme 
 of salvation yet." Now much the same mistake I 
 made one Sunday, when wishing to spend a pleasantly 
 reflective morning in a college garden, I took down 
 from my host's shelves the poems of Holmes, then 
 lazily turned over several pages before discovering 
 that I had in hand a synonymous author of less fame. 
 Holmes might seem no very abundant name, yet in 
 the London Library Catalogue it figures with some 
 three dozen entries. 
 
 When the public is so fond of peeping under their 
 pseudonyms, of playing Paul Pry with their private 
 concerns, and sometimes so impertinent in requesting 
 their autographs, authors might well be astonished 
 at their own moderation of self-esteem. One has 
 seen a comfortable scribbler whose conceit was rather 
 like the fur of a well-fed cat, throned before a snug 
 fire of home life, purring complacently when stroked 
 by some soft-handed critic on the hearth. But in 
 most cases, as already shown, we need not grudge 
 this animal the thin and ragged skin of conceit in 
 which he shivers under cold blasts, and kicks against 
 the pricks of fortune. No wonder if his temper be 
 noted as uncertain. He starts at shadows ; he takes
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 113 
 
 offence at trifles ; he sulks obstinately ; he does not go 
 well in harness ; he makes a great noise about nothing. 
 The author of a cookery-book may be imagined 
 as placid, stolid and eupeptic. But the general run 
 of authors have earned a name for being bilious, 
 quarrelsome, jealous, moody, suspicious, surly, resent- 
 ful, in a word ill-conditioned. Other men's business 
 trains them to a more good-humoured practice of give 
 and take. This man's nature is to love the bowls 
 more than the rubbers of his lot. As a sharp-tongued 
 jester, he smarts under gibes thrown back. As an 
 earnest preacher, he looks askance at a rival pulpit. 
 He is bored, or worse, when another lion in his own 
 line gives a louder roar. He bears, like the Turk, no 
 brother near his throne, if he have one. He damns 
 the performance not his own with faint praise, and 
 with civil leer assents to the general applause. Well 
 if he do not yawn rudely or look at his watch osten- 
 tatiously, while the other artiste is taking his turn. 
 Hence arise heartburnings among a race whose nerves 
 are always apt to be on double edge, and whose keen 
 sympathies and antipathies seem both set on a hair- 
 trigger. Then the author's ill-will does not fail for 
 a weapon at hand. Common men, when the police 
 forbid fists, have little else for it but to grin and bear 
 their wrongs, soon forgotten in the press of outdoor 
 life, after being perhaps exhaled in a hearty curse or 
 two for which the injurer is not one penny the worse. 
 The author can sit at home to nurse his grievance, 
 which, unless held in by a sense of shame or humour, 
 he has means of proclaiming. His art is a gramophone 
 to interpret such records. So when angry, he has 
 the temptation to unpack his heart with words, like 
 a scolding shrew. The restraints of modern life, 
 indeed, oblige him to pick and choose his bad language, 
 
 1
 
 114 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 to sharpen it into a shining epigram, and to deliver 
 it with a biting smile ; but how authors used to bawl 
 against each other in the days when a man's soul 
 seemed damnable for his erroneous view of irregular 
 verbs ! In our days such rancour seems oftener to 
 take the form of impaling one's offender in stuffed 
 effigy, as guy or villain of a novel. I could cite 
 instances, but forbear : the sooner such spiteful tricks 
 be forgotten, the better. The most cold-blooded 
 efiort of spite in our own time, was when a literary 
 gent contrived to fake on to the pages of a book in 
 the British Museum a slander anent his dead enemy, 
 whereby the honest Dictionary of National Biography 
 was deceived. 
 
 It may appear that in all these apologetic strictures, 
 the author is being likened to a woman, not, hien 
 entendu, the new woman who studies science, plays 
 hockey, and scratches policemen, but that proverbial 
 daughter of Eve about whom poets, moralists, and 
 historians have been in the same tale of varium et 
 mutahile, perhaps as beholding her weakness with " the 
 fatal eye of an accomplice." Great men, we are told, 
 derive more from their mothers than their fathers. 
 Waiving this contention for want of accurate statis- 
 tics, I would inquire whether the creative nature have 
 not an essential feminine strain, as shown in its recep- 
 tivity, its sensitiveness, its less fitness for the rougher 
 tasks of open air life. In its proneness to vanity, to 
 jealousy, to caprice, its quickness to take offence, 
 and to harbour spite, does it not show some relation 
 to the spindle side of humanity, as well as in nobler 
 qualities of sympathy, impulsiveness and readiness 
 for self-sacrifice ? 
 
 Too often the author appears a bit of a weakling, 
 infirm in frame as in temper, crooked like Pope, lame
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 115 
 
 like Byron, paralysed like Heine, not to speak of the 
 cropped ears, slit noses and other maimings and 
 mutilations inflicted on him by the tyranny of man. 
 From Homer downwards, the race have been apt to 
 go blind from too much study, at the best to stumble 
 through life blear-eyed or shortsighted, with vision 
 clearer for colour than for form. Most of them see 
 the world tln'ough the spectacles of books, that may 
 increase rather than correct deficiencies of natural 
 eyesight. Not so many of them have been at home 
 in out of door work and sport, unless it be such a con- 
 templative recreation as angling, or such light labour 
 as the plucking of grapes and rosebuds, that can be 
 distilled into a certain amount of copy. The fingers 
 deft to strike the lyre, may prove all thumbs in hand- 
 ling the axe or the hoe. The bard who so loudly 
 celebrates bloodshed beholds it with most exultation 
 from a safe distance, or if he trust himself near the 
 fray, he leaves it sooner than the feast, his shield 
 perhaps relictd non bene. His very gift of imaj:ination 
 keeps him awake to risks upon which the dull clown 
 marches stolidly as bidden. Shining exceptions rise to 
 mind in rebuke of what may seem a slander — Socrates, 
 Xenophon, Froissart, Sidney, Carl Theodore Korner ; 
 Thucydides and Csesar could both write and fight ; 
 Achilles touched the lute when sulking in his tent ; 
 David was a man of his hands as well as of psalms. 
 But as a rule, one fears, hard knocks would stun poetic 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 When wide of soul and bold of tongue, 
 Among the tents I paused and sung — 
 Far ofE the distant battle rung. 
 
 There is often, indeed, an hysterical strain in the 
 literary character, which betrays itself by rising to a
 
 116 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 shriek when it afiects to roar and growl. Witness 
 Carlyle, who in so many volumes extolled silence as 
 golden, never tired of robustiously glorifying strong, 
 patient men, but amid his dithyrambic praises of 
 self-possession and his scoldings of imbecility, the 
 crowing of a cock would set him off into a passion, 
 while all along his wife seems to have had too much 
 insight into the philosophy of an historian whose 
 favourite formula consisted in " calling down fire 
 from heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand 
 on the match-box." He figures as an awful example 
 of the hero as husband, because so many lights have 
 been turned for us upon his domestic life ; but other 
 authors, if as well provided with eloquent wives and 
 indiscreet disciples, might have the same weakness 
 betrayed beyond their domestic circle. 
 
 I pause here to call attention to what seems a 
 danger to human welfare through a Platonic love of 
 warfare too much indulged by poets and romancers, 
 always on the look out for stirring scenes. The book- 
 sick author sometimes develops a perverse taste for 
 voies de fait of fancy. Just as women are found not 
 unwilling to set on men to fisticuffs for them, so there 
 is an excitable species of scribe, who proves all the 
 more thirsty for blood and bruises that his own skin 
 is well out of it. A generation ago I was walking with 
 a writer at that time much concerned in pen -pricking 
 thousands of brave men to death for his view of the 
 fitness of things ; then, as he filled a quiet English 
 lane with words of sound and fury, a gun going off 
 on the other side of the hedge turned him white and 
 dumb in sudden terror. One has known other 
 talkers whose patriotic heroism and love of slaughter 
 were for vicarious application only ; and when one 
 finds such a man putting noisy emphasis on the manly
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 117 
 
 virtues, one need never be surprised to leam that 
 courage, hardihood, endurance and so forth were not 
 his own strong points. 
 
 *' A sad, wise valour is the best complexion," not 
 always noted in those most ready with hot woids. 
 Under the conditions of modern politics, the game 
 kings once loved to play at is more in the hands of 
 ignorant democracies, capable of being worked up, 
 like the Athenians, by the orators of a press that 
 fattens on popular excitement. Surely the issues 
 of peace or war were less well trusted to one practised 
 to set paragraphs in the field, than to a veteran who 
 knows how a defeat is only sadder than a victo y. 
 But since the pen has gained so much power to move 
 the sword, I would submit to the Peace Societies of 
 Europe an infallible plan for staving off war : let each 
 nation form a corps d'eHte of its able editors, eloquent 
 article writers, and newspaper proprietors, who, in 
 gorgeous uniforms, faced with printers' ink, with a 
 band of advertising agents to dium and trumpet them 
 on, should have the honour of leading the van in every 
 army, and earning immortality as a forlorn hope. 
 " Cursed be he that delights in war ! " was written 
 by our first accredited war-correspondent on fields 
 of battle, William Russell, who had not been moved 
 to write thus in Printing House Square. 
 
 Books might be all the better, if their writers 
 could be mobilized for some such active service as 
 they now are liable to in most civilized countries. 
 The most sane and fortunate, and not the least 
 beloved among authors, have had the advantage of 
 being much out in the world, far or near. Homer we 
 can guess at as forced to take a good deal of exercise. 
 Horace went much into society. Dante was a ban- 
 ished politician ; Chaucer a prisoner of war, a govern-
 
 118 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 ment official, and a knight of the shire. Camoens, 
 both soldier and sailor, could tell his own tale of disas- 
 trous chances by flood and field. Cervantes was a 
 bold adventurer and a hardy galley-slave before he 
 raised so many a thoughtless laugh and a thoughtful 
 sigh. Lope de Vega served in the Armada and 
 Calderon in a cavalry regiment. Shakespeare is 
 thought to have poached deer and held horses before 
 he rose to managing theatres. Goldsmith tramped over 
 half Europe, picking up a living as best he could. 
 Burns was a farmer, who became an exciseman, more's 
 the pity. Scott was a legal official all his life, and made 
 himself keenly ready to fight for his native land in 
 its hour of peril. Victor Hugo had his share of revolu- 
 tionary vicissitudes. Tolstoi spent a youth of active 
 service in the Caucasus and at Sebastopol. American 
 men of letters, beginning with Benjamin Franklin, 
 have had a good chance to gain practical experience 
 as consuls and ambassadors, if not as colonels and 
 frontier adventurers. In England the author, unless 
 he be a civil servant, gets most into the open air 
 as a journalist, reporter, amateur detective or war- 
 correspondent. It was rare luck for the voluminous 
 Trollope that he spent so much of his life as a Post- 
 office Inspector, a man of letters in most favourable 
 circumstances. And what did not l^Dickens owe to 
 his early career in post chaises and stage coaches, 
 as rapid shorthand writer, who all the time was taking 
 notes far beyond his commission ? 
 
 But those seem exceptional cases. The rank and file 
 of authors, who are nothing but authors, have to make 
 their livelihood under stunting conditions. In our 
 generation rents have much gone up in Grub Street, 
 where even successful novelists could hardly afford an 
 attic. Its former inmates move into suburban lodg-
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 119 
 
 ings, flats in Battersea or West Kensington, jerry- 
 built villas so far off as Woking or Rickmansworth. 
 They are not often found in prison, now that prisons 
 Lave grown grimly palatial ; but still, in the expres- 
 sive German phrase, they " sit " theii- sentence of hard 
 labour in cells for the most part narrow and scrimply 
 furnished. All along their common lot has been to 
 lead a sedentary, secluded life, breathing stuffy air and 
 wearing out their eyes over midnight oil. Such habits 
 breed a crop of ailments that send them, often empty- 
 handed, to the shrines of iEsculapius, a god not 
 ungenerous to such suppliants, who, like Thackeray 
 and Stevenson, may offer him a dedication in grateful 
 sacrifice. In our generation, also, they turn for help 
 to such easy exercises as golf and tennis. 
 
 The Swiss physician Tissot, in the days of Rousseau 
 and Voltaire, could write a volume De la Sante 
 des Gens de Lettres, which has gone into many editions, 
 and often needs bringing up to date, to be consulted at 
 the British Museum by patients who cannot always 
 afford to buy it, unless by luck on a second-hand 
 bookstall. His physiology and psychology are to be 
 sure a little old-fashioned ; but long before Herbert 
 Spencer expounded the Law of Rhythm, Tissot had 
 opportunities of seeing how fits of imaginative exalta- 
 tion see-sawed into gloomy depression, and how either 
 mood might get off its hinges to be confirmed as 
 mania or melancholy. But who was the " English 
 poet " that consulted him in a case not unique ? This 
 anonymous author — for a doctor, of course, must not 
 publish the patients' names — had so overstrained his 
 mind by intense industry that, having taken Peter the 
 Great as hero of an epic for the publication of which he 
 had collected several thousand pounds in subscriptions, 
 after years of work nothing was ready for the press.
 
 120 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Were Dr. Johnson the man to be pilgrim at Voltaire's 
 Ferney shrine, we might have suspected him for this 
 interesting case, whose symptoms will be familiar to 
 most authors. " During the period of exaltation, he 
 composed with enthusiasm, and was enchanted 
 by his production, this passed, there came a state of 
 feebleness, dejection and discontent, in which all these 
 verses, admirable two days before, were pitilessly con- 
 demned to the fire." In the long malady of author- 
 ship, indeed, one of the most frequent symptoms is 
 inability to distinguish clearly between a goose and 
 a swan. 
 
 " Whom the gods love die young ! " has been many 
 an author's epitaph ; but also his lot may be to find 
 his days prolonged beyond expectation, beyond hope 
 and love. Sheltered from killing blasts of fortune, 
 out of the way of fatal accidents, not so often asked 
 to perilous banquets, he lives on, dyspeptic, anaemic, 
 hypochondriac and paralysed, nursing sickly humours 
 that will not inflame into the fevers more deadly 
 to full-blooded Philistines. So withered an apple is 
 often seen clinging to the tree long after time has made 
 windfalls of plumper fruit. But what profits it such 
 a Struldbrug to be long hidden from Death, watching 
 out of his dim eyes how the brave and the fair are 
 untimely plucked ? Old age may be cankered by ail- 
 ments of mind as well as of body, and to them the man 
 of books is more liable than another. This veteran 
 spirit, too, bears the scars of wounds. His throbbing 
 pulses stiffened through the strain of emotion, his once 
 elastic heart dried to a fibre by rancours, jealousies 
 and disappointments, his humour soured by acetous 
 fermentation, it may be his fate to drag out an ossified 
 and chilled life, without honour, love, obedience, troops 
 of friends, and all that should accompany old age.
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR AUTHORS 121 
 
 Too often, after his turn of note, perhaps of renown, 
 he finds himself forgotten, left behind by hurrying 
 rivals, to brood lonely over the days when he stripped 
 for their hopeful race. Not every author can turn 
 such a cheerful face to a mocking world as did Martin 
 Tupper when, having gone up as a rocket hailed in two 
 continents, he came down as a bare stick to make 
 a cockshy for every smart criticaster. Another 
 exceptional case seems that of his contemporary 
 Harrison Ainsworth, who could go on bravely writ- 
 ing novels for a generation in which his fame had 
 faded. 
 
 Darker fates are among the commonplaces of literary 
 history — Heine sourly grimacing on his " mattress 
 grave " — Edgar Allan Poe dying in a hospital — Milton 
 a blind Samson cut off from the cheerful ways of men 
 — Tasso raging in a madman's cell — Dante eating out 
 his heart with the bread of exile — Ovid shivering in 
 savage Pontus. Looking back, we catch a long- 
 drawn show of such tragedies, flickering dimly out 
 with the shade of a wandering Homer, who would not 
 be the only poet fain to beg his bread. " I have 
 known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend 
 literally dying in a workhouse ! " exclaims Charles 
 Lamb. At the best, broken-down authors have often 
 a good deal to make them crabbed or snarling in their 
 last days, when even prosperous Tennyson turns a 
 little sour on revisiting Locksley Hall. My old friend 
 the late G. K. Fortescue, so well known for his kindness 
 to readers at the British Museum, told me how one of 
 his most painful duties would at times be to exclude 
 from the Reading Room a man once a scholar and a 
 gentleman, who through poverty and despair had 
 become offensive in his habits. Too many once 
 popular writers come to have nothing to chew but the
 
 122 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 cud of bitter memories, when they can complain with 
 " well-languaged Daniel " that 
 
 Years have done this wrong, 
 
 To make me write too much and live too long. 
 
 We poets in our youth, it is well seen, begin in glad- 
 ness — as in the childhood of the world, we all commence 
 author by trying to be poets — but thereof in the end 
 may come despondency, even madness, to be borne 
 perhaps in poverty, bankrupt even of love. Very 
 fine things can be written De Senectute when one has 
 a good house in town, a villa at Tusculum, a valuable 
 library, gossiping and letter- writing friends, and slaves 
 to carry one's litter to some Baise or Bath that may 
 prove a retreat from cold winds of fortune. " These 
 are the things that make death terrible," the less well- 
 provided moralist tries to console himself. But how 
 if our philosopher have no warmer comfort than 
 contemplation of the hour when 
 
 Earth's brown, cUnging lips impress 
 The long, cold kiss that waits us all ! 
 
 Thus have I left to the end the fault most freely 
 charged against authors, their impecuniousness, a 
 fault forsooth which is not so much their own. But 
 an apology for this failing, so manifest in the history 
 of literature, may come better in later chapters dealing 
 with the material conditions and prospects of an 
 author's life.
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 
 
 Some men are born authors ; some achieve author- 
 ship ; others have authorship forced upon them. 
 If a man nowadays win any kind of celebrity, the 
 many-headed beast will be as eager to hear from him 
 as to see him. Does he go to the North Pole, ascend 
 the Mountains of the Moon, cross the Sahara in a 
 balloon to observe there are no such mountains to be 
 ascended, sure as fate, at the first outpost of civiliza- 
 tion he finds a publisher's offer for his forthcoming 
 volume. The soldier earns a pension by describing 
 his campaigns ; the statesman more often has to 
 leave his memoirs for posthumous publication ; the 
 artist writes his reminiscences ; so does the author 
 himself when hard up for another subject. They all 
 do so, sooner or later. And such is the greed of the 
 public for notable names that if a surgeon cuts skil- 
 fully for the stone, his views on art will be listened to ; 
 while a popular preacher is fairly sure of a market for 
 any novel he might like to try his hand at ; and a 
 judge's wit comes from the bench with all the force of 
 incongruity. The pages of our magazines gape for 
 amateur authors whose credentials may be a success 
 in some other field of activity. And without any 
 grudge against those privileged intruders into the 
 fold, one can set them aside as being but incidental 
 
 123
 
 124 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 authors. Some even stumble accidentally into con- 
 genial authorship, like William Howard Russell, who 
 while taking doubtful steps towards the Bar, medicine, 
 school-teaching and soldiering, was pitched upon as a 
 youth with a hard head to send among shillelaghs and 
 report their clashing for the Times, whereby he found 
 in himself an aptitude for a kind of writing destined to 
 jaire ecole. More than one of the best-read authors 
 has come to his achievement by chance, Pepys for 
 instance, who was for keeping his lucubrations to 
 himself in a cipher discovered and interpreted long 
 after it had been jotted down with some reason to 
 blush unseen. And when a kindly subject awakes 
 the gift of a born author, we may get such beloved 
 books as the Complete Angler and the Natural History 
 of Selborne. 
 
 Again there be writers who achieve authorship, as 
 having a purpose of interest, of instruction, of useful- 
 ness to the world, of mere profit to themselves that is 
 not to be forwarded without attempting what may be 
 the uncongenial task of setting it forth in print. 
 Some of the greatest names seem to stand in this 
 category. Had Newton been a musician instead of 
 a mathematician, his works might not have given him 
 a place in literature. Had Adam Smith become a 
 statesman, he might have cast his economic principles 
 into the form of Acts of Parliament, rather than of 
 a treatise ; or in a pulpit he might have dissipated his 
 theory of Moral Sentiments. Famous philosophers 
 have often been Professors, known to us best through 
 their lectures or conversations recorded by reverent 
 disciples, as was their way from the days of Solon and 
 Socrates. Jeremy Bentham was disgusted with the 
 practice of our law before he took to labouring for its 
 reform, and but for this overmastering purpose he
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 125 
 
 mi^lit never have been the cause of so much earnest 
 dullness in other writers. Had Darwin not had an 
 epoch-making hypothesis to expound, was he the man 
 to have taken to scribbling ? And but for Herbert 
 Spencer's being fired by ambition to set forth a 
 Synthetic Philosophy, we might have had nothing 
 from his pen unless a few contributions on railway- 
 making, with perhaps an essay at fiction in the form 
 of angling reminiscences, instead of the voluminous 
 task which Taine qualifies as a great feat of scientific 
 imagination. Not to cite contemporary instances, 
 two of the most popular publications of a generation 
 ago were How to make Fowls fay, and How to live on 
 Sixpence a day, the authors of both of which notably 
 achieved successful authorship, though its fame may 
 have proved transitory. 
 
 But we are here to keep our eye on the born author, 
 him who has authorship in his bone and marrow, 
 even if it may never come out to any admirable or 
 even visible effect. His disposition is apt to announce 
 itself betimes ; and there is no want of documents for 
 the study of this phenomenon. Who will may hear 
 the story of many a Sordello told by an industrious 
 tribe of writers, not always real authors, who 
 find their account in labouring the field of literary 
 biography and transplanting from autobiographical 
 gardens. Here the greenest corner seems that 
 exhibiting the youth of authors, with abundance of 
 illustrations, since most of us look back kindly on the 
 age at which we first became conscious of a vision 
 and a faculty more or less divine ; and not a few have 
 been communicative as to their first impressions in 
 memoirs that sometimes go no further than those 
 beginnings. Their communications may take the 
 form of fiction rather than of fact, yet be none the less
 
 126 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 true. Dickens as David Copperfield, Thackeray as 
 Pendennis, Balzac as Louis Lambert, Carlyle as the 
 foundling of Entepfuhl, are all telling us how they 
 thought and felt in their own young days ; then by 
 comparing such memories with formal autobiographies, 
 we may come at some composite portrait of a child 
 dedicated to the Muses. 
 
 The symptoms appear early, not always clearly 
 diagnosed by empirical practitioners of education. 
 In the nursery, the infant genius may well prove a 
 " handful." If he do not " lisp in numbers," he has 
 a turn for roaring when he cannot get his; way, which 
 is like^ to be a way of his own. A false prognosis 
 is easily made at this stage, since, as already laid 
 down, most children are liable to passing attacks of 
 poetic wilfulness ; while all fond mothers take their 
 darlings for something out of the common. But if our 
 future poet could now be scientifically examined, 
 the child might be found father to the man in whims, 
 jealousies, irritabilities, affections and strange out- 
 looks beyond the range of normal childhood, such 
 " intimations of immortality " as Wordsworth was 
 conscious of trailing about him, and too generously 
 bestowed the same upon imps for whom toys and 
 toffee had the brightest clouds of glory. Could what 
 educational psychologists call his " apperception 
 masses " be now carefully studied and treated secun- 
 dum artem, how many a Bavius or Maevius might 
 such pundits succeed in developing into a Horace or 
 an Ovid, and deftly transmuting Zimmermanns or 
 Paleys into Voltaires or Coleridges ! But, as things 
 go, the authorling is like to be left to himself, happiest 
 if not too well tended, allowed to run a little wild, 
 plucking his own fancies from dusty hedgerow and 
 muddy ditch, nor depressingly subject overmuch to
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 127 
 
 crying disgrace on the score of clean pinafores and 
 other bonds of family discipline. As like as not, those 
 in charge of him know not what to make of one who 
 may grow up to rhyme his characteristics for himself — 
 
 Silent when glad, affectionate though shy ; 
 
 And now his look was most demurely sad ; 
 
 And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why. 
 
 The neighbours star'd and sigh'd, yet bless'd the lad : 
 
 Some deem'd him wondrous wise and some believ'd him mad. 
 
 When he creeps unwillingly to school, he is there 
 pretty sure to be a marked boy. For all his love of 
 books, w^e need not expect him to win prizes or 
 scholarships ; we must not be surprised even to find 
 him passing for a dunce like Scott, and perhaps Shake- 
 speare. The instructors of a genius, " machines 
 themselves and governed by a clock," are wont to 
 see no good in this unfledged cygnet ; or if they do 
 favour him as a rara avis, thereby draw on him more 
 surely the ill-will of his schoolfellows. The hostility 
 of a herd to its stricken deer is often shown to our 
 queer hero, made more unsociable and timid by rough 
 treatment. He misses his home more keenly than 
 another mother's son ; he longs like Basil Hall for 
 the kind word so seldom heard at school. He is 
 teased with coarse wit, like Heine and Alfieri. He is 
 bullied, like Cowper, almost out of his senses. He is 
 mocked, like Goldsmith, almost out of Goldsmith's 
 good humour. He becomes a down-trodden Ishmael- 
 ite, the butt of his fellows, driven into himself to 
 brood over- his troubles, by sullenness provoking 
 them to the more insolent contempt. Or if he hold 
 up his head among them, he runs it against the 
 customs and traditions of the place. He breaks rules, 
 and neglects tasks, without that faculty of grinning
 
 128 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 and bearing the consequences which helps thicker- 
 skinned young monkeys not to be too miserable, 
 when the tear forgot as soon as shed makes a prism 
 for the sunshine of the breast. His tears perhaps come 
 too freely, like those of Gneschen Teufelsdrockh, who, 
 at the Hinterschlag Gymnasium, earned for himself 
 a soubriquet that might be translated " Waterworks " 
 in Master John Bull's pleasantry ; then such an 
 opprobrious nickname galls his sensitive nature sorer 
 than his tormentors can guess. He has some or other 
 reason to look back on his old school with detestation, 
 like Lecky and Trollope. He scorns to fag, like 
 Leigh Hunt. He shudders to see other boys punished, 
 like Charles Lamb. He passionately refuses to be 
 flogged, like Chateaubriand. He rages in the cells of 
 some barrack -like Lycee, like Maxime du Camp. He 
 raises a revolt against the authorities, like Marmontel ; 
 or against a t}n:anny of upper forms, like Henry 
 Steffens at the Roeskilde Cathedral School, Gray 
 may be suspected of snatching the truant's fearful joy 
 only in imagination, but innumerable poets have 
 frequented an ecole huissoniere in the flesh that might 
 have to suft'er for it. Such a one was Alphonse 
 Daudet, who later on would pass through a sharper 
 ordeal as fion, or usher, as did Henri Conscience and 
 many another continental story-teller. The Muse's 
 son suffers still more painfully in the iron routine of a 
 cadet academy, like Schiller, Bulgarin, and Kropotkin. 
 He would give his Ginnasio the slip to join Garibaldi, 
 like De Amicis. He runs away at random from 
 school, as did De Quincey, and, more naturally, Marry- 
 at, whose schoolfellow Babbage, on the contrary, got 
 up in the small hours to study by stealth, like the 
 calculating boy he was. Lindley Murray, the gram- 
 marian, by the way, seems a unique instance of a boy
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 129 
 
 who ran away to school. More naturally the budding 
 author comes to be expelled, like Landor. He falls 
 into disabling ailments, like Gibbon. Of sturdier 
 fibre, he may grow hardened to five different castiga- 
 tions a day, like Anthony Trollope, when perhaps — 
 
 Vengeance deep brooding o'er the cane 
 Had locked the source of softer woe, 
 And burning pride and high disdain 
 Forbade the gentler tear to flow. 
 
 The chances are that such inflictions leave weals of 
 inward resentment, still to rankle in future years, 
 long after his fellow-sufferers have come to wear these 
 whips like rubies spangling their humorous memories. 
 Thomas Ellwood, Quaker as he grew to be, almost 
 boasts how at school he " came under the discipline 
 of the rod twice in a forenoon, which yet brake no 
 bones ; " but the blind genius to whom he served as 
 eyes, is taken to have kept sorer thoughts of some 
 rough handling at Cambridge. This may explain 
 how schoolmasters have so often fared ill at the hands 
 of poets and novelists, as in Roderick Random and 
 in The Fool of Quality, where an Orbilius is doomed 
 by vengeful authors to such smarting humiliation as 
 Camillus inflicted on the treacherous pedagogue of 
 Falerii. 
 
 But indeed, mounting one's hobby too rashly 
 without a firm grasp of the mane, one is apt to go 
 sprawling over on the further side. To keep a fair 
 balance, it must be remembered that even a 
 clever boy may shine at school. There are two 
 varieties of genius, the hard-roed and the soft-roed, 
 the latter more given to cry out upon its youthful 
 tribulations. It would not be difficult to draw up 
 a list of poets and such like who have taken kindly 
 
 E
 
 130 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 enough to school life, or, if they suffered, were silently- 
 still about it. Among leading instances, are perhaps 
 Milton, who seems to have kept his fit of coltishness 
 for the University ; certainly Keats, who went in 
 keenly both for fisticuffs and for the books which 
 after leaving school he came back to borrow from his 
 old master, Cowden Clark ; and Wordsworth, who 
 sees his schooltime in such sunny retrospect, while 
 indeed even weaklings like Gray and Cowper can't 
 help nourishing some affection for the play-place of 
 their early days. 
 
 At Master Wordsworth's village grammar-school, 
 we gather, the discipline was not over strict, nor were 
 studies so engrossing as to vex the mind of a poet 
 who did not appear too precociously bright and good 
 for the company of rough youngsters, " mad at their 
 sports as withered leaves in wind." There are even 
 hints of naughtiness on his part, as that " sly subter- 
 fuge " in hiring an innkeeper's horses ; and surely his 
 prudent dame would not be told how he made one long 
 bathing of a summer day, though she seemed well 
 acquainted with his propensity for tearing his clothes ; 
 then we have a confession of making free with a boat 
 not his own, and a hint of prickings of conscience when 
 
 a strong desire 
 O'erpowered my better reason, and the bird 
 Which was the captive of another's toil 
 Became my prey. 
 
 But if this poaching schoolboy were unlike Beattie's 
 dedicated spirit — 
 
 Concourse and noise and toil he ever fled, 
 Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray 
 Of squabbling imps. 
 
 — the future laureate had also his moments of recueille-
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 131 
 
 ment, when, summoned "by an alien sound of melan- 
 choly," upon the frozen lake under twilight shades — 
 
 Not seldom from the uproar I retired, 
 
 Into a silent bay, or sportively 
 
 Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng. 
 
 Skating, boating, kite-flying, even card-playing on 
 the long winter evenings, when we hear nothing of 
 lessons to be prepared, were at the roots of this poet's 
 flowering as a priest of nature ; and indeed poets of 
 his day had in general better chance to grow — 
 
 As woodland nooks 
 Send violets up and paint them blue. 
 
 It is to be feared that the contemporary genius 
 comes in for a harder time than ever of it at school, 
 now that it has fewer terrors for the average boy. 
 He is not so liable to be brutally flogged or bullied, 
 rather to be caned by " keen " captains or prefects 
 for playing truant to the games at which his awkward 
 hands and dreamy eyes win him no caps nor colours. 
 But there are other rubs for a sensitive spirit, stig- 
 matized among his companions as a " rotter," a 
 " shirker " or a " smug." In the same blinkers and 
 bearing-reins, to him more chafing, he is harnessed 
 with them in teams for which exercise, of work or 
 play, must be prescribed through every hour. Not 
 for him nowadays to " loaf and invite his soul," to 
 " moon about " like the embryo bards of less schooled 
 generations, to escape with his swelling heart for lonely 
 soliloquy such as Shelley could recall from a pregnant 
 hour — 
 
 A fresh May morn it was, 
 When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, 
 And wept I knew not why, until there rose 
 From the near schoolroom voices that alas I
 
 132 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Were but one echo from a world of woes — 
 
 The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 
 
 And then I clasped my hands and looked around — 
 But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, 
 Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground — 
 So, without shame, I spake : — " I will be wise, 
 And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
 Such power, for I grow weary to behold 
 ■ The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
 Without reproach or check ! " I then controlled 
 My tears ; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. 
 
 And from that hour did I with earnest thought 
 Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore, 
 Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught 
 I cared to learn, but from that secret store. 
 Wrought linked armour for my soul, before 
 It might walk forth to war among mankind. 
 
 Swinburne, so far as one can make out, had unex- 
 pectedly kind impressions of the rod ; but one doubts 
 if he would have blessed " compulsory games." 
 Wordsworth himself would find no time for a five-mile 
 walk before breakfast, — unless in training for the 
 school sports — when he must play up for his house 
 at " Soccer " or " Rugger," not to speak of imposi- 
 tions and detentions, cankers of free hours, that under 
 the new dispensation of discipline are specially like 
 to fasten on a poet's wandering wits. Hardly now at 
 " our public hives of puerile resort," can he secure his 
 once dearest comfort of hiding himself in some quiet 
 corner with a book, to have his troubles exorcised 
 by enchanters known to him as to few, by the Lady 
 of the Lake, by Pope's Iliad, which he construes 
 so unsatisfactorily, by Don Quixote, in which like 
 Heine he recognizes the lachrymae rerum, while other 
 boys see nothing in it but the coarse tricks played on 
 Sancho Panza and the comical delusions of a chivalric
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 133 
 
 madness, — if indeed the absorbing study of " records " 
 and " averages " leave them leisure for such out-of- 
 date reading. He finds little time for idle studies, 
 when all his horizon is darkened by the looming of 
 examinations, in which the like of him has a poor 
 chance of distinction. 
 
 Such a pariah among true-bred British bull-dogs, 
 may be clever in his way, but it is not the school- 
 master's way ; and not every schoolmaster is sensible 
 enough to make allowances for it, as the master of 
 Dedham Grammar School did for young Constable, 
 fostering his natural bent when he showed no turn for 
 grammar ; as did not " Louis Lambert's " master, 
 who burned the Essay on Will at which Balzac seemed 
 to have wasted the hours he should have given to 
 less ambitious themes. " My schoolmaster," was 
 Carlyle's reminiscence as Diogenes, " did little for me, 
 except discover that he could do little." It is your 
 men of letters, rather, your future bishops, judges, 
 scholars and so forth who are to figure in biographies 
 as having been head-boys of their school. The des- 
 tined author's lot has often been to learn little Latin 
 and less Greek ; and as for arithmetic, mathematics 
 and the smattering of science taught to schoolboys of 
 this age, all that is calculated to be mere vexation to 
 his mind. Yet perhaps, like Keats or Swinburne, 
 he has unconsciously imbibed the spirit of Greece 
 without being able to conjugate a verb in mi, or ever 
 getting far towards any clear insight into the doctrine 
 of the enclitic de. Already he may be translating the 
 rhetoric of Cicero or the pathos of Virgil quicker 
 than he cares to look up the words in a dictionary. In 
 those text-books he may have vaguely caught sight 
 of shadowy nymphs and naiads to whose grace his 
 spectacled teachers are blind. He may thus have
 
 134 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 picked up a good deal of knowledge not to be tested at 
 examinations, while his blinking observations on life 
 already go towards his apprenticeship as surely as a 
 young puppy's paws and nose serve it in studying the 
 properties of matter. Few books, perhaps, come 
 amiss to this fitful scholar, so long as they come not as 
 a task. He learns readily enough what takes his 
 fancy, but shows slight power of dogged application. 
 Or, if he do learn his lessons conscientiously, an 
 awkward shyness or absent-mindedness stands in the 
 way of his doing himself justice. 
 
 It may seem to be the genius manque whom I am 
 posing in front of my camera. We are not to forget 
 how from the nest Macaulay was a heluo lihrorum, 
 and John Stuart Mill an infant prodigy, like Bayle, 
 Agrippa d'Aubigny and Pic de la Mirandola before 
 them ; nor how the admirable Crichton passed for a 
 nonsuch in both arts and accomplishments. But if 
 one could make a catalogue raisonne of names that 
 shone forth illustriously from cloudy beginnings, we 
 might find that imagination did not always help 
 them over school exercises. The budding poet's case 
 may be the kindlier one of a genius not above 
 industry, accuracy, punctuality and all the other 
 pedagogic virtues ; yet, one takes it, he more often 
 has to say with Chaucer's schoolboy — 
 
 " I learne song, I know but small granunere," 
 
 It goes almost without saying that he has long ago 
 taken to scribbling in his spare hours, perhaps in the 
 school magazine that gives him some chance of 
 precociously gaining good marks in public opinion. 
 Such a one has been known to win a big boy as 
 protector by writing for him verses to his Valentine, 
 or to earn alms of kudos by a spirited description of a
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 135 
 
 cricket match at which he himself went out for a 
 duck's egg. And by this time he is pretty sure to have 
 tried sending shy contributions to some more widely 
 circulated periodical, from which, if he took care to 
 enclose stamps and address, they come back " declined 
 with thanks," a sore courtesy of which for years he 
 may have hardening experience. 
 
 The ambitious youth is willing enough to take 
 steps towards a learned profession, because the way 
 is by a crowded yet spacious and well-turfed course 
 on which he may frisk and canter more at his own 
 will than in school harness. But his college career 
 is not always such a success as was looked for. Grace- 
 less indeed must be the spirit insensible among what 
 memories haunt our older Universities to awe it into 
 becoming modesty. 
 
 I could not print 
 Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps 
 Of generations of illustrious men, 
 Unmoved. I could not always lightly pass 
 Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept, 
 Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old, 
 That garden of great intellects, immoved. 
 
 At a wine-party in Milton's old rooms Wordsworth 
 was moved, as never " before that hour, or since " into 
 pouring out too free libations. The would-be Words- 
 worth or Milton may get drunk on enthusiasm, but 
 needs no wet towel round his head to aid him in 
 unsphering the spirit of Plato. He does a good deal 
 of reading by fits and starts, yet hardly such as will 
 pay in " Mods " or " Greats." He plucks at the 
 blossom rather than the fruit of the flying term. In 
 the vacation, he quite agrees that one impulse from 
 a vernal wood may teach him more than all the sages 
 can. He has wilful ways that lead him into disfavour
 
 136 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 with the college authorities ; and it sometimes comes 
 to a consilium abeundi, as in the case of Shelley and 
 of Landor. In the end, he is like to leave the University 
 without honours, or without a degree, as did Swin- 
 bui'ne and Stevenson in our time, and many more 
 in the past. Milton and Goldsmith are said to have 
 had weals of grudge laid on their minds by actual 
 blows at the hands of College Solomons. The 
 brilliant Mr. Pendennis of Boniface was even plucked, 
 to the horror of his worldly-wise uncle, till assured 
 that it had not " been done in public." I have 
 known a poet who afterwards won a fellowship but 
 was plucked for his " Little Go," as not sufficiently 
 well up in the kings of Israel. The sensitive scholar, 
 proof against intellectual ordeals, has often had to 
 undergo bitter indignities as sizar or servitor, enter- 
 ing at a gate of humility left ajar for the like of 
 him. Looking back afterwards on these days, such 
 a one may take a rather critical view of his alma 
 mater, and in particular has no great opinion of the 
 dons. 
 
 Here was Labour, his own bondslave ; Hope 
 That never set the pains against the prize ; 
 Idleness halting with his weary clog, 
 And poor misguided Shame, and witless Fear, 
 And simple Pleasure foraging for Death ; 
 Honour misplaced, and Dignity astray ; 
 Feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity and guile 
 Murmm'ing submission, and bald government, 
 (The idol weak as the idolater) 
 And Decency and Custom starving Truth, 
 And blind Authority beating with his stafi 
 The child that might have led him ; Emptiness 
 Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth 
 Left to herself unheard of and unknown. 
 
 More often than not, perhaps, authors owe little to
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 137 
 
 school or college. WTiat sort of schooling had Bunyan 
 and Benjamin Franklin, Holcroft and Cobbett, Burns 
 and Hogg ? Scotland, of course, — thanks in part to 
 her parish dominies and homespun divines, — ^lias had 
 a long succession of gifted sons of her hard soil, like 
 the polyglottic Dr. John Brown, first of a learned line, 
 who taught himself Greek on the sheep-runs of Glen 
 Farg; and that other herd-loon Alexander Murray, 
 whose native Galloway heath shows a monument to 
 his achievements as an Orientalist. In imaginative 
 literature, to be sure, one need not wonder at the 
 success of self-educated genius. But if there be one 
 line in which a classical education ought to " pay," 
 it is the study of language, and, strangely enough, 
 some of the best-known English philologists of our 
 time had few scholarly advantages. A late pundit, 
 who revolutionized the study of English grammar in 
 schools, was said to have begun life in the humblest 
 toils, and to the end dropped his hs like leaves in 
 Valambrosa, a fault that usually counts as hall-mark of 
 educational deficiency. I once heard repeated before 
 him the well-worn story about a certain Master of the 
 Rolls exclaiming " 'Ere comes that 'orrid 'umbug, — 
 'umming 'is 'oly 'ymns — 'ow I 'ate 'im ! " but that 
 jovial grammarian made bold to question the legend : 
 " 'E didn't drop 'is hs ; I've often 'card 'im ! " Of 
 another living teacher of our language, it is told that at 
 sixteen he could not read or write. A third such, his 
 name known over Europe, informs me that he had no 
 schooling after the age of thirteen. Two of the three 
 Editors to whom Oxford is fain to entrust its Dictionary 
 are, so to speak, outsiders. George Borrow seems to 
 have learned more among tinkers, gypsies and other 
 disreputable vagabonds than at school. This is not 
 so surprising when an old schoolmaster of my own,
 
 138 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 D'Ao^-cy W. Thompson, who turned out an accomplished 
 scholar and linguist, after all speaks ruefully of his 
 long and elaborate education as chiefly calculated for 
 stuffing him into a " useless University Prize Pig." 
 In his day, he asserts, he spent twelve weary school 
 years learning what might have been mastered in half 
 the time, to be quickly forgotten by the majority of 
 his schoolfellows ; then at a famous alma mater, now 
 no doubt more awake, one " might attend for a year 
 the classical lectures of a College Tutor or a University 
 Professor without one sentence falling from the lips 
 of either that was worth picking up, except for the 
 purpose of throwing out of window." 
 
 To tell the truth — leaving out of view the curriculum 
 of science on which our poetic soul is less likely to enter 
 himself — what most men best acquire at universities 
 is mainly the not being afraid of big words, so im- 
 pressive to the rest of the world. The more scholarly 
 students learn rather careful respect for little words. 
 They gain fellowships, lectureships, stay " up " in a 
 somewhat enervating air, each in time by dint of pick- 
 ing his words and neatly arranging his thoughts, able 
 to bring out his well-bound volume of verses or his 
 diligently-edited text, that give him a creditable but 
 limited reputation. This is the man of letters ; the 
 author's ambition, even when not clear about the 
 difference between iambics and anapaests, is to write 
 songs and stories that will make his name a household 
 word over half the world, so he is rather too ready to 
 turn up his nose at that — 
 
 — trade in classic niceties, 
 The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 
 From languages that want the Uving voice 
 To carry meaning to the natural heart. 
 
 Of course he has been writing all this time, to the
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 139 
 
 detriment of his reading, confined much to congenial 
 books which he fondly imitates, playing " sedulous 
 ape " to the poet or romancer in vogue. University 
 magazines are started a advertisements of talents 
 like his. From his ark he sends out doves of verse and 
 prose, that for long show a strong homing tendency, 
 till at length one may bring back an olive leaf from 
 some metropolitan editor. The local press is perhaps 
 open to him, so long as he be content to prophesy in 
 his own country gratis, and in a strain not too loudly 
 oracular, for at this stage genius is often found genera- 
 ting a gas that mixes in common air to go off with a 
 scandalous bang. The worst thing that can happen 
 to him may be injudicious relatives providing means 
 for a callow flight into publication, when he little 
 knows what future shame will cost him his pride to 
 see himself untimely in print. 
 
 But even if prosaic elders look askance, rather, on 
 his cacoethes, they cannot suppress it, as he will after- 
 wards wish to have suppressed his first volume. 
 Cowley offered himself as a poet before reaching his 
 teens. Pope published a poem written in boyhood ; 
 and William CuUen Bryant was hardly fourteen when 
 he came before the world with verses that next year 
 got into a second edition. Tennyson and his brothers 
 found a publisher in their schooldays. William Hone, 
 whose future works were to be less remunerative, 
 made a few shillings by a tiny publication at the age of 
 twelve. Connop ThirlwaU had printed his first book 
 while still on the threshold of his teens. Even younger, 
 Pic de la IVIirandola was renowned as a precocious poet, 
 though one is not sure if he at once got into print. 
 Lope de Vega is said to have dictated some lines before 
 he could write, and to have composed a play at the age 
 of twelve : he must indeed have begun early to turn out
 
 140 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 all that stands in his name. The Due de Maine was 
 a prince, who had a better chance than most of us to 
 bring out his " Divers works of a seven-year old 
 author ; " he became a colonel at five, and governor of 
 a province at the ripe age of twelve. Master Francis 
 Hawldns, under Charles I., before he was ten, translated 
 from the French The Youth's Behaviour, a work that 
 went through several editions, and let us hope the 
 juvenile editor always behaved himself according to 
 its excellent precepts. Master John Ruskin was only 
 seven when he wrote verses that came to be printed. 
 Browning took to it at the age of five, and could 
 never remember a time when his eye was not fixed 
 on Parnassus. At the same ripe age R. L. Stevenson 
 dictated a History of Moses, which he could hardly 
 spell. 
 
 In stolid British circles, indeed, too rathely budding 
 authorship seems at the present day in danger of being 
 nipped by the reproach of priggishness, a symptom 
 less diagnosed by our ancestors, unless in such shrewd 
 proverbs as " ill weeds do grow apace" — " soon ripe, 
 soon rotten " and the like, that did not always fit the 
 case of the above-mentioned authors. But one reads 
 of a French boy who started a newspaper at the age of 
 five, and at ten another which has gone on for five 
 years under the ambitious title of Journal des Deux 
 Mondes, to become a paying property that brings in 
 200 francs per annum as pocket money for its editor 
 and chief contributor. And American newspapers 
 exult over an infant phenomenon who began to read 
 at two, to write at three, and forthwith to rhyme, to 
 speak in public at five, at eight knew a language for 
 every year of her scholarly life, — including Esperanto, 
 of which she became an earnest advocate,— and by 
 the mature age of nine had published two or three
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 141 
 
 books, giving to a gaping world such verses as — 
 
 What curious birds are common hens ! 
 
 They make good broth and even pens, 
 
 They have no teeth, no hair, no nose, 
 
 But sport a comb red as a rose. 
 
 They have no arms or funny bones 
 
 That cause folks to let forth groans, etc., etc. 
 
 Such prodigies, like those wonderful calculating 
 boys, may not make good their early promise. But 
 real poetesses have sometimes blossomed early. 
 Mrs. Barrett Browning had an epic privately printed 
 at the age of eleven. Mrs. Norton's first production 
 was from the pen of a thirteen-year old. At fourteen, 
 Mrs. Hemans began with a quarto of verse, to be so 
 harshly reviewed that she took to her bed, a touch of 
 poetic nature that shows her own sister to the sons of 
 Apollo. We cannot, to be sure, produce so many in- 
 stances here, since, through the greater part of literary 
 history, the daughters of Sappho were not encouraged 
 in putting themselves forward unless as accompanists 
 to their brothers' performances. 
 
 When we come to a qualitative rather than a quan- 
 titative analysis, genius seems not so clearly precocious. 
 Some of the best known and most beloved authors 
 might have left large families in the flesh before rear- 
 ing their famous offspring of imagination. We know 
 what a stage of life Dante had reached when he put 
 in his best title to immortality. We hardly know 
 when Bunyan began to see his visions, but he seems 
 not to have dreamed them out till shut up in a certain 
 den. Sir Walter Raleigh was another writer who sang 
 loudest in a cage. Izaak Walton had retired from his 
 shop before he endeared himself as The Complete 
 Angler. Cowper was quite an old gentleman when he 
 showed what melody could soothe his madness.
 
 142 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Rousseau was getting on to fifty before he caught the 
 ear of Europe. Sterne was about the same age when 
 he burst out of his parsonage with Tristram Shandy. 
 Scott's fruit set early, but he was long in coming into 
 full bearing. Some authors, like Camoens and Cer- 
 vantes, have had harsher tasks in youth to keep them 
 from strictly meditating the thankless muse. Some, 
 like Casanova, have done a good deal of sporting with 
 Amaryllis in the shade before putting it on unedify- 
 ing record ; others also, like Benvenuto Cellini and 
 Benjamin Franklin, are known in literature by works 
 the nature of which throws them late in the authors' 
 lives. Some authors, for the best part of their lives, 
 waste themselves in dry hack-work that might easily 
 be forgotten, had they not come to strike the oil well 
 of a Robinson Crusoe or a Vicar of Wakefield. Some 
 dally with a Muse in idler hours, prying or fumbling at 
 literary exercises, till in later days they sink a shaft 
 yielding such rich ore as the Essays of Elia or the 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Some, like Hum- 
 boldt, Darwin and Wallace, have wandered the world 
 to gather thoughts which they bring home to tend in 
 some quiet nook. 
 
 It is from life that authors have to learn before they 
 can teach to any purpose. Apprenticeship to life is 
 at the best a life-long job ; and just as most of us grow 
 more fitted to be journeymen, we find ourselves 
 called on to give up the business. Yet here we have all 
 helps in learning, the tradition of elders, good counsel, 
 wise saws, scriptures and examples always at hand, if 
 we would but profit by them. The author's apprentice- 
 ship to his trade is less well provided for. Seldom is 
 he reared at the knee of a fellow-craftsman, " born in 
 a library" as Lord Beaconsfield boasted himself. 
 There are exceptional cases : the Plinys, the Tassos,
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 143 
 
 the Corneille brothers, Fielding and his sister, the 
 Edgcworths, the Mills, the Coleridges, the Lyttons, 
 the Hoods, the Arnolds, the Trollopes, the Dumas, 
 the Daudets, Macaulay and his nephews, not all of 
 whom followed the models set by their kin. But 
 most authors seem a " sport " in their families, and 
 have to learn the rudiments of the craft for them- 
 selves, more often with ridicule than encouragement 
 from those around them. There are professors 
 and authorities, from Aristotle to modern Loci 
 critii ; but they hardly help the tyro with his 
 grammar ; and he is less like to make his first pot- 
 hooks and hangers from graceful models than from 
 bold half-text head-Hnes that catch an undiscrim- 
 inating eye. One has heard of a school for journalists ; 
 but the only school for authors is literature, in which 
 few make profitable progress till they have taken a 
 degree in the university of life. 
 
 As already said, we all begin with clumsy imitation, 
 and, following the ancestral development, most often 
 with verse. Lucky perhaps is he whom youthful 
 spirits prompt to the irreverent form of parody on 
 what strikes his feelings : the blessed sense of humour 
 implies a sense of proportion that gives promise of 
 in time correcting natural deficiencies of judgment, 
 when such bubbling ebullitions may have gathered 
 head as a geyser. Less hopeful seems the case of 
 fanciful young ladies and gentlemen who, with nothing 
 particular to complain of, are fain to be as sad as 
 night and to indulge a wanton turn for peering at life 
 through sentimentally-smoked glasses. In leafy glades 
 and blossoming bowers, youth does not shrink from 
 dalliance with a soft-eyed muse of melancholy that 
 comes abhorred as a wrinkled hag to sit by the cold 
 hearth of age. Perhaps most authorlings see-saw
 
 144 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 between the two moods, a steady balance being no 
 property of their temperaments ; and that is well, for 
 what are the brightest rainbows of imagination but 
 sunlight seen through tears ? 
 
 All art is imitation ; but in other arts the beginner 
 imitates more purposefully, with more conscious 
 modesty, upon better chosen models and more often 
 under skilled direction. The would-be author has 
 rather to try his hand in secret, even in shame, himself 
 not always clear what he would be at. His first 
 attempt at fashioning a Mercury is as like to be a 
 failure as Lucian's, but less like to have brought to bear 
 on it such critical correction as indeed turned Lucian 
 at once from the practice of an art in which failure 
 was made so painfully obvious. What are the rhymer's 
 means of knowing whether he have made a spoon or 
 spoiled a horn ? The very emotions with which he 
 daubs his sketch blind him to its effect. Bountiful 
 nature has given him a little tip of sensibility that 
 in his estimation outweighs untold riches of Potosi. 
 What costs him a thrill so fresh, so strange, so entranc- 
 ing, he is fain to take for a thing of value ; and the 
 mockery that may abash him for a moment, he can 
 soon despise as not raised by connoisseurs. If his 
 work do fall into the hands of those who can estimate 
 it, they are more apt to smile or shrug in silence, 
 knowing by their own experience how its blunders 
 are to be amended by time and practice more surely 
 than by blame. They care not much to waste words 
 on the callow fledgling that may incline to question a 
 depreciating estimate, for it has already been explained 
 how the economy of nature must endow destined 
 authors with a good conceit of themselves. Many 
 young authors start with no subject to write about 
 but their own personality, one of the highest interest
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 145 
 
 to themselves but not so to other people : they are 
 long blind as puppies to the dictum of a wise critic 
 that " the artist-period begins precisely at the point 
 where the pleasure of expressing self ends." 
 
 Then most students of an art that has no Academy 
 are slow in taking to draw from the life, keeping an 
 eye rather on the lay figures of literature. Our imita- 
 tion is commonly at second-hand through some 
 favourite author, maybe most admired as distorting 
 the shape and heightening the tints of nature : happier 
 and rarer the lot of innate genius or grace of environ- 
 ment fostering a familiarity with the noblest types. 
 In any case, some mere exercises are needful to gain 
 freedom of hand and sureness of eye. So much can be 
 taught at school, easily learned by who has the faculty. 
 But when it comes to copying style and sentiment, 
 the young author is prone to study showy designs 
 that catch an untrained fancy, then to exaggerate or 
 burlesque the faults of his chosen model. 
 
 What the beginner may not want is boldness, 
 prompting him to attempts on a scale far beyond his 
 pigments and canvas. " I wrote ", confesses Leigh 
 Hunt, " ' odes ' because Collins and Gray had written 
 them ; ' pastorals ' because Pope had written them, 
 'blank verse' because Akenside and Thomson had 
 written blank verse, and a ' Palace of Pleasure ' be- 
 cause Spenser had written a ' Bower of Bliss.' " The 
 penitent now before the reader is, also, aghast to 
 recall his own juvenile scrawlings and their futile 
 ambition. At the age of ten, or thereabouts, he 
 essayed an imaginative sketch of the progress of man- 
 kind, in four copybook pages or so, which had at 
 least the effect of astonishing a schoolmaster. 
 Later on, I planned an epic poem on Man, with a not 
 too clear eye on Milton. There were sentimental 
 
 L
 
 146 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 verses, of course, after Byron and Tennyson : Words- 
 worth and Browning had not yet swum into my ken. 
 I even experimented in unauthorized forms, one, for 
 instance, that rang the changes upon a single rhyme, 
 fair, hair, rare, spare and so on, with reference to a 
 Dulcinea I had set up for myself with as little encour- 
 agement as Don Quixote. I sought to flirt with 
 history in the flamboyant guise of Carlyle's Frederick, 
 read stealthily at night when I should have been 
 asleep. I vaguely recall novels begun in the style of 
 Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Kingsley and Dumas. 
 There were essays after the Spectator, and satires after 
 Horace or Pope. Homer and Virgil, I blush to tell, 
 moved me rather to irreverent parody. Of all these 
 scribblings, one only was finished and preserved, to 
 be licked into shape for print — a tale of American 
 adventure entitled Kidnapped, that was eventually 
 published for eclipse in the shadow of a greater name- 
 sake, whose author must have been once a small 
 schoolfeUow of mine, unknown to me as yet to fame. 
 The survival of this opuscule I owed to the admiration 
 of a brother, who had the gift of writing a fair hand, 
 and industry to copy it all out in a form still extant. 
 He himself had a less precocious turn for authorship, 
 and has since printed many a page, who even in those 
 days " dropped into " a rhyming story of our daily life, 
 of which he may not recollect the first two lines, here 
 saved from oblivion by fraternal gratitude : — 
 
 At twenty minutes to eight o'clock, 
 The servant wakes us with a knock. 
 
 In a school boarding-house never holding more 
 than a dozen boys, at least three of us at one time had 
 a try at writing prose or verse on our own prompting, 
 which goes to show the propensity no such rare one
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 147 
 
 among sons of Adam. Yet only in some does it 
 prove overmastering ; in many it is choked by thorns 
 or withers as soon as the sun grows hot ; in others 
 it grows even on stony ground, and where it finds any 
 depth of earth, such a one seems doomed to be an 
 author. 
 
 Few of us but have to burn a good deal of what we 
 once thought uncommon fine ; some of us are fain to 
 bury what we still admire and think fine but nobody 
 else thinks so. There are authors who never bear 
 fruit good for the food of man, unless some medlar 
 not ripe till it is rotten. One has seen gifts of sensi- 
 bility and imagination running quickly to seed, to 
 idle dreams, to gibbering folly, to fatal corruption. 
 He whose gift is not to cumber the ground, must dig 
 about it and dung it ; and it is there that the chance 
 of experience sometimes serv^p him better than the 
 written Georgics he may consult for instruction. Even 
 when he do not know the Latin name for parsley, 
 by trying he can find out how to protect his melons 
 and to prune his roses, where to plant sun-flowers 
 and where lilies of the valley, what soil suits cabbages 
 if not laurels. He may get on faster for hints from a 
 practised gardener ; but it is the sweat of his own 
 brow that mostly matters. An eye on formal precepts 
 is not amiss ; but in the world of books his mind may 
 grow almost as unconsciously as plants suck fatness 
 from earth and air. If only he will not be in a hurry 
 to bring forward his productions. The best flavoured 
 fruit, as he cannot at once understand, is that ripen- 
 ing slowly through trials of wind and weather, not 
 blossoming rashly in a too genial sun to be nipped by 
 fro'^ts that come in the mo't hopeful sp"''ins:. 
 
 Half by instinct, half by eiTo^t, the author has to 
 learn his trade as best he can, the labour he delights
 
 148 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 in physicking the pain. From other labour he is apt 
 to shrink, and to despise as dull all lives deaf to his 
 vocation. 
 
 Is there who ne'er those mystic transports felt 
 
 Of solitude and melancholy born ? 
 
 He need not woo the muse, he is her scorn. 
 
 The sophist's rope of cobweb he shall twine, 
 
 Mope o'er the schoolman's peevish page, or mourn 
 
 And delve for life in Mammon's dirty mine ; 
 
 Sneak with the scoundrel fox or grunt with glutton swine. 
 
 The poet's soul is sadly apt to be vexed when it 
 comes to putting that soaring prancer into some kind 
 of worldly harness. Still more vexed may be the 
 mind of parents concerned for his future career. Such 
 a youngster's days of pupilage have been already 
 shown as not always promising. From the first 
 his elders may have had cause for concern in the 
 reports he brings from school, still more in anxious 
 consideration to what tasks his fitful cleverness may 
 be turned with pecuniary advantage. Professions, 
 trades, even handicrafts are proposed to him ; 
 in innumerable cases he has had to stoop to a 
 clerk's desk, if not to a shoemaker's bench. The 
 unsteady youth proves loth to settle down to any 
 kind of industry, heedless as to chances of getting on 
 in life, careless as to future bread and butter. He is 
 put into an office, and we know how he pens a stanza 
 when he should be engrossing or casting up figures. 
 He scribbles a tale on his employer's letter paper. 
 No service will suit him but that of the Muses, which 
 may prove a longer apprenticeship than he reckons 
 on. In former days he was often fain to become an 
 usher, like the Vicar of Wakefield's son, but was 
 soon like to be disgusted with the task of teaching 
 what he himself had never laboured to learn. He
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 149 
 
 went up to London with vaguest hopes of finding it 
 paved with gold, hopes which in our time have a 
 surer foundation in the Fleet Street that eclipses 
 Grub Street traditions. Sometimes, in hasty despair 
 of getting his own way, he has enlisted or run off to 
 sea, thereby putting his neck under a yoke far heavier 
 than that of the business he scorns, yet not seldom 
 doing better for himself than he knew, since thus 
 he came by some rough knowledge of life, which in 
 time might give him matter to write about. An 
 exceptional instance seems to be John Hamilton 
 Reynolds, who after penning stanzas not without 
 approval, and being found worthy to collaborate with 
 his brother-in-law Hood and his friend Keats, fell to 
 engrossing in a lawyer's office, then lived divorced 
 from the Muse for many years to die obscurely as a 
 County-court official. 
 
 A whole legion of authors, from Bacon to Dickens, 
 have had to do with the law, in its upper or lower 
 walks, with a good chance of gathering its straw to 
 make their bricks. The profession that ought to be 
 most helpful in the study of human natm^e is that of 
 medicine ; and the young aspirant to letters might 
 be reminded of Sir Thomas Browne, if less confidently 
 of Sir Samuel Garth and his Dispensary, of Ai-buthnot, 
 Goldsmith, Smollett, Keats, 0. W. Holmes, not to 
 speak of our present poet-laureate and other living 
 authors. As for parsons, they are all authors ex officio. 
 So the parents and guardians of would-be poets have 
 good authority for advising them to secure a firm 
 standing point from which to try moving the world 
 after business hours. 
 
 There is something pathetic, did we consider it 
 rightly, in this old story of conflict between the well- 
 meaning prudence of elders and the rash eagerness of
 
 150 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 offspring blessed or cursed by tastes and instincts out of 
 the common run. Crabbed age sniffs at visions of fame 
 which, in ordinary experience, butter no parsnips ; 
 while eager youth, with the sun in its eyes, has no 
 patience to fix them on the solid prospects pointed 
 out at a distance. Petrarch's father threw his son's 
 books into the fire, but rescued two of them in pity 
 for the poet's lamentations. Tasso's father was a poet 
 himself who, taught no doubt by his own experience, 
 tried in vain to turn the author of Jerusalem Delivered 
 into a lawyer. Boccaccio, Aiiosto and many another 
 were bootlessly bound to the same sober trade. M. 
 Arouet, the notary, thought his son lost when he 
 showed a taste for good society and writing verses, to 
 be signed Voltaire. Diderot's father wept for joy to 
 see his boy come home from school loaded with prizes, 
 yet afterwards he fell out with the lad who would 
 neither be a priest nor a lawyer. Mr. Scott W. S., as 
 we gather from Redgauntlet, shook his head over the 
 wanderings of an apprentice who after all would do 
 well by law as by literature. We know how Sir 
 Timothy Shelley looked askance on his son's unprofit- 
 able propensities. Heine's uncle threw away much 
 pains in trying to win his nephew to give up all other 
 letters for L.S.D. Pope's parents, on the contrary, 
 seem rather to have encouraged their young hopeful 
 in a career that led him to much gentility ; but the 
 precocious poet himself came to write : "I believe 
 that if anyone, early in life, should contemplate the 
 dangerous fate of authors, he would scarce be of their 
 number on any consideration. The life of a wit is a 
 warfare upon earth." 
 
 From a business point of view, those seniors were 
 often in the right of it, yet I have known a heavy 
 father, said to have offered his rhyming son £500
 
 THE AUTHOR'S APPRENTICESHIP 151 
 
 a year to sit down in his own business, who lived 
 to see that son making thrice tenfold as much, 
 not indeed as a poet but mainly as a popular play- 
 wright. There are prizes as well as blanks in this 
 lottery so much distrusted by calculating heads. And 
 if the would-be author here needs a word of hearten- 
 ing against what I shall put before him in tlie next 
 chapter, let us listen to wise words offered for the 
 consideration of another kind of genius that as often 
 " shies from all the cut-and-dry professions and 
 inclines insensibly toward that career of art which 
 consists only in the tasting and recording of experi- 
 ence." My authority here is such an idle apprentice 
 to law as was R. L. Stevenson, who judges that if a 
 young ass must seek the freedom of the wilderness, 
 there are mirages more flinty and thirsty than litera- 
 ture. 
 
 This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience 
 of all other honest trades, frequently exists alone, and so existing, 
 it will pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it 
 is not to be regarded ; it is not a vocation but a temptation ; and 
 when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so 
 properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not im- 
 probably some similar passage in his own experience. For the 
 temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare. 
 But again we have vocations which are imperfect ; we have men 
 whose minds are bound up, not so much in any Art, as in the 
 general ars artiutn and common base of all creative work ; who 
 wiU now dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and 
 anon will be inditing a sonnet : all these with equal interest, 
 often with genuine knowledge. And of this temper, when it 
 stands alone, I find it difficult to speak, but I should counsel such 
 a one to take to letters, for in hterature (which drags with so wide 
 a net) all his information may be found some day useful, and if 
 he should go on as he has begun, and turn at last into the critic, he 
 will have learned to use the necessary tools. 
 
 Not quite so approvable by parents, perhaps, is
 
 152 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 his dogma that " if a man love the labour of any trade, 
 apart from any question of success or fame, the gods 
 have called him." Literature is a trade that seems to 
 demand only casual and agreeable labour ; and the 
 doctrine above stated will readily be received by those 
 whose fortune is to be full of oats, or whose taste is 
 for grazing on wild oats, the nature of the animal 
 always being to kick and fling a little before settling 
 down to any steady jog-trot. There are those, as 
 Stevenson says, in whom the coltish habit may " pass 
 gently away," under the restraint of some not too un- 
 genial harness. Others break loose from all halters, 
 and scamper off sniffing for a pasture of which they 
 know not how thistly it may prove. " Scribbling is 
 as impossible to cure as the gout," was the experience 
 of that fellow-patient Fielding, who adds — " and as 
 sure a sign of poverty as the gout of riches." So too 
 few eager spirits bitten by this gadfly have the sense 
 to do their scribbling at spare moments, like Sir 
 Theodore Martin, who did so not without profit while 
 attending to a more profitable business that for seventy 
 years brought him in a handsome income. Such 
 considerations now call for a look at what return an 
 author can lay before commissioners of income tax.
 
 VI 
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 
 
 At first our hungry authorling is content with a taste 
 of praise ; he is even observed to go long on a windy 
 diet of his own satisfaction ; but sooner or later he 
 wakes up with appetite for a peck of more solid prov- 
 ender, and desires what the Americans call " com- 
 pensation " for the labour he delights in. And there's 
 the rub ! He feels that his indentures to literature 
 should be sealed with gold, not always forthcoming. 
 Sweet is the watch-dog's honest bark, and a great 
 many other things are mentioned by poets as most 
 grateful under certain circumstances ; yet perhaps 
 if they told the whole truth, nothing in their expe- 
 rience has come more welcome — unless the proof- 
 sheet — than the first cheque received for their verses. 
 I knew a highly respectable solicitor who all his life 
 wore at his watch-chain a sovereign he had earned in 
 youth as price of an article, fondly bearing it for a 
 charm by which from time to time he could forget the 
 dusty paths of his prosperous career. Again, I knew a 
 clergyman commissioned by a certain princess to 
 write a short letter to the London papers stating the 
 part she had played in three coronations. For this 
 communication one paper sent him an honorarium of 
 eighteenpence, and it was refreshing to witness the 
 pride and joy with which my old friend exhibited the 
 
 153
 
 154 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 first money his pen had ever fairly earned in three 
 score and ten years. So far has opinion veered since 
 the day when a nobleman or gentleman dabbling in 
 literature abandoned his share of the profit to the 
 publisher, as a busy citizen may bestow on the usher 
 the groat earned by serving on a sheriff's jury. It 
 now appears indeed as if authorship tends to become 
 a privilege of the aristocracy, the plutocracy and 
 other men of means, who need leave no more profit- 
 able calling " for this idle trade." They can afford 
 to publish books. 
 
 Here my considerations are fain to take the form 
 of an affectionate exhortation to young authors, to 
 whom, from the character of my own work, I have 
 been " much exposed," like the Duke of Wellington. 
 So many have written to me, so trustfully, so hope- 
 fully, so eagerly ; some have sought my counsel in 
 person, and I fear have gone away with a grudge 
 against me as disposed to quench their aspirations 
 with a dash of very lukewarm water. I have ex- 
 pounded to them the commonplaces of experience : 
 that literature may make a good stick but a bad 
 crutch ; that Helicon is not Pactolus ; that even 
 true genius may find the greatest difficulty in getting 
 discounted the bills it draws on posterity ; that a 
 volume of verses bears no close relation to a cheque- 
 book, and so forth ; but it was seldom they cared to 
 believe me. Now, once and for all, I am going to call 
 evidence in the case, bearing out what a certain author 
 saw cause to write three centuries ago. " It is but a 
 thriftless and a thankless occupation this writing of 
 books : a man were better to sit singing in a cobbler's 
 shop, for his pay is certain, a penny a patch." What 
 I chiefly advise those clients of mine is to sit a while 
 in some shop or other for punctual pay, till they are
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 155 
 
 sure their singing will bring in pennies enough by 
 itself. Their writing should be all the better if they 
 take time for reading, also for thinking, and none the 
 worse if they pick up some knowledge of the world, 
 even were it such as lies open to side-glances from a 
 cobbler's stall. 
 
 The first question I would put delicately to untried 
 writers is — what do they propose to write about ? 
 They will early have used up their original stock of 
 rhyming addresses to the moon and such-like. Their 
 stories are too much in a minor key, or strained too 
 high on falsetto notes, to get admiring audience. 
 As yet they have gathered little wool by moonlight, 
 and have nothing to spin into fiction but their own 
 threads of fragile and fluttering emotion, with which 
 Arachne herself could hardly contrive a pleasing web. 
 Still less likely are they to have picked up enough use- 
 ful knowledge to fill their shop-window. The best 
 of it is usually some vague idea of copying one or 
 other popular author of the moment. In nine cases 
 out of ten, our young author has as yet no promising 
 pigs of his own to drive to market, while he is not 
 sure of the way to his market, and quite unaware 
 what a bad market this is in which demand, except for 
 a rare line of wares, will be seldom brisker than supply. 
 I recall one particularly confident bard, who sent me 
 from South Africa a small volume of poems very 
 badly printed at Kimberley, along with some opinions 
 of the local press, the most emphatic describing his 
 work as " a mixture of bosh and blasphemy : " this 
 revelation of genius he desired me to have at once 
 reprinted in London and to send him the proceeds 
 without delay. That, of course, made a mere min- 
 iature of Sir Walter Scott's experience, when from 
 America he had to pay five pounds postage on each
 
 156 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 of two bulky parcels, sent by successive posts for more 
 safety, the contents being duplicate copies of a play 
 entitled The Cherokee Lovers, which the youthful 
 author desired him to tittivate for sale to a British 
 publisher, and to arrange for its production on the 
 London stage, duly adorned with a prologue and 
 epilogue from his own pen. 
 
 Most men who have tumbled or struggled into 
 authorship would give such aspirants the same un- 
 palatable advice, viz. : to be in no hurry to woo the 
 uncertain Muse with a purpose of wedding ; to try 
 their hands rather at some trade, profession or business 
 wherein all the same they can be getting together 
 and feeding up a marketable pig or two, and meanwhile 
 may be learning how the market goes. Such sound 
 economic doctrine one preaches from authoritative 
 texts ; but in many cases one can say with Crabbe — 
 who had his own sore experience in this matter to 
 preach from — " I preach for ever, but I preach in 
 vain." 
 
 A famous American author, whose genial and sym- 
 pathetic nature brought him many communications 
 from the " Gifted Hopkins " he has made into a type, 
 tells us that he found himself sometimes rewarded 
 with abuse for the delicate consideration with which 
 he had tried to extinguish, or to trim, the literary 
 aspirations of uninvited correspondents. It has 
 already been explained that the young author is apt 
 to be sanguine, impatient, rash, convinced most 
 clearly of his own merits, while not without fond 
 admiration for models whom he may come in time to 
 hold cheaper. He willingly remembers how Byron 
 woke to hnd himself famous ; how Schiller set all 
 Burschendom afire with his youthful play of The 
 Robbers ; how Fanny Burney burst into note by a
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 157 
 
 girlish novel ; how soon Dickens came to his own. 
 He forgets to note these as exceptional cases. What 
 should be taken to heart is that Milton's most famous 
 work was written in his last days ; that Johnson learned 
 in suffering what he taught in song, " Slow rises worth, 
 by poverty depressed ; " that Wordsworth and 
 Browning reached their zenith hailed by a few watchers 
 of the skies, but without coming into the paying 
 public's ken. 
 
 To entice the eager author, indeed, he has the 
 example of more fortunate poets, who on the whole 
 are an early- flowering stock, but do not often com- 
 mand high prices. The best fruit of the novelists, 
 as a rule, is produced at a later season. Cervantes 
 had nearly sixty years of trials and adventures behind 
 him when he brought out Don Quixote. Fielding 
 had seen his best days before he wrote Tom Jones. 
 Goldsmith had not ten years to enjoy the fame of The 
 Vicar of Wakefield. Thackeray became famous with 
 Vanity Fair after spending half his literary life in 
 obscurer experiments. George Eliot was nearly forty 
 when she began to write her great novels. A popular 
 novelist of our generation was over sixty when he 
 struck into his vein. George Meredith came to be 
 honoured as President of the Authors' Society, after 
 being condemned for a great part of his life to such 
 drudgery as reading for a publisher. I read his Evan 
 Harrington in boyhood, but it was not till I had 
 turned middle age that his neighbour Grant Allen 
 and Henley's band of young critics blew for him the 
 first notes of praise that swelled into a " boom." 
 Not long before this recognition, the stock of one of 
 his principal novels had been burned in a fire at the 
 publisher's, who remarked to a friend of mine that 
 it was no great loss. One could give many other
 
 158 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 instances of a consideration offered by another 
 deservedly popular author, Mr. Zangwill, that 
 "literary value is unrelated to the commercial;" 
 but let us come at once to figures and facts which, 
 as a poet admits, are " chiels that winna ding." 
 
 The trustful youngsters who invited me to put 
 them in the way of at once making a living by their 
 bent for writing, usually assumed that I have reaped 
 a rich harvest on the fields where they would glean 
 in turn. Let me undeceive them. I thank the 
 goodness and the grace that made me not wholly 
 dependent on my pen, yet I have plied it as indus- 
 triously as any hack-writer in Grub Street. After a 
 good many years of diligent work, during which I 
 had kept account of my gains, I had the curiosity to 
 sum them up with the result that, taking one year 
 with another, I seemed to have made an income of 
 about one hundred guineas per annum, and this 
 without setting down fer contra many such incidental 
 expenses as books, stationery, postage, office-room 
 and general wear and tear of one's necessary equip- 
 ments, not to speak of expensive journeys that 
 supplied part of my raw material, nor the prime cost 
 of my education in spelling, rhyming, quoting and so 
 forth : items which, in a strictly kept ledger, would 
 over-balance the whole amount shown as profit. 
 May one not say that any clerk in a publisher's, who 
 had been as long at the business, might look for a 
 higher salary ? 
 
 Even if authors were apt at keeping account books, 
 these are naturally not as open to the public as their 
 other works ; but from casual disclosures lately made 
 on this head, I can comfort myself by considering how 
 I am not w^orse ofi; than some more deserving com- 
 petitors. I see it stated that Lafcadio Hearn, whose
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 159 
 
 work lias come into so mucli admiration in our genera- 
 tion, made rather less than myself, about £100 a year. 
 John Addington Symonds' literary income is put at 
 the same figure ; and he was at more expense for 
 culture than most of us. Professor Church, a diligent 
 labourer, has autobiographically set down his average 
 receipts at £135 a year. George Gissing's New Grub 
 Street is a work of fiction which this author was well 
 able to base upon human and other documents ; and 
 his account makes but a beggarly one. James Payn, 
 modestly reckoning himself among the first dozen or 
 so of popular story-tellers in his time, reports that 
 for more than thirty years he made an average 
 income of £1,500, as to which he does not complain, but 
 justly notes it as small compared with the gains of 
 successful men in other professions. 
 
 The case of the poets is notorious : their virtue has in 
 nine cases out of ten to be its own reward. Tennyson's 
 must be taken for a phenomenal instance, who was 
 such a keen man of business, or so well advised, that 
 he could afford a coronet, after ruining three publishers, 
 as the jibe went. Most bards win nothing but a cro^Ti 
 of parsley or wild olive ; if they make any money, it 
 is not till they have sung themselves hoarse ; and all 
 their lives they may have to publish at their own 
 expense. I think it was Aubrey de Vere who declared 
 that he could always double his income by laying 
 down his pen ; even as a briefless barrister opined 
 that he was sure of being £200 a year to the good 
 by not going circuit. Are there not Crabbes and 
 Chattertons starving among us this day on a succes 
 d'estime ? There are no sinecure offices going nowa- 
 days, such as that on which Wordsworth lived while 
 the Lakeland Muse, through his most fruitful years, 
 hardly could keep him in shoe leather.
 
 160 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 In history and philosophy, also, one could mention 
 famous and esteemed works that did not pay. James 
 Spedding, Bacon's advocate and commentator, tells 
 us that when he published a book " I have either 
 simply given the work away, reserving nothing for 
 myself except the privilege of being supplied with 
 copies at the trade price, or I have paid the expenses 
 myself and published by commission." The author 
 of Erewhon, now in such good odour with booksellers, 
 lamented to me how he had to publish most of his 
 books at his own loss. It is well known how Herbert 
 Spencer toiled in poverty for years at his great work, 
 though he did not pass away before winning some 
 modest reward for his labours. Such a leviathan of 
 literature as Thomas Carlyle made out of it for the 
 best part of his life less than £200 a year, so he had 
 reason to be bitter in his warning — " Not one literary 
 man in a hundred ever becomes popular or successful 
 at all." Every publisher, no doubt, could tell of books 
 that ought not to have been a loss to him, as they were. 
 
 It is the novelists who make most money, one hears ; 
 and their shining output proves a jack-o'-lantern lead- 
 ing many followers on to a Serbonian bog. The first 
 notable author I ever knew in the flesh was James 
 Grant, who startled my youthful ears by lamenting 
 that in his latter works he was not allowed " a single 
 damn " — had he lived to our time he might have sworn 
 at large in print. His Romance of War and the like 
 had such credit with readers in their teens, at least, 
 that when, expounding in that recondite work 
 Delectus the sentence " Isocrates sold one oration for 
 twenty talents," a certain dominie had reduced this 
 figure into current denomination, one of his scholars 
 exclaimed, " Oh, sir, what must James Grant get for 
 a book ! " Another boy, professing inside knowledge,
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 161 
 
 gave out among us that our favourite romancer had 
 contracted, for a salary of £500, to write two novels a 
 year ; but I doubt if that arrangement could hold 
 good to the end of his life. Anthony Trollope, who 
 had not yet swum into our ken, was then making, for 
 the first ten years of his career, something like the 
 price of his paper and ink, who, to be sure, lived to 
 earn some £3,000 a year. Without beating the bush 
 in surmises, let us take what Sir Walter Besant has 
 to tell us, who ought to know. In The Pen and the 
 Book, he calculates that there were some thirteen 
 hundred English- writing novelists at work, of whom 
 some dozen at the most gained large incomes, and sixty 
 or seventy might reach four figures in their return, 
 while rather more than twice as many made £400 a 
 year and upwards, two hundred had to content them- 
 selves with £100 a year or so, and the rest with " little 
 or nothing." 
 
 Since then Mr. Arnold Bennett has furnished a more 
 cheerful estimate. He states that over a hundred 
 novelists get £300 for every novel they write ; that a 
 certain number count their gains in thousands of 
 pounds, and that a handful run into five figures. One 
 popular story-teller he mentions as being recently 
 paid at the rate of three shillings a word, or thirty 
 shillings a line, an advance upon the sixpence 
 a word Louis Stevenson could command at the end 
 of his career. One shrinks from mentioning the 
 names of those millionaires, as some of them are 
 merely more or less facile writers who have had 
 the luck or the cleverness to hit a vein of popular 
 taste, not likely to be exploited in another gener- 
 ation, and in some cases soon worked out. At the 
 same time, the Author, that ought to be an authority, is 
 found qualifying as successful novelists those making 
 
 M
 
 1G2 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOKS 
 
 from £150 to £500 a year, which indeed is more 
 than Johnson or Goldsmith made, but a poor show 
 beside the income of a successful lawyer or doctor. 
 Johnson, in the days when he dined for eightpence, 
 got thirteen guineas for the Vanity of Human Wishes, 
 which nowadays he might have to print at his own 
 expen-e ; then, ten years later, Rasselas brought him 
 in a hundred pounds, when his position was so well 
 established that he could persuade a publisher to give 
 sixty pounds for the Vi'^ar of Wakefield. 
 
 It may be that since Besant's estimate was made, 
 the profit of novels has been raised by literary agents, 
 international copyright, and other machinery for 
 crushing a larger yield of gold from imaginative ore ; 
 but that profit seems not better distributed. There is 
 reason to fear, indeed, that through the arts of reclame 
 and the system of small profits and quick returns, the 
 few novelists who can command a large sale are 
 fattening at the expense of their less successful fellows. 
 The old three- volume nuisance had at least the advant- 
 age of helping beginners to come before the public, 
 while if novels are to be further reduced to a price 
 based on certainty of a huge sale, the smaller fry will 
 find getting into print harder than ever for them. As 
 it is, many of them are fain to take service v/ith manu- 
 facturers of fiction en masse, by whom each writer's 
 talent, sliced and dried, is passed through the mill as 
 a sort of literary copra. 
 
 Such light craft as stories, whether clipper-rigged 
 or barge-built, have the best chance of catching what 
 airs of fortune are astir in the literary world. The 
 success that carries most sail is of course a popular 
 play, by which one or two lucky authors of our time 
 have been rumoured to count their share of profit in 
 tens of thousand pounds. One such told me how he
 
 THE TRAi:>E OF AUTHOR 163 
 
 had six dramas running at once on different stages, 
 each of them dribbling so much nightly into his pocket. 
 But the dramatists' audiences are harder to tickle and 
 quicker to yawn than the reading public ; and, if all 
 tales be true, it is more a labour of Hercules to get 
 the ear of a manager than of a publisher, while the 
 risk of putting on a play far outweighs the production 
 of a volume. A certain familiarity with the stage, 
 too, seems necessary for the author who would enter 
 for this blue ribbon of his craft ; and there appear 
 to be other considerations, such as providing good 
 parts for the stars that sparkle in one or other theat- 
 rical firmament. So, on the whole, one can't count on 
 earning fame or fortune by such a tragedy or comedy 
 as the " commencing " author used to bring to town 
 in his saddle-bags. 
 
 What are we to say of solid literature, such as in 
 the opinion of some should monopolize this title ? 
 The general reader might be surprised to learn how 
 many useful and approved works have to come out 
 at the author's expense, seldom repaid him. His best 
 chance is to be employed by a publisher who keeps 
 an enterprising eye open for what pattern of gossip- 
 ing history, indiscreet biography, or smart writing 
 on things in general will be in brief demand at the 
 circulating libraries. Many a book which would not 
 stand upright by itself will do so as part of a series, 
 which it is the publisher's craft to plan. As a hint 
 of how cheap literary labour is for such imdertakings, 
 I may mention what a friend of mine imparts to me, 
 a man of university distinction and long literary prac- 
 tice : he wrote for a well known series two volumes 
 requiring historical research, each of them containing 
 nearly 60,000 words, and for each he was paid £?5, 
 which comes to exactly the proverbial penny-a-line.
 
 164 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 less than some music-hall lions get nightly for tickling 
 the ears of the vulgar with a single ditty. Another 
 thriving series of volumes, twice as large, costs £40, 
 I am creditably informed, for the literary labour of 
 each. I have beside me a volume of some 500 double- 
 columned small-print pages, stuffed full of dull but use- 
 ful information, the collection of it looking like a good 
 work, for which a slave of the pen was paid £35. One 
 could easily multiply such revelations ; but it is 
 enough to say what no one behind the scenes will 
 contradict, that most authors are glad to get anything 
 for their work, and that most books bring their author 
 next to no profit, unless in the experience of loss. 
 
 In Germany, it has been said, " there are too many 
 books, too many pages in each book, too many lines 
 in the page, too many words in the line, too many 
 letters in the word, and too much ink in the letter." 
 There would appear to be also too many authors dim- 
 ming their eyes over this heavy type, for I learn that 
 their earnings all round are still lower than ours. 
 From Paris comes a story I do not vouch for, that one 
 who had read through a book bought for a trifle on 
 the stalls by the Seine, found at the end two pages 
 stuck together so as to enclose notes for 3,000 francs, 
 with a note declaring that to be all the author's pen 
 had earned for him in half a century's work. In 
 France, where the business of authorship seems rather 
 better organized than with us, and where the period 
 of copyright is longer, M. D'Avenel, in his chapters 
 on Literary Property, as-erts that of the 1,500 members 
 of the Societe des gens de lettres, only 100 at the most 
 can live by their share of the 500,000 francs or so 
 annually collected and distributed by the Society, 
 which, however, it must be remembered, deals with 
 only part of its clients' gains. Below authors of this
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 165 
 
 rank, the same writer shows a proletariat of literary 
 hodmen eager to work for two sous a line. There, as 
 here, the only paying line is fiction, printed or acted. 
 Eveiywhere the same mournful truth stands confessed, 
 that authorship, in the lump, is a poor business. 
 So is gold mining, to be sure, for its main d'ceuvre ; 
 but the digger works doggedly on in hopes that his 
 next panful will turn out a nugget. In the end, as 
 often as not, he is fain to give up picking at claims on 
 his own account, and to hire himself to the combina- 
 tions of capital that can bring expensive machinery 
 and scientific enterprise to bear on the reef ; but 
 the hack-miner's wages, one understands, nourish no 
 day-dreams of Alnaschar. 
 
 Knowing how the matter stands, shall one not be 
 chary of sending a hopeful youth in search of oases 
 in a desert that yields so little pasture ? I have 
 often tried my best to put such a one in the way 
 of browsing : ours is a trade in which we are 
 constantly asked to recommend competitors to our 
 customers, and to give a leg up to rivals who presently 
 may be showing us their heels. But only once can I 
 recall a case in which I was able to help an outsider to a 
 good start, and he came to the post with a rare turn of 
 speed that needed nothing but heading him straight to 
 the goal. I may now mention his name — R.I. P. The 
 late Professor A. H. Keane, one of the best linguists 
 of our day, was brought up at the Propaganda in Rome 
 to be a Jesuit missionary, in sign of which vocation he 
 once showed me the Lord's Prayer written in more 
 than a hundred languages. Breaking with his Church, 
 repudiation by his family, and marriage, threw him on 
 the London literary market. My friend R. H. Quick, 
 of educational fame, asked me if I could find some 
 work for one who had shown his ability by letters in a
 
 166 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 periodical with which we were connected. At the 
 same time a pubHsher was looking out for some one 
 to translate and adapt a German book on Geography. 
 I introduced to him Keane, who tackled the task with 
 such success that from translator he soon became 
 editor, then in the next edition practically author of 
 the important work known as Stanford's Compendium 
 of Geography. 
 
 One of my ex-clients for advice comes back to 
 accuse me, after years spent on the paths he has made 
 out for himself. His report is that, what with one 
 thing and another, by pushing with publishers, by 
 waiting on editors, by keeping an eye open for every 
 chance, by sending in a paragraph here and a column 
 there, by despising no job as too petty, by taking no 
 rejection as final, he has after all made nearly as large 
 an income, with more toil, trouble and anxiety, than 
 he might have expected in the occupation which I 
 advised him not lightly to abandon. 
 
 One thing the young author must be warned to 
 expect, that pecuniary success is not likely to come 
 to him without industry. He looks forward to 
 daundering about sunny banks and braes where he can 
 at ease pick flowers of sentiment and fancy ; but in 
 real life the poet should learn to scorn delights and live 
 laborious days of study, experiment and strictly medi- 
 tating what may be a thankless muse. Anyhow, there 
 is little money to be made of toying with a facile muse. 
 Wliat the light-minded aspirant admires is the irre- 
 gularity of work which often grants long holidays alter- 
 nated with labour pushed on as in hot spells of hay- 
 making and harvesting. Many authors do their work 
 much by fits and starts ; but the ruck of them prosper 
 only on condition of attending punctually to business. 
 Charles Lamb, who at odd times distilled the essence
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 167 
 
 of his wit and wisdom for the press, professes that he 
 had piled up on his office shelves " more MSS. in 
 folio than ever Aquinas left " ; yet few clerks could 
 have been as diligent as Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, who, 
 besides a constant flow of periodical articles, seem to 
 have put out between them, in loving partnership, 
 over 500 volumes. Many writers of all work in our 
 day count their books by the dozen, by the score, by 
 the hundred. Perhaps our most industrious contem- 
 porary was Andrew Lang, who, at his death, had 
 tilled over fifteen pages of the British Museum Library 
 Catalogue with the titles of volumes that at least bear 
 his name. 
 
 A book, however long it may have been in incuba- 
 tion, has sometimes to be hatched in haste, by dint of 
 assiduous sitting. The history of literature could be 
 ransacked for tours de force performed by members 
 of this idle gang. Becki'ord's statement was that he 
 wrote Vathek in French with a single spurt kept up 
 through three days and two nights ; but indeed from 
 his own correspondence it has been shown that he 
 must have been thinking of but one episode, and that 
 the whole work went through much labor limce. 
 Johnson, less likely to delude himself, declared that 
 he ^v^ote Rasselas in the evenings of a single week, 
 spurred out of his habitual procrastination by need 
 of money for his mother's funeral. Sir Walter Scott 
 finished Guy Manner ing in six weeks ; and we know 
 how swiftly, in his broken old age, he plied the pen for 
 his creditors. Dumas, making all allowance for 
 " ghostly " assistance, must have been a most diligent 
 scribe before type-wrriting days. Balzac, when in full 
 blast, would go to bed at six and get up at midnight, 
 to work more than a dozen hours at a stretch. I know 
 a lady, by the way, who undertook to translate all
 
 168 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Balzac — "the new edition, fifty volumes long" — 
 in three years, and only by a little fell short of 
 accomplishing this gigantic task. 
 
 It is more astonishing to find such bouts of work 
 sometimes done in intervals of other avocations. 
 Henry Neele, author of The Romance of History, 
 spent long days in an office, came home at eight to 
 write till the small hours, and rose again at five for 
 four hours over his manuscript : no wonder he went 
 mad and cut his throat. Scott and Trollope are 
 happier instances of officials who lengthened their 
 working days by stealing a few hours from the night, 
 at the right end. No small proportion of authors 
 are still clergymen, as most of them once were ; and 
 these must often be called away from their desks. A 
 prolific writer I knew in my early days, the Rev. 
 Paxton Hood, claimed to have finished in a fortnight 
 the biography of arecently deceased popular preacher, 
 so that the book might follow hard upon the funeral. 
 The most extraordinary feat of application I can 
 recall is S. C. Hall's story that under pressing circum- 
 stances he read up for, wrote, printed and had illus- 
 trated a 400 page history of France in three weeks, 
 working night and day at a sleepless heat that cost him 
 a brain fever. Journalists and writers for periodicals 
 might no doubt report more prodigious efforts of speed. 
 
 It may have struck the reader that all along I have 
 not been taking an " up-to-date" view of the writer's 
 lot. Instead of starving in Grub Street, he nowadays 
 writes for newspapers and magazines, enlisting in a 
 host whose banners flaunt other devices than Excelsior. 
 But non ragiona^n de lor, as they have learned to quote. 
 The journalist may be an author, and often is. But in 
 his capacity as journalist he has to write as he is told, 
 whereas qvM author his work is bringing forth what he
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 169 
 
 wishes to say. The Pegasus of the ephemeral press 
 is driven in shafts and teams, and may grow fairly 
 fat in his stable, once he has got over the coltish stage 
 of training. In the service of an author, whether 
 thorough-bred or nag, he trots, canters or gallops 
 at his own gait, unless some Erckmann-Chatrian 
 pair, or some Besant and Rice can hit off an ambling 
 pace, side by side, sometimes falling out again when 
 it comes to shoving their noses in the same manger. 
 Beaumont and Fletcher makes the most classical 
 instance of such collaboration, as to whom legend 
 tells that they got into trouble by disputing in a tavern 
 which of them should " kill the king." I could dis- 
 close a curious literary partnership of our day, a 
 popular name that covers at least two story-tellers 
 rolled into one, with ghosts also, it is whispered, made 
 useful in the business ; but, like old Herodotus, I 
 must keep silence about certain mysteries of this 
 priestcraft. 
 
 The journalist is simply the old hack-writer put into 
 jingling harness, and more regularly fed than in 
 former days, at a penny a line and upwards : this 
 figure, I am told, is also behind the times, being in fact 
 more often three halfpence a line, a smaller remunera- 
 tion seeming appropriate rather to historians and such- 
 like ; yet also one hears of journalists less well paid 
 than the printers who set up their copy. If his pace 
 be smart and his action taking, the newspaper hack's 
 pay may be even counted in silver per line, but for 
 that he must show himself docile, diligent and of good 
 bottom. He has to be Whig or Tory as required : I 
 have known journalists who were both by turns, and 
 at the nod of the same employer, sometimes running 
 vehicles in opposition to each other, or seeing good to 
 try if his green " Atlas " might not pay better with
 
 170 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 a fresh coat of blue paint on the " Favourite " route. 
 Every now and then we hear of leader-writers and 
 even wheelers kicking over such traces ; but the well- 
 broken journalist cannot aft'ord a skittish conscience. 
 His point of honour is that of the mercenary free- 
 lance, loyal to the standard under which he draws 
 pay and provender, but always holding himself free 
 to accept better terms from the enemy. A veteran 
 Dugald Dalgetty of the press once confessed to me that 
 in all his career he took shame only for one turn of 
 duty, that obliged him to draw up a column of hypo- 
 critical religious meditations for a certain periodical. 
 Alas ! I have known more than one manufacturer 
 of moral pap who himself became a castaway, neglect- 
 ing the advice he served out for youth under the mask 
 of a good old uncle or such-like. Not one luminary 
 of the religious press alone has been marked in Fleet 
 Street as apt to be eclipsed by Bacchus. Pious old 
 ladies and trustful young persons, fed on sectarian 
 morality, do well not to know in the flesh some slaves 
 of their lamp. 
 
 Authorship and journalism, it is said, tend to become 
 fused in our time ; but for want of up-to-dateness, 
 the present writer must shrink from dwelling on this 
 topic. His outlook on the literary world, it may be 
 perceived, inclines to retrospective views, whereas 
 the "live" journalist's watchword is "actuality." 
 Forty years ago I facetiously remarked to Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, " posted up, as you say," to 
 which that genial and cultured host replied with a 
 certain stiffness, " Excuse me, not as / say ! " 
 Since then our periodical press has been quickly 
 posting itself in phrases and methods that come 
 mainly from New York and Chicago rather than 
 from Boston. Even the last decade, one is credit-
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 171 
 
 ably informed, has wrought such changes in the 
 street of newspaper fortunes and misfortunes that the 
 most experienced editor of Delane's or Edwin Arnold's 
 time might find himself a Rip van Winkle among its new 
 men and machinery, all working at highest pressure 
 with a din which might scare those young lions of the 
 "Daily Telegraph" that roared so imposingly for the 
 last generation. I meddle not with matters that are 
 too fast for me, except in so far as denying to the 
 facile reporter with his "scoops" and his "stories" 
 the dignity of right authorship, a craft he has gone 
 far to demoralize by the rattles and corals with 
 which he exerts himself to make that great baby, the 
 public, " take notice." 
 
 Paternoster Row stands on a slight eminence which 
 an old inscription declares to be the highest point of 
 the City ; yet in our time it has come to be over- 
 shadowed by the lower level of Fleet Street. If the 
 book-market be not so brisk as that which has its 
 stalls hard by, the latter is largely to blame. News- 
 papers are handier than books, offer more variety, 
 cater more keenly for the popular taste, and can be 
 sold much cheaper. The public spends so much time 
 in reading its newspapers that it has less leisure for 
 books ; then our newspapers do not stick at poach- 
 ing on the preserves of literature, supplying daily 
 articles that take the place of political pamphlets and 
 periodical essays, along with poems, stories, essays, 
 scientific, didactic and humorous matter as well as the 
 latest telegrams and tape-reports of the money-market. 
 What chance has a grave or even a gay volume against 
 an enterprise that thus grasps every point by mixing 
 the utile with the dulce ! The mere author, then, has 
 some cause for looking askance on the prosperous 
 journalist, and chuckling to hear how, if all stories
 
 172 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 be true, this competitor sooner falls out from the 
 exhausting pace of such a career. 
 
 Nor is this the worst of it. Our well-spiced sheets, 
 with their daily and almost hourly editions, have so 
 demoralized readers as to set them always gaping for 
 some new thing. What is asked for at libraries is not 
 the best book but the newest. The life of most books, 
 those in the business tell us, now lasts from three to 
 six months. In that short term, the author must 
 take his chance of hitting or missing [popularity ; and 
 in either case is like to find his work soon thrown on 
 the scrap-heap, or laid up rotting in dock, to make 
 room for new craft launched daily with hopeful sails 
 spread to catch the gusts of popular applause. Neither 
 author nor publisher can be sure on what lines to lay 
 their keel, nor what rig to choose, so fast does one type 
 of cruiser supersede another in fashion. One day I 
 came upon a successful novelist in pensive mood, and 
 on my offering the proverbial penny for his thoughts, 
 he glumly responded, " I was wondering what would 
 be the next boom ! " It is rather the second-rate 
 author who has a jiair for the change of wind, and 
 cunningly goes about to sail in the wake of his better 
 who without design, may be, has struck into a spank- 
 ing course, yet does not always make the most profit- 
 able voyage of it. Sic vos non vobis is an old story in 
 literary annals. 
 
 There's the extract, flasked and fine,^ 
 
 And priced and saleable at last ! 
 
 And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes and Nokes combine 
 
 To paint the future from the past — 
 
 Put blue into their line. 
 
 Hobbs hints blue — straight he turtle eats ; 
 Nobbs prints blue — claret crowns his cup ;
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 173 
 
 Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, — 
 Both gorge. Who fished the murex up ? 
 What porridge had John Keats ? 
 
 The best author is not like to be the sharpest-eyed 
 man of business, to know, or care, what colour comes 
 into vogue. Sir Walter Besant, who had more 
 business aptitude, more common-sense and more 
 esfrit de corps than most men of the pen, was leader 
 in forming an Authors' Society, which should provide 
 his fellows with a corporate faculty of looking after 
 their own interests. But this Trades Union can 
 bring little power to bear upon conditions of employ- 
 ment : it seems even a question whether its activities 
 have not gone towards reducing wages in some 
 cases. The publishers have formed a Union of 
 their own, presumably commanding funds to support 
 a long lock-out, whereas authors are in no position to 
 endure a strike, which would be a matter of much 
 indifference to the public, well able to do without 
 books much longer than it would take the book- 
 makers to starve. 
 
 Other sweated trades have this remedy, approved 
 by a sentimental philanthropy that has got on to the 
 slippery slope of proposing to regulate wages while 
 leaving prices to find their natural level. \A'Tiat the 
 wisest statesmen and the most powerful kings have 
 tried in vain to do, as often as not with a result the 
 very reverse of their aim, is now to be accomphshed 
 by ignorant and hungry mobs, to whose votes we 
 lightly submit questions of political economy that 
 divide studious reasoners all over the world. A 
 union of coal-miners, dock-labourers, railway-servants, 
 is able to hold a pistol to the public head, demanding 
 its money or its life, and thus they can raise their pay
 
 174 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 at the expense of otlier classes of the community, less 
 indispensable or more regardful of law and liberty. 
 But an authors' strike would hurt the public as little 
 as Mahommed's whipping his wife with palm leaves. 
 It must have bread, but for circuses, at a pinch, it 
 could do with cinematograph shows. Our printers 
 know how to strike, but by what sort of " peaceful 
 picketing " could writers jeer or bully one another 
 into taking holiday, they who are always on the watch 
 to grab at each other's jobs, and in whose craft, for one 
 diligent apprentice, there are thousands of outsiders 
 ready to try their hands at mastership. How few 
 are the professionals in this game whose place could 
 not be filled by amateurs, at short notice ! How 
 many authors, in such a case, would not tumble over 
 each other in eagerness to play the blackleg ! 
 
 Most authors, when one comes to think of it, are 
 blacklegs, men of affairs scribbling in their evening 
 hours, journalists who begin their day with a turn 
 at fiction, retired officers, clergymen, ladies of fashion, 
 millionaires, even kings and queens ; all sorts and 
 conditions of men contribute to bring down literary 
 wages by cheapening their work to such a point that 
 they will even pay for overstocking a poor market. 
 Then remember how all approved authors become 
 ghostly blacklegs, haunting the glimpses of the moon 
 in cheaply elegant editions, which are bought in huge 
 numbers at the present day : one is not always so sure 
 of them being read. 
 
 The author who has still to keep body and soul 
 together, hungrily desires to be bought, but his 
 customers are still less liberal with bread than with 
 stony praise. The last thing your " warm " citizen 
 cares to buy is a book, unless when it comes down to its 
 weight in coppers. He judges it mean not to pay for
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 175 
 
 a bottle of wine, for a stall at the theatre, for a cab, 
 for a bouquet, when he will take any pains to borrow 
 a book, rather than buy it. In the average British 
 household, the sum spent on literature through the 
 year would hardly make a physician's fee to cure the 
 sequelcB of a banquet the cost of which might fill a book- 
 shelf. Thus flourish the libraries, to which booksellers 
 have to give check by a move of artificial prices, that 
 puts new books beyond the reach of most pockets. 
 There is something to be said for the system of joint- 
 stock libraries, whence the subscriber can have a wide 
 choice of books without the need of cumbering his 
 rooms with a kind of furniture likely to collect only too 
 much dust. But when a rate -paying maker of books 
 is forced to support public libraries at which the 
 neighbours may come by his wares without cost, it 
 seems adding insult to injury that he should be 
 invited to take the wind out of his own sails by a 
 contribution of gratis copies. People who make such 
 applications do not perhaps understand how an 
 author may have to pay for his own books, with only 
 a little more discount than is given to the ordinary 
 customer ; or if he have books to give away, why, it is 
 not in the case of a successful performance that dead- 
 heads are welcome. The managers of one library 
 wrote me that having spent most of their money on 
 the building, they expected me to aid in supplying it 
 with books. I handed this statement to a man of 
 the world, whose exposition was that people who 
 dealt in bricks and mortar had to be paid for them, 
 but ink and paper came into a different class of 
 materials. 
 
 On every hand the poor author finds himself 
 treated as a charitable institution. Certain publica- 
 tions have of late years taken to publish our addresses^,
 
 176 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOKS 
 
 with the result of directing to us not only letters of 
 compliment or complaint, but applications for books, 
 subscriptions, autographs, and other favours. The 
 larger fry of literature always were liable to this 
 ordeal, as appears in Dickens' correspondence, who 
 indeed had a soft heart for begging letters, which he 
 complains of as coming in " hundreds." As a sample 
 of such applications, based on the mistaken notion that 
 we are rich as well as generous, a lady once wrote me 
 that she was equipping a bazaar for the conversion of 
 the Jews : she desired me to seek out authors at a 
 literary club I belonged to and get them to send 
 copies of their works for sale at her stall. I replied 
 that having gone to the club in question, I had met 
 two or three authors, who were Jews and presumably 
 unready to contribute to their own conversion : I 
 added that to the best of my knowledge and belief 
 these men could ill afford to support anything beyond 
 their own households ; and I asked the lady why she 
 did not rather apply to publishers, whose addresses 
 suggested a larger share of the profits of literature. 
 Such a person has no sense of humour, and she wrote 
 back warmly thanking me for my advice, which she 
 would at once follow ; and I hope she got something 
 out of it. This correspondent was not a stranger ; 
 but from utter strangers, too, one gets similar begging 
 letters. Some years ago, a certain country parson 
 acquired notoriety among authors by circularizing us 
 to the effect that as much admiring our works, he 
 would be grateful for a copy inscribed by the writer's 
 own hand to make part of his treasured collection. 
 How large a library he gathered out of our good nature 
 or vanity I know not ; but one sly author wrote back 
 that he for his part was making a collection of cheques, 
 also more valued if bearing the drawer's autograph,
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 177 
 
 and he should be grateful to his correspondent for a 
 specimen of his own work in this kind. 
 
 And the worst of all such correspondents, as by no 
 means to be denied, are the income-tax collectors, 
 keen to put a fancy figure on our modest gains. 
 Matthew Arnold found himself assessed at £1,000 a 
 year, and had to go before the Commissioners to 
 explain that sweetness and light may not burn in an 
 Aladdin's lamp. The like of us are much at the mercy 
 of officials whose charge is to squeeze all they can 
 out of taxable persons. Most of us writers have no 
 turn or no need for account books ; our gains can often 
 be reckoned on the fingers of one hand. At the best, 
 they are precarious, fluctuating and hard to estimate 
 from year to year ; then those official Shylocks take 
 advantage of our innocence to cut as liberal a pound of 
 flesh as may be found on a starved carcase. I hear 
 that, when a discrimination between earned and un- 
 earned income was lately made by our phflanthropic 
 legislators, authors had difficulty in maintaining that 
 the royalties they received on the sale of their books 
 must be counted as earnings and not as proceeds of 
 investment. For myself I can say that I have dealt 
 as scrupulously with the State as with my butcher or 
 baker : writing seldom under my own name, it would 
 not be difficult for me to hide from the tax-collector, 
 to whom, on going to live in a new district, I have 
 always oflered myself as a sheep to be shorn, and have 
 been sometimes treated as if I were a truant goat. 
 A favourite trick is to try to nail up one's return to 
 the higher figure at which it may have stood in some 
 exceptionally fat year, then leave to the worried 
 author the onus of shaking off this charge. I was once 
 so overcharged when I happened to be living abroad, 
 without any facility for explanation or appeal. In 
 
 N
 
 178 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 the same hotel I met a retired high official of the 
 Inland Revenue Office, to whom I had been able to do 
 some slight service, and in return asked for his advice 
 as to resisting such an exaction. He answered, in 
 effect, that it was a shame, that the government was 
 trying to cheat me, but that he advised me to pay 
 and say no more about it as the best way of saving 
 myself a great deal of trouble. Is this the way in 
 which honest citizens should be treated by the 
 pettifogging agents of a great country ? f^ 
 
 In some countries honours and titles of rank are 
 bestowed upon authors to make up for the want of 
 more solid boons, such as France has also forthcoming 
 in the shape of well-endowed prizes for crowned works, 
 and of the jetons going with academicianship. Our 
 State, that does not stick at swindling this class of 
 useful citizens, now and then makes a faint effort at 
 rewarding them. In our time a sprinkling of knight- 
 hoods has been bestowed upon popular authors, 
 apparently to their satisfaction, while the publisher is 
 content with nothing less than a baronetcy, and if he 
 should pander with signal success to the weaknesses 
 of the million, he might even buy a peerage. When 
 Tennyson accepted a coronet, it was felt that so much 
 the less laureate he ; but in most cases even a poet- 
 laureate cannot live up to such social distinctions. 
 
 A more appropriate guerdon for authorship should 
 be the pensions of the Civil List, which, to the 
 amount of £1,200 annually ought to be 'largely 
 given to those who have done the state ill-paid 
 services, or to their necessitous families. But the 
 distribution of these public alms has always been apt 
 to depend on friends at court. The day has passed 
 when half the'^ whole' annual addition could' be'^granted 
 to^a quasi-member of the royal family ; yet in our
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 179 
 
 time there have been scandalous jobs in its apportion- 
 ment. Both Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, when 
 else well provided for, were not ashamed to draw £200 
 a year from this exiguous fund, though one hear^ that 
 Tennyson latterly made a point of giving aw -y his 
 share in relief of less fortunate authors. Another 
 poet, by no means unrewarded nor laid on the shelf, 
 pockets the largest slice of Civil List Pension along 
 with several hundreds a year making his retiring 
 allowance from a government office. One fourth part 
 of what is allowed to such a writer in fashion has 
 been grudgingly given to a dying scholar who did 
 spade-work of useful learning that brought in no pay. 
 So capricious is the allotment of such favours, that 
 more than once of late years it has raised questions in 
 Parliament ; but only once can one remember a 
 pension being withdrawn as given scandalously amiss. 
 
 Such charities as the Royal Literary Fund make a 
 more considerate effort to relieve the distress of men 
 who deserve well of their fellow-countrymen. The 
 Guild of Literature, for which Dickens worked so hard, 
 came to nought. The Authors' Society has recently 
 started a Pension Fund of its own, which appears to 
 be usually applied for the benefit of novelists, the only 
 class of authors that does make any money to speak of ; 
 and in two cases it is paid to gentlemen also enjoying 
 Civil List pensions. This looks as if the Authors' 
 Society contained few really necessitous members. 
 But one has known only too many authors, and of note 
 and usefulness, who could not afford even the guinea 
 subscription to this association. 
 
 All whips' and scorns the thorough-bred author 
 proverbially bears with more or less patience, hoping 
 one day to be paid in fame, if only by the " tardy 
 bust " raised to buried merit : he hardly asks for
 
 180 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 bread, if he may have this stone in the end. But 
 such chill reward is even less sure than his grudged 
 money-rate of "so much per thou." Now and 
 then he seems worth v of a monument, but what his 
 ashes more often get is a short newspaper paragraph, 
 that may be a little longer, if there happen to be no 
 political crisis, no great cricket match, no sensational 
 murder available to fill the daily papers. His works 
 are his best memorial, not always remembered, when 
 he himself comes to be forgotten. If he gain in 
 lifetime something like renown, he finds it a windy diet 
 at the best, and no more enduring than satisfying. 
 He could earn it more quickly and surely by being 
 hanged for a murder that appealed to popular imagina- 
 tion. How many authors in our own day have lighted 
 a squib of notoriety that soon fizzled out : as examples 
 rise to mind " Ginx's Baby " and " Dame Europa's 
 School," read by all the last generation, unknown to 
 the present ! Writers with more staying power are 
 goaded on, by the need of money or by the mere itch of 
 keeping themselves before the public, to over- writing, 
 till the lion of his day comes down to exhibition in a 
 side-show. More rarely has a worn-out author the 
 singular luck, like Bulwer Ljrtton, to retrick himself 
 with new beams for the approval of another generation. 
 Mrs. Oliphant and Anthony TroUope are examples 
 of novelists who would now stand higher in fame if 
 they had been not so pressed to coin their talent. 
 But writers with far less talent have often the knack of 
 passing false coin on their contemporaries, that will 
 not ring true in the ears of the next generation. 
 
 A book's prosperity lies in the long ears of a many- 
 headed beast whose taste in tickling changes from 
 generation to generation. Even the praise of its 
 critical contemporaries cannot always preserve it
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 181 
 
 beyond their own time. How many of us can mention 
 the author of The Female Quixote, who died poor and 
 forgotten, more than half a century after Fielding, 
 Richardson, Goldsmith and Johnson had saluted her 
 in chorus as their peer. To the same generation 
 Hannah More appeared an orthodox Minerva, yet 
 who, unless out of curiosity, ever turns her pages, 
 any more than those of Blair's once admired rhetoric ? 
 A contemporary Gray would not now find delight in 
 lying on a sofa to read new novels by Crebillon and 
 Marivaux. Who remembers the very names of poets 
 whose lives seemed worth writing by Dr. Johnson ? We 
 still read Northanger Abbey, kept sweet by the salt of 
 wit ; but how many of us know even the titles of those 
 once popular fictions on which this book was a lively 
 satire ? Where are the novels over which our great- 
 grandfathers and grandmothers sat up with moist 
 eyes ? Where are Mrs. Gore's seventy volumes ? 
 Where is Sam Warren's Ten Thousand a Year, which 
 some critics thought fit to throw Dickens into the 
 shade ? Where are the Romans de longue haleine that 
 were not too long for Madame Scudery's generation, 
 and Mrs. Aphra Behn's ? Where are the voluminous 
 marvels of Don Quixote's library ? Gone like the 
 neiges d'antan, as will be the lot of some of the most 
 profitable books for which readers struggle at our 
 circulating libraries ! Voltaire defines a classic as a 
 work everybody praises, but no one reads : who now 
 reads the Henriade ? Klopstock's Messiah is given as 
 a school prize ; Johnson's Rasselas is sold in cheap 
 
 editions ; but ? If we have our day at all, most of 
 
 us have it but for an hour, then cease to be. Thackeray 
 sighs to think that his novels will "go to limbo, 
 along with Valincourt and Doricourt and Thaddeus 
 of War saw."" Nay ! for some books are so embalmed
 
 182 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 by genius, humour and sympathy that time shall 
 not thus bury them in his dusty maw. Yet the best 
 in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no 
 worse if popular imagination amend them. 
 
 Habent sua fata lihelli ; and authors, too, are much 
 the creatures of fortune. In this career, chance often 
 seems to play a dominant part, if only by bringing a 
 square peg upon a square hole. Dr. Johnson would 
 hardly find a public for Rasselas nowadays, as our 
 " banjo-muses " and dialect-stories would have seemed 
 below the dignity of literature in his time. Chief 
 among the quite worldly qualities that go to give an 
 author some measure of success — I let him take his 
 genius for granted if he bear in mind that this is 
 seldom an immediately lucrative endowment — after 
 industry, perhaps before it, should come a certain 
 docility or adaptability that sets him on writing what 
 people want to read. And with all his readiness, a 
 good deal depends on opportunity. I have seen 
 many instances where the square opening gaped, and 
 only round pegs came to hand, others where the right 
 man for a job turned up at the right time. So many 
 authors believe, with or without reason, that they 
 could do this and that work, if they got the chance ; 
 perhaps as many do not know what they could do till 
 they are asked to try. But for John Bunyan's being 
 thrown into prison, we might never have had the 
 Pilgrim'' s Progress. It was the vogue of Richardson's 
 Pamela that prompted Fielding to write Joseph 
 Andrews. Scott had thrown aside Waverley, forgotten 
 till the manuscript turned up when he was searching 
 for some fishing tackle. Pickwick began with a 
 commission for some light pen sketches to accompany 
 illustrations by an artist who presently took himself 
 out of the way by suicide. Dickens no doubt would
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 183 
 
 have found his way sooner or later ; but would George 
 Eliot, after aspiring to reconcile the philosophy of 
 Locke and of Kant, have certainly taken to novel 
 writing but for the suggestion of George Lewes ? 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, on whose name I dwell so 
 often, seemed to have finished his literary career, 
 when, at the instigation of a magazine editor, he took 
 up a fragmentary scheme dropped a quarter of a 
 century back, to expand it into his famous Breakfast 
 Table series. To come down to our own current 
 periodicals, as a favourite character in their fiction 
 appears " Sherlock Holmes," whose latest adventures 
 were rumoured as paid for at rate of more than half- 
 a-crown per word ; and this profitable personage 
 seems to owe his existence to the accident of his 
 " only begetter " having studied medicine under an 
 old schoolfellow of mine, who impressed the future 
 author with a talent for rapid deduction more useful 
 to a detective than to a doctor. As has already been 
 pointed out, a layman who attains popular note in any 
 other line, can always fetch a price for fame while 
 fresh by exhibiting himself on flickering cinematograph 
 films. So Disraeli, as prime minister, got £12,000 for 
 the absurdest of his novels ; and General Grant could 
 coin hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a leaden 
 volume of Memoirs. 
 
 The reader's humble servant may venture to confirm 
 this doctrine of opportunity from his own experience. 
 His most profitable publication, for its size, was a skit 
 written in his teens by which he had the luck to parody 
 a favourite humour of the day, happily applied to an 
 event of the moment. I have lately been asked to 
 write a book on certain lines which nearly forty years 
 ago I laid in vain before as many publishers as now 
 make haste to carry out the same idea since it has
 
 184 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 been suggested to them by certain educational pundits. 
 My largest mass of writing came on paper through the 
 accident of carelessly relating certain incidents of 
 travel before a friend, who happened to be an editor, 
 and he was tickled into asking me to make an article 
 of them, and the article happened to be read by a 
 publisher who thus conceived of me as able if willing 
 to do certain work he then wanted done, and I chanced 
 to be at leisure to do it, and our agreement led on to 
 the writing of some dozens of volumes. 
 
 Think how even great writers have had to make a 
 public for themselves, that might be educated into 
 buying their books perhaps not till they come to the 
 sere and yellow leaf of genius. That was somewhat the 
 lot of Wordsworth, Carlyle, Browning ; and one can 
 imagine writers of their stamp lost in the waves of 
 common life, for want of certain bladders of fortune 
 that kept these heads above water. Most readers of 
 Waller's day probably agreed with him in gaping over 
 Paradise Lost as a tedious poem by an old school- 
 master, with no other merit than its length. It is not 
 probable that a Milton will remain dumb and inglorious 
 all his life, yet in the present state of the literary 
 market, an impecunious Keats or honest Chatterton 
 might have his poetry buried with him, while the lower 
 walks of Parnassus are dotted with successes, and 
 pitted with failures, that were as much due to casual 
 circumstance and meeting or missing of occasion as 
 to any merit or demerit of the author. To one venturer 
 at this game falls a good hand to be played well or ill 
 as he can ; another gets bad cards and poor partners ; 
 or, whatever suit he be strong in, it may not be the 
 one turned up as trumps for the round ; and perhaps 
 the same ill-luck follows him throughout the rubber, 
 till Death cuts in before he has scored a trick. Even
 
 THE TRADE OF AUTHOR 185 
 
 success sometimes may prove strangely capricious, 
 shaking her swift plumes to depart without apparent 
 reason. I could name one author lately deceased 
 who, after supporting himself by the production of 
 useful volumes for the best part of his life, found the 
 name he had earned go so inexplicably stale on 
 public esteem that he was reduced to poverty, against 
 which he could presently make head by publishing 
 similar books under other names. 
 
 Since experience and observation have moved me 
 to put forward so many considerations that cast but 
 a murky light on authorship, it may not be amiss to 
 introduce a brighter illumination thrown over it by 
 one who had well known both its lights and shadows. 
 
 The drawbacks and penalties attendant on our profession are 
 taken into full account, as we well know, by literary men, and 
 their friends. Our poverty, hardships and disappointments are 
 set forth with great emphasis, and often with too great truth 
 by those who speak of us ; but there are advantages belonging to 
 our trade which are passed over, I think, by some of those who 
 exercise it and describe it, and for which, in striking the 
 balance of our accounts, we are not always duly thankful. We 
 have no patron, so to speak — we sit in ante-chambers no more, 
 waiting the present of a few guineas from my lord, in return for 
 a fulsome dedication. We sell our wares to the book purveyor, 
 between whom and us there is no gTcater obligation than between 
 him and his papermaker or printer. In the great towns in our 
 country immense stores of books are provided for us, with hbrarians 
 to class them, kind attendants to wait upon us, and comfortable 
 apphances for study. We require scarce any capital wherewith 
 to exercise our trade. What other so-called learned profession 
 is equally fortunate ? A doctor, for example, after carefully 
 and expensively educating himself, must invest in house and 
 furniture, horses, carriage and men-servants, before the pubhc 
 patient will think of calling him in. I am told that such gentlemen 
 have to coax and wheedle dowagers, to humour hypochondriacs, 
 to practise a score of little subsidiary arts in order to make that of 
 healing profitable. How many hundreds of pounds has a
 
 186 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 barrister to sink upon his stock-in-trade before his returns are 
 available ? There are the costly charges of university education — 
 the costly chambers in the Inn of court — the clerk and his mainten- 
 ance — the inevitable travels on circuit — certain expenses all to be 
 defrayed before the possible client makes his appearance, and the 
 chance of fame or competency arrives. The prizes are great, to 
 be sure, in the law, but what a prodigious sum the lottery ticket 
 costs ! If a man of letters does not win, neither does he risk so 
 much. Let us speak of our trade as we find it, and not be too 
 eager in calling out for public compassion. 
 
 So wrote Thackeray at the zenith of his career, not 
 always prosperous, yet begun with private means, good 
 introductions to literary and lay society, and other 
 advantages sparely shared by the ruck of authors. 
 But Charles Lamb, who also did not live by his pen, 
 takes a gloomier view, when perhaps in some head- 
 achy morning hour, he sat down to advise Bernard 
 Barton rather to throw himself " slap dash headlong 
 on iron spikes " than to give up the service of L.S.D. 
 for letters that more often spelt I.O.U. 
 
 Oh ! you know not (may you never know !) the miseries of 
 subsisting by authorship. 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation 
 like yours or mine ; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a 
 bookseller's dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and 
 breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts and involuntary 
 numbers for ungracious task work. Those fellows hate us. The 
 reason 1 take to be that, contrary to other trades in which the 
 master gets the credit (a jeweller or silversmith for instance) and 
 the journeyman who really does the fine work, is in the back- 
 ground, — in our work the world gives all the credit to us, whom 
 f/iey consider as their journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, 
 and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, 
 to put another sixpence in their mechanical pouches ! 
 
 Here, then, we run up against that hete noire of the 
 author, whose fortunes are so bound up with his, that 
 the publisher earns a name, for the great part no good 
 one, in the story of authorship.
 
 VII 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 As Don Quixote, his head full of fancies and fictions, 
 sallied forth attended by a squire of shrewd mother 
 wit and common sense, not without his own touch of 
 human weakness, yet clear-eyed for ass-colt bills and 
 other profits, so the author goes unequally yoked in 
 his enterprise with an uncongenial spirit, their partner- 
 ship making a proverbial antithesis like the pot and 
 the kettle, the wolf and the lamb, powder and shot, 
 oil and vinegar, heat and cold, to which might be 
 strung on many other similitudes that suggest them- 
 selves from various points of view. The authors are 
 free with such figures of speech ; the publisher has 
 his eye rather on more solid coinage. Since we 
 learn of their relations chiefly from the pen of the 
 author, the publisher is apt to be fitted with the 
 more odious term of the comparison. Were publishers 
 much in the way of publishing for themselves, they 
 might eloquently comment upon the elder D'Israeli's 
 account of " Authors who have ruined their book- 
 sellers." But, as a matter of fact, this outspoken 
 reproach is mostly on one side. 
 
 Not at once did these two interests stand out in clear 
 rivalry, or convenient co-operation. The primeval 
 author's publisher would be something like a rattle, 
 a tom-tom, or a mysterious bosom-companion like 
 
 187
 
 i 
 
 188 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 that serpent recorded as himself the first author of 
 fiction. Something like a printer first comes to light 
 under the earliest dawn of Babylonian history, when 
 cuneiform characters were stamped on brick tablets 
 that appear like to outlast by ages the clayed-paper 
 volumes of our own popular literature. Kings, high 
 priests or law-givers must have been the virtual 
 publishers of ancient days ; and there could have 
 been no money in the trade when the best advertised 
 book took the form of a pyramid or a rock sculpture. 
 China is said to have anticipated AVestern civilization 
 in the invention of bamboo tablets, silk scrolls, ink, 
 and even types ; and before the dawn of our era, it 
 brought out so many books that a Philistine emperor 
 had most of them burned along with their authors ; 
 but one does not hear what happened to any 
 publishers. 
 
 In ancient Greece, the first publishers appear to have 
 been reciters ; and Herodotus has the name of thus 
 bringing out his own works, viva voce, at the Olympic 
 Games. The rhapsodists are supposed to have edited 
 as well as published Homer. Questions of copyright 
 would hardly arise till paper and ink brought some kind 
 of organization for the distribution of manuscripts, 
 such as went on at Athens, and more largely at Alex- 
 andria, where the library founded by Ptolemy Soter 
 came to contain hundreds of thousands of books to 
 make a bonfire for Csesar's soldiery, and again for 
 illiterate Saracens. Some of these were enormous 
 scrolls, unwound for awkward reading, and soon 
 divided into more manageable form as " volumes " 
 or " books " of one great work. The material was 
 the papyrus of which Egypt had a monopoly, and 
 instead of printers the publisher employed probably 
 sweated industry of copyists from dictation. 
 
 V
 
 PUBLISHERS 189 
 
 After the conquest of Greece and Egypt, Rome in 
 turn became a great centre of book production. 
 Rome of the Augustan age had booksellers, whose 
 wares could be cheaply produced by slave labour, and 
 exposed for sale, perhaps at the columnce where 
 Horace reports small demand for mediocre poetry. 
 Atticus was so largely concerned in this manufacture, 
 as well as in banking and the breeding of gladiators, 
 that he might be called a publisher, whose correspond- 
 ence with Cicero suggests the relations of Byron and 
 John Murray ; and he also acted as editor, to judge 
 from the fear expressed by that philosophic orator of 
 his pencil marks, cerulas miniatulas. Horace, as well 
 as a liberal patron, had the firm of Sosii for publishers, 
 and seems to complain that they pocketed an undue 
 share of the profits of his works. Another old com- 
 plaint of authors is made by Martial against the 
 friends who expected presentation copies ; and the 
 sic vos non vohis of Virgil supplies the classical rebuke 
 of plagiarism. Semper ego auditor tantum ? begins 
 Juvenal, in allusion to the fact that minor poets of 
 that age took licence to read their poems in public or in 
 private, and thus became their own publishers, for 
 want of better. Ovid, and the ruins of Pompeii bear 
 him out, boasts of his verses as scribbled by admirers 
 on blank walls. But the true publisher is a handler 
 of paper and ink in some sort. Every schoolboy 
 knows how Liber, a book, with all its progeny, springs 
 from the bark tablets used in a ruder Italian age, long 
 before lihellus, a little book, got a bad name. Bihlos 
 was the Greek name for papyrus ; and the word 
 bibliopole, which remains the bookseller's most honour- 
 able designation, dates from the epoch of Alexander. 
 In Egypt the undertaker may be claimed as a per- 
 verted publisher, when the practice of burying mauu-
 
 190 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 scripts in tombs preserved many that would have 
 decayed in the open air. The papyrus plant has 
 died out on the Egyptian Nile ; and it was well for 
 literature that this more perishable material gave 
 place to parchment, a name derived from the skins 
 used at Pergamum, itself a place once aspiring to be 
 a literary market, but it had not Alexandria's luck 
 of standing long in a backwater of war. 
 
 Parchment came into use at Rome, even in the 
 classical period, before the business of copying fell 
 into the hands of monks, who added the art of illus- 
 tration to their patient labours. They seem to have 
 been better off for time than for material, to judge 
 by the palimpsests that have defaced lost books of 
 Livy or odes of Sappho in favour of more edifying 
 writings. The value of their handiwork is shown 
 by chains which would be used to guard a Codex 
 from unscrupulous collectors, and by the warnings 
 to careless borrowers, barbarous mutilators or dis- 
 honest filchers, that stand in place of publisher's 
 imprint. Scholars, an esurient race, have not always 
 studied the distinction between meum and tuum ; 
 and even now, in our libraries, there are treasured 
 folios which one may hardly turn over unwatched. 
 Sit utendi gratia, largitori venia, fraudanti anathema 
 is the kind of motto prefixed to mediaeval MSS. 
 The leisurely scribes had a way of turning such 
 inscriptions into verse or epigram, sometimes charged 
 with the most awful threats, as Non videat Christum, 
 qui lihrum suhtrahit istum, and in others, such as 
 Qui te furetur, in culum percutietur, falling into that 
 jocular vein still in favour for schoolboy rhymes of 
 commination against book-stealers. Some' of these 
 legends are almost identical in French, English, 
 German and Italian, having been handed down
 
 PUBLISHERS 191 
 
 through international seminaries of the Renaissance to 
 grammatical tyros of our own day, who, all unaware 
 what crabbed headlines they copy, are wont to adorn 
 their school books with protective legends mostly 
 harping on the theme of dishonesty, from the 
 impressive simplicity of 
 
 Steal not this book for fear of shame, 
 For here you see the owner's name, 
 
 to a more scholarly elaboration which I find adapted 
 in French and Italian as well as in an English version, 
 duly illustrated : — 
 
 Aspice Pierrot hung on a pole, 
 All for having kunc librmn stole. 
 Si Pierrot redd idis set 
 Pierrot non hung fuisset. 
 
 A German schoolboy's Bilcherfluch is more impressive. 
 
 Hie liber est mein, 
 Ideo nomen serif si darein, 
 Si vis hunc librum stehlen, 
 Pendebis an der Kehlen. 
 Tunc veniunt die Raben, 
 Et volunt tihi oculos ausgraben. 
 Tunc clamahis Ach, Ach, Ach ! 
 Uhique tihi recte geschah. 
 
 The monasteries undertook mainly religious and 
 educational works. Unless for such edifying tales as 
 the Gesta Romanorum, entertaining literature long had 
 no other publisher than the minstrels who chanted 
 their own compositions or those of mediaeval bards, 
 as the rhapsodists did for Homer. But the minstrel 
 was anything but a capitalist, working for his meat 
 and drink, or some trifle of gold on occasion, when he 
 had skilfully adapted his production to flatter per- 
 manent or temporary patrons. An exception to the
 
 192 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 rule would seem to be Rahere, munificent founder of 
 St. Bartholomew's, yet the account that makes him a 
 king's jester is doubtful, and he probably came by his 
 large fortune in the character of an ecclesiastic. By 
 and by, poets, too, found means of coming out, more or 
 less creditably, on paper, as we know from Chaucer's 
 malediction on " Adam Scrivener," who did not 
 " write true " after the author's " making " — 
 
 So oft a day I must thy work renew, 
 It to correct, and eke to rub and scrape ; 
 And all is through thy negligence and rape. 
 
 Printing brought in a new state of things, where for 
 some time yet the characters of printer, editor, book- 
 seller and publisher were confounded under the 
 general title of Stationers, still the official style of a 
 trade that takes its name from the stationarii who 
 were post-masters in classical, copyists in mediaeval 
 times, and became booksellers and lending librarians 
 under the patronage of Universities. The Stationers' 
 Company, founded before Caxton's time, was chartered 
 under Philip and Mary. Caxton had to be a jack 
 of all the trades mentioned above, to which at a 
 pinch he added that of author. By and by, book- 
 sellers are found differentiating themselves from the 
 manufacturers who supplied their wares. From the 
 first their shops in London tended to be grouped about 
 St. Paul's: "true Paul's bred" is Ben Jonson's 
 description of a bookseller whose rather mundane 
 dealings would be carried on at most holy addresses, 
 Amen Corner, Ave Maria Lane and the like, in later 
 times overshadowed by the dignity of the " Row," 
 when even the f elites maisons of the trade betook 
 themselves to " Holywell Street," that before it was 
 swept away sought to deodorize its reputation by the
 
 PUBLISHERS 193 
 
 style of Booksellers' Row. Little Britain also was for 
 long a dingy mart of folios and quartos ; but Wash- 
 ington Irving found this commerce ebbed off to the 
 other side of Newgate Street. Printing and book- 
 selling had soon been regulated by authorities that 
 undertook to meddle with supply and demand as 
 tyrannically as any Trades Union. The Star Chamber, 
 for instance, forbad books to be sold by Haberdashers, 
 Ironmongers, Chandlers, and all Shopkeepers that 
 had not served a seven years' apprenticeship to 
 one of the allied trades, bookselling, printing or 
 bookbinding. 
 
 Though thus protected in their proper dealings, 
 booksellers of the seventeenth century were not above 
 adding quack medicines to their stock ; and they took 
 a leaf from medical books in falling out a good deal 
 among themselves, under the rules of the Stationers' 
 Company. For the rights of authors they had no 
 conscience, as we see by the fate of Shakespeare's 
 works, out of which from first to last so much money 
 has been made. Yet the poet might have starved but 
 for his business as an actor-manager. This was a 
 stage of anarchy as to copyright. The first authentic 
 record of agreement between author and publisher is 
 believed to be that famous one, under which Milton 
 and his widow received in all eighteen pounds for 
 " Paradise Lost." The first notable publisher, in the 
 modern sense, is taken to be Jacob Tonson, to whom 
 Dryden was what Pope became to Lintot, what Byron 
 was to Murray or Scott to Constable ; and the Kit- 
 Cat Club suggests the Christopher North clique that 
 had their rendezvous in Blackwood's shop. 
 
 It was now that the muses turned to a publisher as 
 their patron, weary of waiting in noble ante-rooms, 
 despised by untipped lackeys. What a wretched 
 
 O
 
 194 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 business this was we know from the experience of 
 Johnson and many another victim of " toil, envy, 
 want, the patron and the jail." In John Bunde we 
 learn more or less veraciously how the ill-famed 
 Curll boasted that " his translators, in pay, lay three 
 in a bed, at the Pewter Platter Inn, Holborn, and he 
 and they were for ever at work deceiving the public," 
 Another contemporary bibliopole, John Dunton, — 
 who regrets that he ever hampered himself with a 
 shop, when the business could as well be carried on 
 from " a convenient warehouse, with a good acquaint- 
 ance among the booksellers " — rather fancied himself 
 as an author, which may be the reason of his ill- 
 success as a publisher. In his queer autobiography, 
 he speaks bitterly in general of the hack-writers he 
 had to employ, while he has a good word for some, like 
 Defoe ; and another of his staff, Mr. Ridpath, upon 
 whom came " by some unfortunate accident or other 
 the fate of an author," is praised for rare qualities of 
 humility and honesty ; also for his ingenious inven- 
 tion of the " Polygraphy or writing engine " by which 
 half a dozen or more copies of a manuscript may be 
 made at once — apparently the earliest attempt at 
 typewriting. Here is Dunton' s view of Grub Street. 
 
 Printing was now the uppermost in my thoughts, and the 
 Hachney Authors began to ply me with " Specimens " as earnestly, 
 and with as much passion and concern as the Watermen do Passen- 
 gers with Oars and Scullers. I had some acquaintance with this 
 Generation in my Apprenticeship, and had never any warm affec- 
 tion for them, in regard I always thought their great concern 
 lay more in how much a Sheet, than in any generous respect they 
 bore to the Commomvealth of Learning ; and, indeed, the Learning 
 itself of these Gentlemen lies very often in as little room as their 
 Honesty ; though they will pretend to have studied you six 
 or seven years in the Bodleian Library, to have turned over the 
 Fathers, and to have read and digested the whole compass both of
 
 PUBLISHERS 195 
 
 Human and Ecclesiastic History — when, alas ! they have never 
 been able to understand a single page of 8aint Cyprian, and can- 
 not tell you whether the Fathers lived before or after Christ. 
 And as for their Honesty, it is very remarkable, they will either 
 persuade you to go upon another man's Copy, to steal his Thought, 
 or to abridge his Book, which should have got him bread for his 
 life-time. When you have engaged them upon some Project 
 or other, they will write you ofi three or four sheets perhaps ; 
 take up three or four pounds upon an urgent occasion ; and you 
 shall never hear of them more. 
 
 This is what many publishers might have to say 
 of authors, if they were given to putting their 
 experiences into print. What authors had to say of 
 publishers in that period, is a commonplace of the 
 " wits" who had nothing else for it but " writing for 
 the booksellers." " The man of Touch, in right of 
 Midas his great ancestor, enters his caveat against him 
 as a man of Taste," is James Ralph's account of pub- 
 lisher and author in what seems the first long-drawn 
 bitter cry of this out-at-elbows fellowship, The Case 
 of Authors by Profession or Trade stated. There were 
 notable exceptions to such a cat and dog attitude. 
 Dodsley, who came to town as a footman, was success- 
 ful both as publisher and author ; and he seems to 
 have been on better terms with his poets and literary 
 patrons than with some of his brother bibliopoles. 
 After him, Andrew Millar earned the good word of 
 authors by liberality, paying Fielding a thousand 
 pounds for Amelia, and speculating in Thompson's 
 Seasons when other publishers saw no promise in them 
 but of frost ; he it was who could thank God to be 
 done with Dr. Johnson, when his dilations over the 
 Dictionary at last reached an end ; but for his own 
 part Ursa Major growled out Millar's praise^as having 
 raised the price of literature. 
 
 The hack- author of those days might have many
 
 196 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 masters, since booksellers were in the way of clubbing 
 to pool risks and profit in a work, sometimes divided 
 into as many as sixty-four shares. Still the book- 
 seller, at his sign of " The Bible and Crown " or 
 " The Black Raven," had hardly developed into 
 the full-fledged publisher, unless in exceptional cases ; 
 while at the bottom this trade declined into the 
 " Flying Stationer," of whose catchpenny wares 
 Jemmy Catnach came to be the Tonson or 
 Lintot. From a welter of interlaced competition, 
 emerged the great firms of the next period, whose 
 dealings with authors advanced Johnson's four 
 guineas a sheet to Southey's four or five-fold as 
 much ; and the bidding of such publishers went on 
 raising the price of literary labour, till our generation 
 of contributors quotes its rates not by the sheet but 
 by the thousand words. 
 
 So much for a brief history of the trade, whose 
 shortcomings never fail to find a vates sacer. " There 
 is no living with thee, nor without thee ! " has been 
 all along the cry of a chronic wrangle between author 
 and publisher, loudly proclaimed by one of these 
 parties, notoriously irritable or eloquent, while the 
 other has grown hardened to pocketing affronts 
 among the returns of the business. " Barabbas" is 
 the author's nickname for his publisher, who for his 
 part perhaps mutters the word genius as if it answered 
 to Lucifer, and for the sons of Zebulon, " they that 
 handle the pen of the writer," finds any Scriptural 
 reproach too good, unless the name of him who dwelt 
 with wild asses. I knew an author that thought to be 
 scathingly satirical in addressing a certain firm as 
 " publishers and sinners," to which they made the 
 practical retort of serving him with a writ. As a rule, 
 it is the publishers who keep philosophic silence in
 
 PUBLISHERS 197 
 
 such disputes ; they can ailord to bear those quips by 
 which the author tempers his subjection, as when, in 
 small beer or the like, he alTects to toast Napoleon for 
 shooting a bookseller. AATiether or no publishers 
 quail; champagne out of authors' skulls, it is notorious 
 that they often come to live in lordly mansions which 
 they leave to their babes, while the author is more like 
 to lodge in Grub Street, or nowadays, in Grub Road, 
 such as may be found in many suburbs from Camber- 
 well or Cricklewood. He may take his share out in 
 fame ; but the publisher must have returns capable 
 of being assessed by Income Tax Commissioners. 
 
 As I am writing, I find in print an account of the 
 fortunes left by five contemporary authors of note, 
 three of them editors as well as authors, whose estates 
 range from about £400 to £9,000, the average working 
 out at some £4,000. In the same period, five 
 notable book publishers were not considerate enough 
 to die, so as to aiTord materials for a comparison ; but 
 five newspaper proprietors have gone over to the 
 majority, leaving among them nearly ninety times as 
 much money as the group of writers in question. 
 Heine might well chuckle from his " mattress grave" 
 that the mansion his publisher had built for himself 
 at Hamburg ought to be taken as his own monu- 
 ment. 
 
 The author now asks himself more seriously whether 
 his should not be the lion's share of the pudding as well 
 as of the praise. The days have long gone by when 
 noble scribblers and gentlemanly contributors were 
 shy about taking pay for their work. Byron, who 
 began by some such affectation, drew from first to 
 last twenty thousand pounds or so of John Murray's 
 money, sometimes paid in advance. Certain authors 
 show themselves graspingly keen for their share of the
 
 198 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 profits, as certain publishers have been generous to 
 sons of Bohemia, and not always on mere calculation. 
 But taking these colleagues respectively in the mass, 
 the author's first aim is apt to be something not 
 reducible to L.S.D., while the publisher seldom carries 
 on his business for fame or love of letters. The one 
 follows rather the shadow, the other the substance of 
 success, which latter proves the more often gained. 
 Publishers go bankrupt at times, but seem to have a 
 Phcenix-like property of rising from the ashes of their 
 misfortune. When the author fails, he is like to be 
 bankrupt in hope and all. When he succeeds in money 
 getting, it is not always to his own satisfaction, since 
 he may have the grace to regret having put forth 
 more matter with less art. 
 
 It is not the publisher's fault that literary wages are 
 kept down by the state of a market in which a blackleg 
 is as welcome as any other candidate for employ- 
 ment, and in which the gain must be spread over an 
 average of results from various ventures. But some 
 books carry the certainty, many the chance of profit ; 
 and it is asserted that such gains have not been fairly 
 divided in the past. The authors of this generation, 
 no longer to be kept in good humour by advances and 
 bonuses, like the four boire given to a cabman, have 
 incorporated themselves into a Society — its original 
 name, the Company of Authors, rejected perhaps as 
 too closely suggesting the Army of Martyrs — which 
 undertakes to stand up for their rights and royalties. 
 
 The Authors' Society was at first a rock of offence to 
 the publi hers, so much so that many members feared 
 to have their names given as resorting to this refuge ; 
 but such a Trades Union is now accepted as matter of 
 course. The publishers have on their side organized 
 a league of their own, as is only fair. They might take
 
 PUBLISHERS 199 
 
 a hint from those Chinese Guilds that bring such a 
 pressure of discipline to bear on tUeir members that a 
 merchant is a proverb for honesty amid political 
 corruption and social degeneracy. At least they are 
 in the rigiit of it to guard their own interests ; and 
 it seems a hopeful sign that their interest and the 
 author's are sometimes recognized as identical, so that 
 the two opposing leagues have been able to take 
 common counsel and action, as they might often do 
 to advantage. 
 
 Thus, at least; the battle is a pitched one, no longer 
 a guerilla warfare ; and on the whole as yet, the 
 authors have been victorious along the line, while 
 there seems reason to suspect that this agitation has 
 made their early struggles somewhat harder, even as 
 the yoke of American slavery was tightened by eforts 
 at emancipation. The publishers need not be blamed 
 if, finding their more liberal margin of profits scrimped, 
 they are shyer of taking risks with an unknown wiiter. 
 Then, as if a union of authors were not nuisance 
 enough, there has of late years arisen a middleman 
 styled the Agent, who undertakes to handle the com- 
 modity of brains with wide experience and business- 
 like coolness, so as to get the best turn of the market 
 for a seller who is seldom in a good position to gauge 
 his own value. Unfortunately the xA^gent hardly deals 
 but in reputations already made ; and the commenc- 
 ing author, who needs it most, gets little help of his 
 services. But at least no one should grudge him 
 what backing he can get from a Trades Union and the 
 use of any other machinery that may stand out for a 
 minimum rate of wage. We are, in sober sooth, the 
 most sweated of all trades, even* sempstresses, taking 
 one with another, having hardly such a sorrowful song 
 of the sheet to sing, when the majority of books are
 
 200 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 published at a positive loss to somebody — les? often 
 perhaps to the publisher. 
 
 I am not going to enter on that wide questioK, part of 
 a wider one as it is, the relations of Capital to Labour, 
 with the spade or the pen. But no mock-modesty 
 need prevent me from setting forth certam lessons I 
 have learned from a long and pretty mde experience 
 of authorship, which has brought me into contact, 
 friendly or otherwise, with publishers of all sorts. 
 Perhaps I ought to say that I know less of the up-to- 
 date publisher, who crosses swords with the Authors' 
 Society. My dealings have been rather with the 
 looser arrangements of a past generation, when formal 
 written contracts were not so common as verbal agree- 
 ments, or a simple letter, on which, in case of good 
 firms, a great deal of literary property used to change 
 hands with remarkably little misunderstanding be- 
 yond the author's chronic and suppressed grudge of 
 being underpaid, when his book was successful, and 
 his cheerful readiness to overlook the chance of failure. 
 My reminiscences go back to the time when an old- 
 fashioned publisher, though he had moved out of the 
 shop where Messrs. Bungay and Bacon lived, would 
 have on his premises a snug little dining-room for 
 entertaining authors into good humour. Something 
 of the kind still goes on in the trade, but rather, I 
 suppose, at clubs and restaurants, as in Georgian 
 days at taverns and coflee-houses. The sales dinner 
 to booksellers, one understands, is still more a thing of 
 the past. I once heard a very well-known WTiter tell 
 a story, to which his personal habits gave a special 
 point. He had called on a famous firm of publishers 
 in New York, and saw two of the partners with results 
 that sent him out in high dudgeon. But before 
 reaching the corner of the block, he was tapped on
 
 PUBLISHERS 201 
 
 the shoulder by a hasty stranger, catching him up to 
 say, " You have seen the wrong men. You inter- 
 viewed the literary partner, and did not hit it oft" 
 with him. Then you saw the financial partner, and 
 got on no better. It was me you should liave come 
 to first : I am the drinking partner." The end of 
 the story was a harmonious understanding. Had it 
 turned out otherwise, the publisher might not have 
 been to blame, for one of my experiences was being 
 engaged to finish a book by that author, who, having 
 been paid partly in advance, spent the money and took 
 no further steps in the matter. 
 
 Since those Arcadian days, I have come to deal 
 with publishers whom I never saw in the flesh, nor need 
 to see, on this side Jordan. The development of 
 cheap postage has, of course, made a great dilterence 
 in our business. I may mention, by the way, that in 
 half a century I can only once remember an appari- 
 tion on my threshold of the printer's devil, that old 
 bogey of authors ; and this one was smartly attired 
 in the livery of a newspaper. Another convention 
 seem- to have disappeared, the letter of introduction 
 which a publisher was supposed to require of new 
 clients. I am sometimes asked by raw authors for 
 such credentials ; and they still seem under the delu- 
 sion that a friendly letter should be a passport to the 
 publisher's good will : to which my reply always is 
 that I know of no publisher who, to oblige me or any- 
 one else, would publish a book unless he expects it to 
 be to his profit and credit, nor am I aware of any who 
 is not willing to hear of such a book oftered him as the 
 sufficient introduction. The publisher's concern is to 
 appreciate the value of what the author oflers, but 
 the character or qualities of the latter only as bearing 
 on the commercial value of his work : the former,
 
 202 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 for instance, is less willing to hear from an unknown 
 aspirant to fame, than from the Archangel Gabriel, 
 or even Beelzebub himself, if he had copy to dispose 
 of, not too much out of the firm's line of publication. 
 But the wary publisher is always on the look out for 
 new authors, for he cannot carry on his game without 
 drawing fresh cards, any one of which may turn up an 
 ace of trumps. His concern is to know a trump or an 
 honour when he sees it ; and the rule of the game is 
 that he may either, on consideration, take it into his 
 hand, or more or less politely let it " pass." He must 
 have his hands full, if Andrew Lang's estimate be 
 correct, that at least a hundred novels are written for 
 every one that struggles into print. A publishing 
 firm that does not deal in novels gives me from their 
 experience a ratio of seventy to one. 
 
 Personally or by post, I have taken a hand in a good 
 many games of the sort, played fairly or unfairly ; 
 and the general idea precipitated in my mind is with 
 how little wisdom the publishing world is governed. 
 This kind of merchant does not always profess to be a 
 complete judge of the wares he deals in. One of the 
 first publishers I had to do with used to boast with 
 convivial emphasis, " Bless you, I know nothing about 
 literature — if I did, I should be ruined in a week ! 
 But I know what will sell." So he believed, yet his 
 business came to nought in the end. Another pub- 
 lisher I knew, a scholar and a divine, who also 
 achieved failure, owed his ill-fortune, it was under- 
 stood, to not being able to resist the temptation 
 to publish what seemed admirable rather than 
 what would prove saleable. One need not repeat 
 the wicked stories authors tell among themselves 
 of publishers' ignorance. As a matter of fact, what- 
 ever Tonson and Lintot may have been, or Bacon
 
 PUBLISHERS 203 
 
 and Bungay, the publisher of to-day is as like to be a 
 scholar and a gentleman as his needy scribes. Some 
 publishers are notoriously brought up to the business, 
 in which their families have flourished for generations. 
 Others come into it late in life, from quite different 
 training and activities ; and these also do well at it, 
 or ill. It looks as if nascitur non fit applies to publisher 
 as well as to poet. Ignorant men succeed and well- 
 instructed men fail. The man almost sure to fail is 
 he who is not aware of his ignorance, a character found 
 among publishers as well as among authors. I re- 
 member one such who chose the line of an educational 
 publisher, but did not make much of it, and no wonder, 
 when he complained to me of the gentleman whom 
 he had commissioned to write an English grammar, 
 then instead of dwelling on the time-honoured inanities 
 of Lindley Murray this fellow had filled the book with 
 " nonsense about strong and weak verbs." The 
 flower of all knowledge, as is more frequently remarked 
 than taken to heart, is to know what one does not 
 know. A slow-witted British rustic, born before such 
 as he were driven to spell out Tit-bits, may in his 
 modest ignorance of all but soil and seasons be a wiser 
 man than the sharp and cock-sure Yankee, common- 
 schooled to believe whatever he sees in print ; but 
 " that is another story," as a celebrated author would 
 put it. 
 
 The great bibliophiles of last century, the Murrays, 
 the Blackwoods, the Longmans, seem to have owed 
 their success mainly to their own discrimination ; but 
 I take it that the shrewd publisher nowadays is slow 
 to " fancy " his own taste or knowledge of any subject, 
 in the way of business. A publisher in a large way of 
 business could never depend on himself to get through 
 all the MSS. submitted to him, even now that the
 
 204 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 art of typewriting has made this task more a property 
 of easiness. He has to use the services of a cryptic 
 person known as the " reader," whose judgment 
 multiplied into the publisher's -jlair, and divided by 
 the state of the book market, gives as a quotient the 
 verdict of to be or not to be awaited with such anxiety 
 by the authorling on his trial. In the long run, 
 taking one book with another, the reader's judgment 
 must be judged, one presumes, by results ; and the 
 law of the survival of the fittest should keep this arm 
 of the service efficient ; yet one doubts. Else, how 
 come those more or less well-founded legends of books 
 afterwards famous that were Ugly Ducklings to the 
 trade, Andersen's own Fairy Tales, Robinson Crusoe, 
 Tristram Shandy, Eothen, The Pleasures of Ho'pe, Sar- 
 tor Resartus, The Christian Year, Uncle Tojn's Cabin, 
 John Inglesant, Motley's History of the Netherlands, 
 and most appropriately, Rejected Addresses — to quote 
 a few instances that at once rise to mind. Vanity Fair 
 is said to have run the gauntlet of the Row. Jane 
 Austen's first novel was bought for £10 by a publisher, 
 who, on second thoughts did not think it worth print- 
 ing, and it gathered dust for years till, after her first 
 success, the family could buy it back for a song. The 
 Vicar of Wakefield lay in like limbo till Goldsmith's 
 fame was stamped by The Traveller. Even Gibbon's 
 Decline and Fall, it appears, had to go through an 
 ordeal of rejection at several hands. 
 
 Dropping from fame to popularity, one learns that 
 a book which sold its million of copies in our day, was 
 refused by firm after firm till the author had the luck 
 to print it at his own expense, an experiment that more 
 often justifies the publisher's judgment. " Sherlock 
 Holmes," perhaps the most popular hero of our genera- 
 tion, is understood not to have found favour with the
 
 PUBLISHERS 205 
 
 first firms that had the chance of him. One successful 
 novelist tells us how his first book was refused by 
 dozens of publishers before being luckily accepted by 
 one of the chief houses. Besant, who began his suc- 
 cessful run in double-harness with Rice by bringing 
 out Readij- Money Mortiboy on their own account, 
 warned young authors, however, against following a so 
 seductive example. The authors who have set up in 
 business, did not usually make a good thing of it ; 
 but to the contrary may be noted the cases of Ruskin 
 and William Morris, who proved able to defy merely 
 commercial considerations. One has known, by the 
 way, more than one author turned publisher, who in 
 this capacity showed himself an arrant sweater. 
 
 Every author of many books must have had the 
 experience, if he cared to go through with it, of hawk- 
 ing a potentially immortal work from door to door till 
 at last it found favour, or oblivion in the fireplace. 
 Not every author knows how the report of the reader 
 may have been more gratifying to his vanity than he 
 suspects, yet weighted by considerations that sank the 
 balance to declining point. On the other hand, the 
 reader may have to say of the matter submitted to him, 
 that he finds it foolish, ungrammatical, ill-spelt, full 
 of carelessness and ignorance, yet that it will none the 
 less appeal to a large section of the public, so his fiat 
 is imprimatur. It would at least be wholesome and 
 edifying discipline for a writer, could he come to know, 
 as he seldom does exactly, what the reader has said of 
 his work. I have had that exceptional experience. 
 In extreme youth I wrote what I called a book, the very 
 remembrance of which makes me blush. Inspired by 
 not ungenerous indignation at the imperfections of a 
 world that seemed to me deceitful and desperately 
 wicked, I let off my soul in a display of revolutionary
 
 206 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOKS 
 
 squibs, a la Sartor Resartus, in a falsetto voice accus- 
 ing heaven as well as earth, and concluding like a 
 very minor prophet that there was nothing for it but 
 dies ircB and a clean sweep. This bombshell I had 
 the assurance to submit to one of the very first of 
 publishing fii^ms, which naturally declined it, but with 
 kindly paternal counsels suggested perhaps by the 
 immaturity of the handwriting ; and to help in open- 
 ing my eyes, the reader's report was enclosed for 
 my benefit. All I can recall of it was that in effect 
 it pronounced my firebrand philippics " very dull, 
 apparently written to recommend the Evangelical 
 system of theology ! " I had clearly been too dull 
 for the reader to make out what I would be at. 
 
 This was stated to be "an unusual course ; " but 
 another famous firm more than once enclosed me the 
 verdict of a most painstaking reader — his name, I 
 think, Williams — who in careful terms and with court- 
 eous sympathy, balanced the shortcomings of one's 
 work against its merits in a way that should have been 
 profitable to a young author. Yet of one book so 
 refused, when it came to be published elsewhere with 
 success, this model adviser confessed that, "had we 
 seen it in type, our decision would probably have been 
 different." Another glimpse I got behind the scenes, 
 this time by accident, was not so satisfactory. I had 
 sent a story to a Religious Society, which decHned it. 
 The MS. being laid away for a time, when I came to 
 look through it I found among the leaves a letter, 
 addressed to no one,which I read almost through before 
 realizing that it was not meant for my eye, and that 
 it must have been left here by carelessness. It was in 
 fact a report on the story, signed by a well-known 
 divine, not now living ; and I am sorry to say, he had 
 libelled my little work, one point being that he sneered
 
 PUBLISHERS 207 
 
 at what he called " a pious ploughman," whose part 
 was in fact played most orthodoxly by the parish 
 clergyman. As this was in the days of typewriting, he 
 had no excuse for such misrepresentation. Perhaps 
 if all those secret judgments were brought to light, 
 writers might prove not without reason in their sus- 
 picion that " readers " sometimes indulge in a Homeric 
 nod or so, as well they may over much that is laid 
 before them. 
 
 I have been a reader myself on occasion, and know 
 how this machinery works. I can remember having 
 sent me, then living at a distance, a most careless 
 and cryptic MS. by a celebrated writer, as to whom the 
 publisher — a provincial one — confided to me that he 
 could not trust any opinion nearer at hand, so much 
 was this author detested by the local fellowship 
 of letters. The interpretation of his script was the 
 hardest guinea job I ever did in my life, but I read 
 through every word of it before condemning it, the 
 author being indeed at that stage of a distinguished 
 career known as trying to live on one's reputation. Such 
 confidential dealings are not to be lightly divulged; 
 but I will tell one story, the parties to which are dead ; 
 and as it is to the credit of a publisher who lived 
 to a good age in high respect, I will name him as the 
 late Mr. Stanford of Charing Cross, in whose record 
 I could say other good things. A generation ago, Mr. 
 Stanford made attempts towards general publishing, 
 and engaged a shrewd business man as editor. One 
 day, happening to call on this gentleman, I took up 
 a French book that lay on the table. " I wish you 
 would look through that, and tell me what you think 
 of it," said he, who knew no language but his own. 
 I saw very well what he would be at ; but, as I was 
 making a railway journey the same day, I thought I
 
 208 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 miglit as well save myself buying a book to read in the 
 train. So I read it through, and sent an account of 
 it ; and on this report Mr. Stanford arranged for 
 a translation. A year or two after its publication, 
 when the matter had passed out of my mind, I got a 
 cheque for two guineas from my editorial friend, who, 
 in an expansive mood, owned to me how he had meant 
 to avail himself of my services gratis, and how Mr. 
 Stanford, on coming to go into the accounts, had 
 rebuked him. " You must never do such a thing again : 
 when you ask a gentleman's opinion about a book, 
 you will always send him a guinea, and two guineas 
 if it is in a foreign language." On such moderate terms 
 a publisher's memory becomes embalmed among 
 authors. 
 
 Now I, being in a jaundiced or careless mood, might 
 well have failed to give a true account of that volume ; 
 so from my own consciousness, as well as from the 
 celebrated examples above mentioned, I conclude a 
 reader's judgment to be not conclusive. I once acted 
 on that opinion, when a publisher refused a book of 
 mine, which I felt sure would suit his purposes. As 
 he, too, is dead, I will confess what trick I played upon 
 him for his own good and mine. Keeping the MS. by 
 me for a little, I gave it a new title and sent it back for 
 his consideration. This time he accepted and pub- 
 lished it, and came to admit that he had made money 
 by it, as publishers can seldom be got to admit to an 
 author ; but I fear I was not equally frank with him as 
 to the history of that transaction. I once had the 
 experience of an ultroneous letter from a publisher 
 writing in warm praise of a book of mine which, as he 
 probably forgot, his firm had refused to publish. 
 
 Whether or no the publisher be master of his business, 
 he at least claims to be a man of business, punctual,
 
 PUBLISHERS 209 
 
 orderly, methodical, regular, all that the author is 
 understood not to be. Now, whatever professional 
 men of business may have been when apprenticed 
 to Osbaldistone and Tresham, or to Dombey & Son, 
 there seems reason to suspect them as somewhat 
 degenerate now that they aspire to share their lives 
 between the City and the West End. In my salad 
 days I belonged to a club of authors, artists and the 
 fine flower of Fleet Street, which society, having no 
 ground of its own, seeded itself as a parasite in the 
 premises of a City Club, where we had separate rooms, 
 yet so that we saw into the ways of our landlords, 
 as Lamb's form fellows at Christ's Hospital could 
 compare their lot with that of Boyer's pupils. It was 
 somewhat notorious that these City gentlemen amused 
 themselves with cards, billiards, betting and such- 
 like, whereas we mild Bohemians, after drinking a 
 sober glass and smoking an honest pipe, would go home 
 betimes to the bosom of our families. That experience 
 went to shake one's simple faith in business men, which, 
 however, is not quite uprooted. Like Caleb Garth, I 
 cherish a heartfelt reverence for " that myriad-headed 
 labour by which the social body is fed, housed and 
 clothed." A good deal of the business done on the 
 Exchanges of this world, seems to me, indeed, not 
 worth doing. A respectable citizen, it appears, has 
 certain stock which he values at 99f , then he casts 
 about for som.e other to whom he can pass it of! at 
 lOO-J, and congratulate himself on having done a good 
 stroke of business. For my part, I have no desire to 
 study the turns of such a market. As for the finan- 
 cial "kings "or "barons" or "trusts," that plot and 
 scheme to " corner " necessaries of life, whereby every 
 peasant's dinner on the other side of the world is a 
 halfpenny dearer, let such miUionaires fatten on the 
 
 P
 
 210 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 accursed gain and in due time marry their daughters 
 to dukes, but for them should be reserved a hotter 
 circle than any in Dante's Inferno. 
 
 While lacking talent to get the better of my neigh- 
 bours, I consider myself a man of business. I never 
 neglect an engagement, fail to answer a letter, put off 
 till to-morrow the duty that should be done to-day, 
 nor owe any man a penny longer than he delays to let 
 me know of it. Let the publisher stand forth who 
 can accuse me of ever breaking a bargain with him, of 
 scrimping him of his just due, of keeping him waiting 
 for what I had promised by a certain date, unless 
 in case of illness, during fifty years. I daresay all 
 authors are not equally careful, but as a class we bear 
 an undue reproach for irregularity. Will the public 
 consider how many paragraphs and columns and 
 volumes, from day to day, and from season to season, 
 have to be filled up by the exercise of faculties not so 
 readily commanded as muscular and mechanically 
 mental labour, then say if the craftsmen who turn 
 out this work to time, can be altogether the idle and 
 heedless workers of their reputation. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott made a fatal mistake in taking 
 himself for a shrewd man of business ; but where was 
 the prudence of the firms that misled him ? To stick 
 to my own experience, I have very seldom had much 
 to do with a publishing or printing firm, without hav- 
 ing cause to complain of carelessness or remissness in 
 just the points which are taken to be the business 
 man's superiority, while sometimes I have found 
 myself as well equipped in knowledge of practical 
 matters as were the partners who depended for such 
 details on their employes. 
 
 There was one firm that for a time flourished greenly, 
 tillin the second^ generation its members took to
 
 PUBLISHERS 211 
 
 interests outside of their business. My acquaintance 
 with them began by their asking me to write a book- 
 on a subject of which I am uttei-ly ignorant, then it 
 turned out that they had addressed me in mistake 
 for some one else ; but in later years I did a good deal 
 of work for this firm, whose methods struck me as an 
 illustration of how not to do it. The partner with 
 whom I had most to do, affected Napoleonic rapidity 
 in his transactions, as if trusting to an inspired coup 
 d'ceil. I once wrote him a long letter making thn^c 
 proposals, to which he answered on a post-card: " (1) No 
 good. (2) Do as you like. (3) Make an appointmenL^' 
 I made an appointment, accordingly, to talk over a 
 book I had offered to write. After keeping me waiting 
 for a little, the publisher bustled in with my letter 
 and another sheet in his hand. " What will you take 
 for this ? " I mentioned a sum. " Very well ; 
 there are the calculations ; go on these lines." So in 
 a minute and a half I was bowed out with this com- 
 mission in my pocket, duly impressed by such a way 
 of knocking off business. But on going into the figures 
 given me, I found them all wrong. More than once I 
 wrote to the publishers on their error, without any 
 answer. WHien the book began to be printed, I again 
 pointed out how it would make a volume twice as 
 large as was designed ; but it was not till nearly half 
 the type had been set up that I could get anyone to 
 mind me, then it had to be reset fiom the begin- 
 ning. 
 
 It was no wonder that this firm fell in the end. 
 For some time before, there was a period when, as a 
 larger creditor put it to me, " it was not easy to get 
 small accounts out of them : " that is, whereas printers 
 and papermakers had to be satisfied somehow, the 
 poor author found their cash -box bare as Mother
 
 212 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Hubbard's cupboard. The principal partner was 
 much in the way of entertaining theatrical celebrities ; 
 and when, as a guest in the next house, I sometimes 
 caught the din of their revels, I would fain have 
 played the part of a skeleton at the feast. At last, 
 to save something from the impending ruin, I accepted 
 about half what the firm had long owed me for hard 
 work, and thanked heaven to be rid of them. Now if 
 an author had treated a publisher so, would he be 
 called honest or business-like ? 
 
 Another publisher, who long somehow escaped 
 bankruptcy, has owed me a little money for the life- 
 time of a generation, during which he lived in a house 
 surrounded by green bay trees at a rental two or three 
 times what I can afford. For certain reasons, I did 
 not choose to press him for what is due to me. But 
 I once said to him un mot cruel, after the model of the 
 poet in Alphonse Daudet's Jack. Seeing the gentle- 
 man about to travel by the same train as myself, and 
 guessing that the like of him would go first-class, I 
 took a third-class ticket and walked slowly along the 
 train. Sure enough he sat in state, where he graciously 
 invited me to join him. " No," said I ; " you can 
 travel first-class ; I pay my debts." I think he had 
 the grace to be a little ashamed ; and the small sum 
 he still owes me I forgive him for the satisfaction of 
 letting off my epigram. 
 
 Eemissness, let us call it, in payment is bad enough ; 
 but there is another remissness by which publishers 
 often are very unjust. Time is money, we are told 
 by business men, and very truly so in the case of 
 certain books, which depend for their success on being 
 brought out at a certain date, sometimes with the 
 least possible delay. No wonder then if authors are 
 found bitterly complaining of the long time taken
 
 PUBLISHERS -213 
 
 in the consideration of their MSS. by publishers busy 
 as Chaucer's Sergeant of the Law, " And yet he 
 seemed busier than he was." One would allow such 
 a one fair time to make up his mind ; but when it 
 comes to keeping an author in the purgatory of sus- 
 pense for long weeks, even months, the poor suitor 
 may have a real grievance. I have had a good deal of 
 experience in bringing out books for the season of holly 
 and mistletoe, which means that they must begin to 
 peep forth with the daisies and buttercups ; and not 
 once only I have lost my chance of pi'inting in good 
 time through a publisher keeping them too long under 
 his consideration, more or less careful. 
 
 I am sorry to say that the worst offenders in this 
 way are the Religious Societies which do a large 
 business in the Christmas trade, and have a great 
 deal of mind to make up on what they then publish. 
 Trading on a capital of subscriptions, sure of a large 
 circle of readers, more than one such society has made 
 of its godliness great gain in the book-market, going far 
 to monopolize the supply in certain lines, and crushing 
 certain private competitors almost out of existence. 
 Trading in the name of religion, such bodies might be 
 expected to deal at least as fairly and considerately with 
 authors as firms that profess mere worldly principles. 
 In fact, religious societies have been noted for mean and 
 unjust dealings with the authors whom they employ 
 to their profit. Sir Walter Besant in the pages of the 
 " Author," tried to stir up a crusade against the most 
 dignified of these joint-stock champions of orthodoxy, 
 which he accused of being an oppressive employer. 
 Had he had my experience in lower walks of author- 
 ship, he might rather have couched his chivalrous lance 
 at other shields bearing similar devices ; for that 
 particular society is at least managed by gentlemen ;
 
 214 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 and I should judge its hands comparatively clean of 
 the blood and sweat of authors. 
 
 I myself once attacked such a Society in print, 
 which never thought fit to answer my accusation, and 
 yet most honest publishers would have felt some need 
 of an apology. In one of its magazines I had written 
 a number of stories, this magazine having originally 
 been promoted by myself and a friend of mine, who 
 were led to hand it over freely to the Society that 
 made it a profitable property, so at least owed us a 
 consideration and civility we did not receive at the 
 hands of its officials. This Society advertised a 
 series of books, for which I thought some of my stories 
 might be acceptable, for while the copyright remained 
 with me, the illustrations belonged to the publishers. 
 I made this suggestion to the gentleman advertised as 
 Editor of the series, who let me know that the matter 
 would be taken into consideration. Understanding a 
 Society's consideration to be slow work, I had opened 
 the matter so early as February ; and I impressed upon 
 the Editor that I must have a definite answer by the 
 middle of the year, so as not to lose my opportunity of 
 publication for Christmas. When months had passed 
 by without any communication from him, I wrote 
 more than once pressing for a decision, but he did not 
 vouchsafe me the courtesy of a reply. Having waited 
 till the very last moment, in June I took my book to 
 a firm of publishers with whom I arranged in as many 
 minutes as the Society had spent months over consider- 
 ing it. But then arose the question whether my 
 previous ofier had not tied me by an implied contract, 
 a point accentuated by the fact of an author's having 
 recently come off ill from a legal dispute with a 
 publisher in somewhat similar circumstances. I 
 wrote to the Editor of the series, informing him of
 
 PUBLISHERS 215 
 
 my intention to publish the book elsewhere, and insist- 
 ing on its being made clear that I was free to do so. 
 At last I elicited a testy reply that I could do as I 
 pleased. Then in September, my book being already 
 printed and about to be published, I had a civil letter 
 from another official, the General Editor, informing me 
 that his Society was willing to take it up next year, 
 after that seven months' consideration. 
 
 Now this delay did not damage me, being as well 
 satisfied to bring out my book with a private publisher. 
 But I thought right to make a protest in the interest 
 of other craftsmen who could not afford to quarrel 
 with any prospect of bread and butter. Had I been 
 an unknown or inexperienced writer, I should have 
 lost my chance of publication for a whole year, because 
 this Society's officials could not or would not give 
 attention to the business they undertook to manage. 
 If all stories be true, the Society makes a handsome 
 profit out of its publishing and bookselling enterprise. 
 Its editors are understood to draw their salaries with 
 considerable regularity. Why should the poor devil 
 of a scribbler, who is the mainspring of its profit- 
 making, be put to a loss by their superiority to the 
 ordinary standard of fairness and promptness in 
 business transactions ? Such was the question I 
 asked at the time, but was given to imderstand that 
 whoever traded with a religious society must take 
 its dealings as he found them, and not expect the 
 courtesy by which ordinary publishers are more 
 concerned to secure the good-will of authors, if only as 
 an asset in their business. 
 
 This grievance of delay is specially felt in the case 
 of contributors to periodicals, who have taken up some 
 theme of " topical " interest that grows stale before 
 they can get an answer to their proposal. Such themes,
 
 216 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 of course, the editor or publisher would rather get 
 treated by a trusty pen on which he can lay his hand 
 without waiting for volunteered work. More than 
 forty years ago, public sentiment being excited by a 
 certain event in what are called the highest circles, 
 I was employed to bring this topic upon railway 
 bookstalls in the form of a parody on the best-selling 
 novel of the day, a job having to be done so quickly 
 that part of the copy went to the printer by telegraph. 
 I will not here own the name of that hasty skit ; but 
 it is evident at what disadvantage its author might 
 have been in finding a printer and publisher for himself, 
 before the public ear had to be tickled by some fresh 
 straw of sensation. An illustrious instance in the 
 same kind is Rejected Addresses, depending for success 
 on being written and published in a few weeks : this 
 was refused by several publishers who seem to have 
 needed only a few hours for its consideration ; but 
 such a manuscript nowadays might be kept locked up 
 for weeks or months by the routine of some publishing 
 houses. 
 
 Another wrong done to authors shows a fault in the 
 law of literary property. I have unpleasant memories 
 of a publisher who published a book for me on a 
 royalty, which went on selling, at a loss to himself, as 
 he declared, yet he was always ready to buy the 
 copyright. For many years I refused to part with it, 
 till one day, meeting him at dinner, he took me " gross 
 and full of bread," and in a weak moment of convivial 
 expansion, I agreed to sell him my book outright for 
 a very modest price. The morning's reflection brought 
 repentance, but I kept my verbal agreement, while he 
 never paid me anything beyond repeated promises. 
 I can recall how, at our last interview, he expressed 
 surprise that I had not been paid, and made a show of
 
 PUBLISHERS 217 
 
 noting — with a dry pen — that a cheque was to be sent 
 me at once. But it had not come to hand, when in a 
 year or so my debtor went bankrupt. The result of 
 this was that my copyright, for which I had not 
 received one penny, became the property of his 
 creditors. So I was legally advised ; and the Author's 
 Society gave me no hope of getting anything out of the 
 wreck beyond my share of the inconsiderable dividend. 
 Yet I so pressed the official receiver, that in the end, 
 rather to my own surprise, my claim was paid in full. 
 This book, still on the market, had expensive plates ; 
 and might have proved difficult to sell for the benefit 
 of the estate if clogged by a possible dispute as to the 
 ownership of the copyright : such is the only explana- 
 tion I can give of my good luck in that matter, where, 
 I believe, law if not justice was against me. 
 
 The law is imfair to more unfortunate authors who 
 have to do with unfortunate publishers. A friend of 
 mine published a book, for the printing, paper and 
 advertising of which he paid on the nail. The publisher, 
 acting merely as agent for its sale, became bankrupt 
 in a manner as to which ugly stories were told ; then 
 my friend not only had to be content with a fraction 
 of the receipts from the sale of his book, but the unsold 
 copies, his rightful property, were seized by the book- 
 binder in whose custody they lay, the law giving 
 him a lien on them for the publisher's debt to himself ; 
 and from him they had to be ransomed by the author. 
 
 This is a not uncommon hardship, authors who may 
 have employed a bankrupt publisher being still at 
 the same disadvantage as once were lodgers when 
 their goods could be taken in execution among those 
 of the landlord. The author of ErewJion told me, 
 if I remember right, how he had more than once had 
 such an unpleasant experience. But again I have been
 
 218 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 rarely lucky in scoring of! a business -firm that sought 
 to take advantage of me under this legal injustice. 
 I had agreed to bring out a book with a publisher, 
 whose stability there was reason to distrust. Before 
 handing over the MS., I had a copy made for myself. 
 WTiile the book was still in the press, the firm failed. 
 The printer informed me that he had a lien on my MS., 
 judging like Solomon of my love for the child of my 
 brain, and seeing his way to getting his bill paid better 
 than out of the bankrupt estate. He seemed surprised 
 that I took it coolly ; and after a time a representative 
 was sent to ask what I meant to do about it. I declined 
 to do anything, pointing out that what he had seized 
 was worth to me only the cost of copying, and to him 
 not one farthing till he had made terms with me for its 
 publication. The printer saw his mistake, and came 
 down to offering abject terms, getting very little out 
 of this stroke of business beyond a bad name among 
 authors. One need not have much sympathy with 
 printers, paper-makers and the like in such a case, 
 as it is their business to know a publisher's position, 
 and, as often as not, they are really keeping up a lame 
 duck of the trade, throwing good money after bad in 
 the hope of setting him on his legs again. Sometimes, 
 indeed, a publishing firm is only the mask of a printer. 
 But the author, unless he consult the Authors* 
 Society, has scant means of foreseeing a catastrophe 
 which may involve him as he is hoping in vain to pay 
 the rent of his garret. 
 
 The author, it may be granted, is apt not to have 
 a good head for accounts, which is presumably a 
 publisher's strong point. And publishers' accounts 
 are cryptic to those better versed in book-making 
 than in book-keeping, the clearest point in them most 
 often being a balance brought out against the author.
 
 PUBLISHERS 219 
 
 Even when he has learned by experience that when a 
 book is published at five sliillings, about half that 
 amount sticks to the hands through which it passes 
 before reaching the buyer, and barely half-a-crown 
 is left to pay the expense of paper and print, he may 
 still be confronted with charges for advertisements 
 and other exactions, for which are invoked the mys- 
 terious customs of the trade. Among these customs, 
 as now may seem scarcely credible, was that he must 
 take the publisher's mere word for every item of 
 expenditure on his behalf. This is still practically 
 done in most instances, though one of the first victories 
 of the Authors' Society was in bringing prominent 
 firms to recognize the author's right to inspect accounts, 
 if he pleased, and to demand vouchers such as are 
 matter of course in other agencies. 
 
 No wonder the author often prefers the smallest 
 payment down, whereby the publisher, for the price 
 of a sprat, may chance to buy a whale, but also a bad 
 sprat. When the sprat turned out a right whale, he 
 sometimes has thrown the author an extra handful 
 of blubber, beyond the bargain. But now that the 
 author, under the advice of his agents and counsellors, 
 stands out for a larger share, the pubUsher may well 
 contract his casual liberality. The day has gone when 
 he was often the author's banker ; he shows himself 
 more shy of making advances by which he some- 
 times lost, yet not always in the long run. The 
 old publisher was expected to accommodate his clients 
 in the manner of a fashionable youth's tailor. The 
 new publisher stands more strictly on business lines, 
 even in questions of pence, for of late, in several cases, 
 he has been requiring the author to provide straw for 
 his bricks, in the form of stamps to pay the postage 
 of returned MS. And the business has changed its
 
 220 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 character to some extent, with new markets and 
 methods of distribution. It was once more like the 
 exciting uncertainty of placer-mining, but now seeks 
 rather to strike banket-reefs, which give a steady 
 return for working on a large scale. Nuggets and 
 rich pockets still turn up ; but the main yield is from 
 the crushing of literary ore, in which the publisher's 
 experience, capital and machinery are set against the 
 author's labour, at a rate which has to be adjusted 
 not without a good deal of contention. 
 
 On a hint from the mining world, the remuneration 
 of authors has lately taken more often, in whole or in 
 part, the form of royalties. The principle of pay- 
 ment by results seems a fair one if fairly calculated. 
 But here again the publishers do not always set 
 authors a good business example. Such agreements 
 provide for accounts and royalties becoming due at a 
 certain date ; but in my experience it is exceptional 
 for them to be paid punctually. There was one firm 
 that for years owed me a settlement in July, yet I 
 never got a penny without dunning them, and when 
 once my dues came so late as November, it was 
 with a grumble against my pressing for them so soon. 
 
 Of other schemes of division, such as the once ap- 
 proved half -profit agreement, little need be said except 
 that the author seldom got anything out of them ; and 
 that they have mostly withered up under the accusing 
 light turned on them by the Authors' Society. In my 
 early days, a common fraud practised by certain 
 publishers was this. The aspiring author produced 
 a MS., usually a novel, which then was bound to come 
 out in the two or three volume form fostered by 
 circulating libraries. This foolish fly walked into the 
 parlour of the publishing spider, who recognized 
 talent, genius, etc., but . What his hut expanded
 
 PUBLISHERS 221 
 
 to was a proposal that tlie author should contribute 
 a certain sum to the risk of publication. This sum 
 covered all the risk to the publisher, who printed some 
 three hundred and fifty copies, pretty sure that the 
 libraries would take at least a hundred or so at a price 
 to meet, plus the author's subsidy, the cost of paper 
 and printing. The author's returns were to begin when 
 three hundred copies had been sold, as seldom happened. 
 Between one hundred and three hundred, all the gain 
 was for the astute publisher, with an off chance of the 
 book turning out a real success for both parties. 
 
 Of course I am not speaking of high-class firms ; but 
 this would be a business for heaven rather than for 
 earth, if the trade did not include men no more honest 
 than they are forced to be. Even now that the 
 Authors' Society has exposed and exploded so many 
 tricks and trade customs, it has still its hands full of 
 work in protecting the rights of authors. From a 
 recent number of its paper, " The Author," it appears 
 that in one month the Committee has had to deal with 
 over thirty cases of wrong done to its clients, agree- 
 ments broken, MSS. detained, payments delayed or 
 refused, and that a majority of these are in the way of 
 being settled in the authors' favour, if only by infinites- 
 imal dividends in bankruptcy. By no means the 
 whole body of authors belong to this Society, as all of 
 them should do, especially those most able to look after 
 their own interests, on consideration of the weaker 
 brethren who must have so often gone to the wall 
 before they could be thus equipped in the weapons of 
 Co-operation. 
 
 As far back as 1736 a Society was formed for helping 
 authors to come before the public without dependence 
 on the Caves and Newberys of the day. This dift'ered 
 from the Society of our day in not being an association
 
 222 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 of authors for self-help, but a body of noblemen and 
 gentlemen who proposed to exercise a sort of joint- 
 stock patronage with the best intentions, as set forth 
 in what would be to-day styled their prospectus. 
 
 To supply the Want of a Regular and Public Acknowledgment 
 of Learning. 
 
 To assist Authors in the Publication, and to secure them the 
 entire Profits of their own Works. 
 
 To institute a Republic of Letters, for the promoting of Arts and 
 Sciences, by the necessary means of profit, as well as by the Nobler 
 Motives of Praise and Emulation. 
 
 This Society held together for a dozen years, and 
 printed about as many books of heavy metal, among 
 them Sir T. Roe's State Papers and Sir Isaac Newton's 
 Quadrature of Curves, some bringing a profit and some 
 a loss. The chief complaint of the managers was that 
 they could not sell their publications without the 
 intervention of booksellers, who would not be content 
 with a commission of 15 per cent. It also appears that 
 those philanthropic publishers brought out volumes 
 not very likely to pay. Furthermore the subscriptions 
 fell off, so that the Society was fain to dissolve itself 
 in 1749, its small balance of funds being handed over 
 to the Foundling Hospital, perhaps as undertaking 
 another class of works that do not else find a publisher. 
 
 My favourite plan of publishing is to print at my 
 own expense, and to sell the book through a publisher 
 who keeps a clear 10 to 15 per cent of the returns for 
 himself. In what other trade does a middleman despise 
 such a commission for handling wares, without risk 
 and with little but routine labour ? Yet publishing on 
 such terms is by no means approved in the trade, and 
 good firms will not readily undertake it. The first 
 time I published a book on this plan, more than a
 
 PUBLISHERS 223 
 
 generation ago, to be sure, I was surprised by the 
 printer begging me to keep our transaction private, 
 as dealing thus with an author direct might earn him 
 a bad name among his most profitable customers. So, 
 one understands, the British criminal or litigant must 
 engage his counsel through the mediumship of a 
 solicitor, a point of professional etiquette not valid in 
 America. 
 
 It may be remembered how in Bulwer-Lytton's 
 Caxtons, the author of a History of Human Error was 
 nigh ruined by his sanguine brother-in-law luring him 
 into the speculation of a Grand Anti-Publisher 
 Confederate Author's Society. 
 
 Now imaginative minds have again been whisper- 
 ing to each other that, whereas the publisher could 
 hardly prosper without authors, authors might con- 
 ceivably co-operate to become their own publishers. 
 Some books, not always the best, are so welcomed by 
 the public that very simple machinery would suffice 
 to put them on the bookstalls. Some other books, not 
 always the worst, bring so slight returns to the author, 
 that he may well be concerned to get them printed 
 with as little loss as need be. These things being so, 
 certain authors of our time have recalled how in the 
 last generation Civil Servants put their heads and their 
 savings together — but the following out of this 
 consideration might make my book seem to publishers 
 quite unfit for publication.
 
 VIII 
 
 EDITOES 
 
 As that cryptic being the publisher's " Reader " is a 
 kind of criminal turned detective, so the Editor seems 
 also a traitor to his brotherhood, pardoned and paid to 
 act as executeur des hautes oeuvres. The French editor, 
 indeed, is no better than a publisher. In England, too, 
 his identity was once involved with the publisher's, 
 but the process of evolution at work on the trade since 
 its protoplasmic days, has developed him into a 
 publisher's responsible minister, a secretary of literary 
 state whose ojffice is to select, correct, touch up, dress 
 out, in a word, to edit the writings of live and dead 
 authors. The Editor's function, older than his title, 
 was originally one of importance, not without dignity. 
 In the early days of printing, when classics were in 
 demand, unlettered printers had to depend on a 
 scholar's services, not only for choosing what deserved 
 printing but to act as corrector of the press. Men so 
 famed for learning as Erasmus and Melanchthon 
 were editors in this sense as well as authors. And all 
 along there have been editors, as of Dictionaries and 
 Cyclopaedias, who could not be belittled as mere 
 handlers of other men's work. 
 
 There are, to be sure, editors and editors, some 
 being no more than valets to a classic author, others 
 virtual despots over a scribbling province, which they 
 
 224
 
 EDITORS 225 
 
 rule with a blue pencil for sceptre. The title seems 
 as elastic as that of captain, who may command any 
 class of craft from a coal barge to a cruiser. Some- 
 times his vessel hoists the flag of an admiral, under 
 whom the commander sits eclipsed in dignity. Some- 
 times, like the fighting captains of old Armadas, he 
 depends much on an experienced sailing-master, or 
 bustling first-lieutenant, known as the sub -editor. 
 Again, his crew may be so small that the skipper 
 himself has to lend a hand at all jobs, his wife perhaps 
 taking a trick at the helm, and his son goading a 
 dull Pegasus along the bank. I myself have made 
 voyages with the rating of editor ; but commonly 
 it was a story of playing in one's single person the 
 parts of 
 
 The bo'siin tight, and the midshipmite. 
 And the crew of the captain's gig. 
 
 I once took a veritable voyage across the Bay of 
 Biscay, when it jaisait des siennes. The salt has been 
 much washed out of my blood ; while well satisfied 
 that there is more of the Viking in the average Briton, 
 I look on the sea as a damp, draughty and disagreeable 
 place, and applaud Dr. Johnson as taking a more 
 sensible view of ships than of Scotsmen. But long 
 ago I had paid my footing to the winds and waves, 
 so on this trip I could critically observe the speedy 
 prostration of one fellow-passenger after another. The 
 one who surprised me by holding out through all, was 
 a mildly venerable-looking man in a broad-brimmed 
 hat and long black coat, that carried out the general 
 impression of a retired tradesman occupying himself 
 as a Sunday-school superintendent. He turned out 
 to be the oldest master-mariner alive, Elder Brother 
 of the Trinity House and so forth. At the height of
 
 226 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 the tempest — sailors might have styled it half a gale 
 or so — this veteran hoisted himself on to the bridge 
 with the view of giving his advice and assistance to the 
 young skipper, who at once sternly ordered him down. 
 " And quite right, sir ! " the sea-Nestor told me. " In 
 such cases, the master can't be left too much to 
 himself." We noticed how he always made a point of 
 addressing the captain as master ; and I have lugged 
 in this somewhat loosely flapping reminiscence to show 
 how titles of honour tend to come down in value like 
 the Eoman penny and the French pound, till the style 
 of a princess fits a new world " sales lady," whose 
 washing, when she saves up her " compensation " for 
 a trip as far as Rome, may be done by a donna. 
 
 Some modern editors have no nobler task than the 
 washing of dirty manuscript. But the title of Editor, 
 par excellence, in our day belongs to the captain of a 
 periodical liner or iron-clad newspaper, who is truly a 
 great man on his own quarter-deck or in his sentinelled 
 cabin, his orders received with observance by all hands, 
 his state envied by many who know not with what 
 anxious caution he has to shape a course in shifting 
 winds, and to satisfy the firm or " my lords " to whom 
 he owes his commission. If the craft he command be 
 his own property, all the more reason he has not to let 
 it be cast away. But care was ever the shipmate of 
 greatness. The first Editors on record seem the 
 priests that controlled the Delphic oracle, under whose 
 injudicious or corrupt management the Pythia came to 
 lose profitable credit and authority. 
 
 Since writing in papers and magazines is the surest 
 means of earning money, with fame thrown in for 
 signed articles, the editor may now be considered the 
 author's most influential patron, having in his hands 
 power to bind and loose, the keys of acceptance or
 
 EDITORS 227 
 
 rejection, the dispensation of indulgences that are torn 
 from a cheque-book. The hungry authors look up to 
 him and are, or are not, fed. Not all authors, indeed, 
 for the spoilt popular favourite may have to be coaxed, 
 flattered, tickled with laurels and heavily chained with 
 gold before he will consent to figure in the triumphal 
 procession of inky slaves, any one of whom might well 
 stand in the editor's chariot to whisper reminders that 
 he is mortal and how fickle a thing is public favour. 
 One successful editor is credited with the bon mot that 
 he has only to show himself at the door of his office and 
 whistle for authors ; yet he, too, must take trouble to 
 catch decoy-ducks of more gorgeous plumage. 
 
 Even this great man, as has been hinted, must bow 
 before his proprietor, unless he double the parts of 
 a Belisarius and a Justinian. There are, it is under- 
 stood, some editors who by force of character or 
 success, come to be Mayors of the Palace under a rot 
 faineant. There are also proprietors with the name 
 of being terrible Turks, whose pashas stand in monthly 
 dread of a bowstring known as the circulation-list. 
 Certain literary enterprises have been noted for a 
 rapid consumption of editors. One newspaper 
 owner of quasi-Oriental antecedents, was notorious 
 for falling out with his staff. The story goes that on 
 his being asked if he still kept acquaintance with So- 
 and-so, a journalist who meanwhile had grown to be 
 a Cabinet minister and almost a standard author, this 
 potentate professed not to be sure of the gentleman's 
 identity. " The fact is, I have employed so many of 
 those young men, that I can't remember one from 
 another ! " There was another renowned proprietor 
 who had the name of meddling much with his editors, 
 through " fancying himself " as an author. One of the 
 legends about him is that being struck by the " Christy
 
 228 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Minstrels" performances, in their heyday of novelty, 
 he wrote an article on them for a Cyclopaedia then 
 being prepared by his j&rm. The editors, judging this 
 contribution below the dignity of such a publication, 
 contrived to mislay it. The publisher kept it back to 
 be presented later when the work came to Minstrels. 
 Again it somehow was kept out ; but finally appeared 
 under the head of Negro Minstrels, since the per- 
 sistent proprietor could hardly be suppressed a third 
 time. These editors rather deserve our gratitude ; 
 while nothing short of execration seems the meed of 
 that unknown potentate who forced Thackeray to 
 leave half-told the story of The Great Hoggarty 
 Diamond. 
 
 The awfulness of editorship, then, depends on the 
 point of view. There may be intelligences to whom 
 the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica seems no 
 bigger than a blackbeetle. But the young author, 
 dropping his first contribution into the editorial 
 letter-box, imagines himself addressing a power little 
 short of earthly providence. And some authors no 
 longer young delude themselves that all might still go 
 well with them if only they had an editor by the ear. 
 In An Editor's Tales is well put the matter as known to 
 Anthony Trollope from both sides. One of the most 
 amusing stories in that instructive book is of the 
 aspirant to fame who spent his last three-and-sixpence 
 for the privilege of imposing his acquaintance upon 
 an editor in the nakedness of a Turkish Bath. This 
 editor's tales harp upon the trials of a kindly man 
 tempted to play the philanthropist when his duty is 
 to carry on a business ruled by the laws of demand 
 and supply. The fate of Trollope's chief editorship 
 seems to show that in his case the supply was not 
 adapted to the demand. But Thackeray retired from
 
 EDITORS 229 
 
 the "Comhill" in the flush of success, finding the 
 thorns in his editorial cushion unbearable, for he was 
 not more sensitive to criticism than to the appeals of 
 would-be contributors who took a magazine to be an 
 institution for the relief of widows and orphans. A 
 good writer, indeed, is not often the stuff of which to 
 make a good editor. There have been exceptions, yet 
 the best in this kind may be those who do not write 
 themselves, like Buloz of the famous French Review, 
 and that volcanic editor of Mrs. Lynn Linton's early 
 experience, who made the reputation of a periodical 
 in which his chief part seems by her account to have 
 been swearing at such of the writers as would stand his 
 manners. " Editors are not born, but made," is the 
 dictum of S. C. Hall, after long experience ; and he 
 declares that Thomas Campbell, Theodore Hook, 
 Tom Hood and Bulwer Lytton, under whom he served 
 as lieutenant, all made very bad captains of the New 
 Monthly Magazine. 
 
 " It all goes by favour, and the people who write 
 are your uncles and aunts, and grandmothers, and 
 lady-lovers," wrote a fair and sore rejected contributor 
 to one of Trollope's editors. This is a view often 
 taken by the unsuccessful ; but very little judg- 
 ment is needed to consider how ill a periodical 
 would flourish whose editor thought of obliging his 
 friends rather than pleasing his readers, or to learn 
 how Paternoster Row is haunted by the ghosts of 
 mighty magazines, dead because their conductors 
 failed to be on the look out for new blood. Whether 
 from his lady-love or his worst enemy, the prudent 
 editor should be always open to an infusion that may 
 quicken his circulation. Yet there is some truth in 
 the charge of " influence." Poor L. E. L. might not 
 so soon have won an introduction to popularity had
 
 230 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOES 
 
 not Jerdan of the Literary Gazette been her father's 
 friendly neighbour ; while not to avail herself of such 
 an advantage, Adelaide Procter was so scrupulous as 
 to win Dickens' favour for her first contributions under 
 the mask of " Mary Berwick." Mrs. S. C. Hall, who 
 came to write over two hundred volumes, seems not 
 to have thought of writing till she married a much- 
 editing husband. More than one scribbling celebrity 
 of our generation might be named, who would hardly 
 have got the chance to fill so many pages, had he or 
 she not been born in the porphyry chambers of Pendom, 
 or by chance brought into familiar contact with its 
 ministers. 
 
 Other things being equal, the Editor gives out a job 
 to a friend rather than to a stranger, and employs 
 contributors on whom he can always lay his hand in 
 preference to waiting for Macaulays and De Quinceys 
 in the bush. Even in the most choice magazines, the 
 purple patches are sewn on a certain amount of pad- 
 ding, which the Editor knows by experience can be 
 done well enough by So or So, each in his own line of 
 ability ; while it is the interest of the publisher to 
 throw crumbs among the flock of authors fluttering 
 half-tamed about his premises. In weekly and stfll 
 more in daily journalism, the further consideration of 
 haste comes in : the Editor may have scant time to 
 read manuscripts, but must commission writers whom 
 he can trust to deal with this or that subject. In vary- 
 ing degrees, all periodical publications are manned by a 
 regular crew, among whom a raw aspirant finds it not 
 always easy to enter as cabin boy or stowaway. This 
 is in the nature of things. But the outsider need 
 usually count on no " influence" beyond his possible 
 usefulness to the publication ; and if editors, after 
 many disappointments, prove difficult to convince on
 
 EDITORS 231 
 
 this head, they are perhaps as often inclined to strain 
 a point in favour of a literary consc.ipt. 
 
 Such a recruit does not always well in forcing him- 
 self on the pe sonal acquaintance of an editor, who is 
 like to be wary of interviews, all the more when he 
 prints the varying conditions on which he is prepared, 
 or not prepared to " consider" the prolters of aspirants. 
 Less harm is done by presenting oneself to publishers, 
 since every Jorkins is apt to have a Spenlow, who may 
 serve as buffer for polite refusal. If Trollope's hints 
 are to be trusted, however, there is one exception to 
 the above rule : young and comely Sapphos, it appears, 
 may not always be so unbusiness-like in their fond 
 desire of viva voce communication with an editor, 
 who happens to be a man. 
 
 I can remember once being asked to see an editor, 
 and she was a woman, daughter of Captain Marryat. 
 The result of this interview turned out important for 
 her. To a magazine she conducted, I had offered an 
 account of an extraordinary spiritual seance, such as 
 was then a novel sensation in London. The lady 
 wished to let me understand that while she would 
 like to publish my article, she durst not risk scandaliz- 
 ing her readers. Since she seemed hardly sure whether 
 to take me for accomplice or dupe of the uncanny 
 doings in question, I, who had treated the matter 
 solely from an observer's point of view, advised her 
 to see such a performance for herself, as given by a 
 couple of American mediums, afterwards exposed as 
 arrant humbugs. She went, accordingly, accom- 
 panied by another popular novelist, and was treated to 
 a show of signs and wonders, with religious sentiments 
 uttered by invisible spirits in a strong Yankee accent. 
 Though both these ladies had disguised themselves by 
 taking olf their wedding-rings, ^Ii\ and JMrs. Sludge
 
 232 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 were cunning enough to guess at and call forth, the 
 spirit of a dead child that worked its effect on one of 
 the visitors. This was at a high tide of mediumship, 
 when one of our most distinguished men of science, 
 having set out armed cap a pie to quell the monster, 
 was presently found pining in its dungeons. My 
 incredulous editress, who went to scoff, remained con- 
 verted to become a doughty champion of spiritualism, 
 in defence of which she wrote two or three volumes, 
 one of them, I observe, attributing my part in the 
 matter to a gentleman of our common acquaintance, 
 w^ho was at the time confined in a lunatic asylum. 
 From this story I draw the moral that an editor's 
 judgment is not infallible, either when speaking 
 ex cathedra, or in private life. 
 
 My own experience of editors, however, has been 
 peculiar rather than extensive. The other day a 
 chord was struck in my memory by learning from Mr. 
 W. D. Howells' Literary Friends, how an early poem 
 of his, after many adventures of rejection, at last 
 found unhoped-for favour with an English editor 
 about to start a " Shilling Magazine." This was Mr. 
 Samuel Lucas, whose name I remember gratefully as 
 the only editor who ever made advances to me as an 
 unknown writer. If I remember right, I had offered 
 a paper to a periodical with which he was connected, 
 then, this periodical coming to an end, Mr. Lucas wrote 
 to me, as to Mr. Howells at Venice, inviting my 
 services in his new venture. Naturally, I admired his 
 discrimination. But when he had printed one article 
 of mine, our patron died untimely, as, I think, did his 
 magazine, so that neither Mr. Howells nor myself got 
 much good out of this gleam of encouragement. Since 
 then, I have seldom been in favour with editors, who, 
 perhaps found me a little difficult to drive in harness.
 
 EDITORS 233 
 
 I had one friend who became an editor, with some 
 friction to our friendship. For his periodical I wrote 
 a story, of which one scene was laid at a Shoeblacks' 
 home. Being strong on the " document," after my 
 French models, I visited such a refuge, and painted it 
 from the life as cold and cheerless. My editor, being 
 on kindly terms with a chief promoter of such char- 
 itable efforts, objected to this description as likely to 
 offend the personage in question, and wished me to 
 give my faithful picture a thick wash of couleur de 
 rose ; but I stubbornly declined to sophisticate facts, 
 for if truth be fled from among writers of fiction, where 
 indeed shall she find refuge on the face of the 
 earth ? 
 
 From the Editor's function as patron and selector, 
 we pass on to consider him as corrector, in which 
 capacity he may be a guide to yoimg authors, not 
 always grateful, and a bugbear to old ones who find 
 their most elaborate sentences curtailed or deleted. 
 One remembers the outcries of Southey and Sydney 
 Smith under the hacking about of Quarterly editors, 
 who were perhaps more chary of meddling with the 
 style of Macaulay or Carlyle : the latter Sampson, 
 indeed, once appeared in the Edinburgh Review shorn 
 of all his hirsute force. But writers should not com- 
 plain of such emending interference, when they have 
 undertaken to treat anonymously a subject which 
 must be adapted to the size, the tone, and the tradi- 
 tions of an organ which takes all responsibility for their 
 opinions. Alterations of style or statement should 
 here of course be a matter of more or less delicacy ; 
 but when " No flowers, by request," is the rule, an 
 editor must be ruthless in pruning the paragraphs of 
 florid contributors. Such a work as the Dictionary 
 of National Biography, for instance — as it stands, a loss
 
 234 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 and an honour to its publisher — could never have 
 been kept within reasonable limits but for a watchful 
 censorship that proved too much for its first editor's 
 health. And a very little practical experience, of 
 course, would have hindered the Rev. Homer Wilbur 
 A.M. from offering his fast-day discourse to be printed 
 in the Jaalam Courier, with the remark that " by 
 omitting the advertisements, it might easily be got 
 within the limits of a single number." 
 
 As for that pulpit which " the editor mounts daily, 
 sometimes with a congregation of fifty thousand " — 
 five hundred thousand ? — one editor in Mr. Biglow's 
 country now counts his flock by millions — within 
 reach of his voice, and never a nodder, even, among 
 them, the convention is clear for unlimited despotism 
 of the absolute " we." The newspaper potentate can 
 edit a Balaam's very blessings into curses, or vice 
 versa ; and the prophet who will not submit to this law 
 must prophesy under his own name, perhaps at his 
 own expense. One remembers hearing both sides of 
 a grievance that caused an able leader-writer to resign 
 his commission, and seek fortune on another path 
 leading him to the bench. He complained to me that 
 a " not " had been inserted in every sentence by the 
 editor, who drily explained how the writer " took 
 quite the wrong view." Such rubs, of course, are 
 avoided by employing writers who take the right view ; 
 and some of the free-lances of Fleet Street seem able 
 readily to take any view that may be required of them, 
 to judge by the ease with which they transfer their 
 services from the Wallenstein Post to the Gustavus 
 Adolphus Gazette. One has known such a writer of 
 fortune engaged on both sides at once, wherein he is 
 at least as honourable as prosperous firms that bring 
 forth from the same fount both sweet waters and
 
 EDITORS 235 
 
 bitter, flavoured with sparkling Toryism at one tap 
 and at another frothed to a democratic head. 
 
 Fleet Street has many tales and legends of editors 
 who bore the blue pencil not in vain. One repre- 
 sents a mere underling as stealing the editorial 
 thunderbolt, to the scathe of a colleague. It is told 
 of a once copious journalist, noted as more ready with 
 copy than with coin of the realm ; this gentleman's 
 hatter, in pressing him for payment, had hinted how 
 he would cry quits to his bill, if the customer could 
 name his establishment in a leading article. Promising 
 to try his best, the journalist scribbled an article 
 on Hats, beginning with the days of Herodotus and 
 working round to our own time, so as artfully to bring 
 in his creditor's name. This he kept by him till, as 
 will happen in a newspaper office, an article had to be 
 dropped in haste, and he was called on to fill the gap 
 with a kind of literary fagot for which that paper had 
 no small reputation. In went his article on Hats, and 
 he stayed after the editor to make sure that the main 
 point had not been deleted. Next day he betook 
 himself to his hatter, who received him with an 
 unexpectedly frowning countenance, explained when 
 he saw his article marred by one slight alteration. 
 Another contributor, perhaps in debt to his own hatter, 
 had stayed behind to change the important name for 
 that of a rival over the way. This is a story of the last 
 generation. Alas ! the newspapers of our day often 
 display lying articles that have no other intent than 
 to advertise hatters, tailors, milliners and the like, no 
 doubt for value received — " and my people love to 
 have it so ! " 
 
 The " We " which once covered most printed 
 deliverances, has its use and virtue still in periodical 
 literature. So long as a writer be not responsible,
 
 236 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 the Editor's prerogative is unquestioned. What the 
 former furnishes is a raw material which another hand 
 may trim, cut and elaborate to the required gloss, 
 shape and pattern. That is the bargain : so long as 
 the craftsman gets his agreed pounds per thousand 
 words or pence per line, he has no right to complain. 
 He can complain with more reason on finding his pay 
 docked as well as his style. The case may be reversed. 
 An author, now fugleman of his own company, has 
 feelingly described to me his first interview with an 
 editor, for whom his prentice hand had written a 
 review of an important work on a subject of which he 
 himself thus began to be recognized among the 
 masters. At the time he was in need of money, and 
 when he saw the editorial pen run through certain 
 paragraphs, his heart sank under the calculation 
 of how many shillings were being marked off his 
 remuneration. But " Come ! " said the editor, " this 
 is too good to waste on one article. We must make 
 two or three of it." Thus was this esurient author 
 bidden to mount the heaven of success, and 
 mounted accordingly, when he had got such a leg 
 
 up. 
 
 But when the author gives out his work under his 
 own name, he has a right to say " a poor thing, but 
 mine own." There is a real grievance, when an editor 
 undertakes to titivate his contribution, except by 
 consent, for appearance before the public. I am sorry 
 to say that, in my experience, editors show a tendency 
 to presume on their power more and more of late 
 years. It is in the lower and more mechanical work- 
 shops of literature, of course, that the author must 
 submit to being clipped, filed and brushed ; but even 
 editors who should know better are found playing the 
 literary barber. I once wrote a signed article in
 
 EDITORS 237 
 
 a magazine that stood among the best. When it 
 appeared, I found how, after the proofs had passed 
 me, the editor had put in some touches of his own, 
 whereby I was made to appear as if I knew as little 
 of the subject as he did himself. Even a poet may- 
 have to submit to being edited. Samuel Butler's 
 Psalm of Montreal, that whimsical effusion of which 
 he gave me the proof sheet, might certainly have 
 startled the readers of a most discreet periodical had 
 it appeared there as he originally wrote it. 
 
 Authors should stand out against such interference, 
 as they are not backward in doing, when they can 
 afford it. No writer ought to have the power of 
 meddling with another's work, which is an expression 
 of personality in proportion to its worth. Inky 
 fingers too readily itch to alter a way of putting things 
 that comes natural to another mind ; but your Ben 
 Jonsons are not to be trusted to blot the lines of 
 Shakespeare. An editor, by the very nature of his 
 occupation, is apt to be dull, precise, with a preference 
 for the commonplace, the obvious, the jog-trot, and 
 he has seldom time to spare over considerations that 
 may have cost the author much labour of the file. 
 His taste is usually for potted phrases rather than for 
 sappy flowers of speech. I think with shame and 
 horror of one little, little book bearing my name, 
 which the proprietor has had gone over by some one 
 whose task was to translate all idiomatic and racy 
 expressions into the corresponding cliches of the news- 
 paper. Another editor of mine, who had more right of 
 criticism, was very free with suggestions ; then I could 
 not but chuckle to note how when I had quoted from 
 masters and models of style, his hasty blue pencil was 
 no less censorious of their diction than of my own. 
 Fancy such an editor let loose on the contortions of
 
 238 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Carlyle, on the conceits of Charles Lamb, on the 
 cadences of Ruskin, on the oracles of Emerson ! 
 
 Some of the most lively authors, indeed, are just 
 those who would dance with the worst grace in fetters 
 of criticism. How many of our standard writers have 
 their notable lapses, solecisms, queer tricks of tongue, 
 sheer blunders of which no able editor could ever be 
 guilty ! The very classics on which our taste is 
 formed take liberties with syntax and prosody for 
 which a schoolboy would have been flogged in days 
 when to break Priscian's head entailed a punishment 
 the reverse of capital. Such masters are not likely to 
 be superseded by the impeccable prize-poems of their 
 scholars. Yet the schoolmaster has been abroad in 
 literature, correcting its old licences with the pen of the 
 Lindley Murrays, pruning vagrant individualities to 
 smooth outline, weeding out poppies as well as tares 
 from well-trimmed beds of speech, and rejecting such 
 wild flowers as " early risers of literature " loved to 
 pluck " with the dew still on them," and the earth, 
 perhaps, sticking to their roots. 
 
 Our language has been carefully tamed, broken in 
 to hackney paces, trained to keep rank and step, in a 
 word edited, since Shakespeare wrote " I am appointed 
 him to murder you," and the English Bible was quite 
 Scotch or Irish in its use of shall and will. Chaucer 
 might nowadays have to do with editors who would 
 not allow him to " deemen to the badder end." Milton 
 would be rapped over the knuckles by the editorial 
 pencil for his " fairest of her daughters, Eve," which 
 yet has passed for a phrase matre pulchra filia 
 'pulchrior. The scholarly divine in Amelia exclaims 
 that a fourth-form boy would deserve whipping for 
 such false concord as Varium et mutabile femina. 
 " Every schoolboy " has been taught to flout Byron for
 
 EDITORS 230 
 
 his " there let him lay ! " Neatness and uniformity in 
 style are the only wear of a generation of writers fain 
 to seek after originality rather in motley affectation 
 of ideas. So the verbal corrector grows mighty as 
 embodying the spirit of our age. 
 
 " Boys and blackguards have always been my 
 masters in language," owns J. R. Lowell, who, I think, 
 would have agreed with me in deploring our taste for 
 clipping and trimming the English of our forefathers. 
 Before I ever heard his name, I had taken to the same 
 school of improvement. My most diligent studies in 
 style w^ere pursued in listening to cricket-players 
 on a village green or roisterers in a Devonshire 
 public-house, from whose careless talk I delighted 
 to pick up hedgerow blooms, racy of the soil. But 
 such are an abomination to the editorial mind, as 
 to the pedantic schoolmasters who go about to root 
 out good old idioms like " Try and do it," or " all 
 but over." Not long ago I wrote, what every one 
 says, " a dog to play with," which for the edification 
 of youth was altered into " a dog with which to 
 play." In this spirit a certain pedant is reported 
 as rebuking his pupil — " I told you, sir, that a 
 preposition was not a word to end a sentence with ! " 
 But let me err with Milton, Bunyan and Defoe, rather 
 than be correct with the contemporary Priscian, 
 whose head I should like to break for artificial rules 
 of grammar that are, in Dr. Johnson's corrected 
 phrase, " fundamentally unsound." 
 
 One cause is clear for the editor waxing and the 
 mere author waning in the present moon of our 
 history. John Bull's taste in literary fare has under- 
 gone a change very marked since dinners a la Russe 
 came into fashion. In old days, he stuck by choice 
 to substantial joints, seasoned perhaps with rather
 
 240 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 unwholesome pickles, and washed down with draughts 
 of full-bodied vintages. He who cared to read at all 
 was not afraid to tackle a quarto or a folio, that came 
 to table over and over again, or stood always in cut, 
 salted by the respect of generations. Now the reader 
 demands something new at each meal, served up in 
 a tempting way, and with all the variety he finds in 
 his beloved periodicals. These cater for him with 
 cunning kickshaws, with pungent sauces, with spicy 
 snippets, with a fiece de resistance of fiction, handed 
 round in slices, yet also with sweet and savoury plats, 
 on a table that appeals to the eye as well as the tongue, 
 while the barrel organ of advertisement supplies 
 music to help lazy digestion. The up-to-date author 
 has shown some ingenuity in adapting himself to 
 furnish forth such a menu, but its success depends 
 much on the chef, whose title is the Editor. A full- 
 flavoured haunch of venison would seem out of place 
 in the repasts he composes. Give him rather a 
 lump of frozen mutton, and trust to him for turning 
 out just the ragout that will satisfy his patrons. 
 
 It is the simple truth that many of the magazines 
 of to-day, and not a few of its books, depend for their 
 success on a kind of dullness. The art of sinking has 
 to be cultivated by their proprietors, as writers have 
 toiled after grace and eloquence. They appeal to a 
 mob of readers who would be scared away by any hint 
 of genius. Nothing pays so well as the commonplace, 
 tricked out in the mode of the hour. A prosperous 
 firm that has done much to popularize periodical 
 literature, used to keep among its staff of editors one 
 of whom the joke went that he served as dunceometer : 
 if any venture did not pay, he would be put in charge 
 of it to bring it down to a meaner capacity. I have a 
 sad experience of my own to note, after having had
 
 EDITORS 241 
 
 to do with almost every magazine of a certain class 
 that has been started in my time, then nearly all of 
 them came to die as surely as it deserved to live, while 
 those that have thriven find their depth of earth in 
 very common clay. So here again the wary editor is 
 more useful than the author, who will not be worth 
 his salt at this business, if he cannot bend to the idols 
 of its market-place. It is the author with most breed- 
 ing in him that runs least patiently in such harness. 
 The editor is a better-broken animal, that may be 
 trusted not to go scampering and sniffing after 
 shadowy fancies, so he gets his feed of corn and his 
 snug stable, while the untamed steed grazes on thorny 
 deserts, and leaves its bones to fatten richer pastures. 
 Yet indeed the best groomed and fed of all is the 
 Pegasus with lively action, that has had the luck to 
 learn smart paces and clever tricks which may be 
 shown ofi with applause in the circus of periodical 
 literature. 
 
 The author can seldom do his best without trying 
 to please himself. The Editor's task is rather to 
 please his public. The public is to be pleased in 
 different ways ; but it is apt to be shy of personality, 
 originality, and strong convictions. This means much 
 dwelling on matters of no importance, leaving all 
 controvertible questions to be aired in the special 
 yards of sect or party, where again the great point 
 is to give no offence by ideas not of the approved 
 pattern. 
 
 So it comes that religion sets the Editor upon his 
 highest horse. Their forms of faith and worship are 
 the poetry of life to many worthy folk in our land ; 
 there are others who at least cherish the antipathies of 
 their creed ; and the more serious-minded of these 
 believers cause a demand for reading that has been
 
 242 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 carefully edited to suit their point of view. Unfor- 
 tunately their point of view is not always that of one 
 who tries to " see life steadily and see it whole ; " and 
 the gratifying of their consciences leads to a sad 
 tampering with facts, more or less honestly under- 
 taken by authors who in this work are no better than 
 editors. We know how bigotry has edited the mind 
 of whole peoples, not yet risen up from intellectual 
 abasement ; but we hardly see how, in his present 
 mood of idle toleration or indifference to all creeds 
 but his own, Mr. John Bull, too, is in danger of grow- 
 ing flabby in respect for the truth, which one eminent 
 author tried in vain to honour by spelling it with 
 a capital T. 
 
 In my youth one had to be more careful about out- 
 raging orthodox Protestantism, while Giant Pope was 
 taken to be so crazy and stiff in his joints that any 
 scribbler might venture a shy at him. But in our 
 time, when Giant Pagan, too, has been galvanized 
 into some show of life, that other ex-bugbear seems 
 to have taken a new lease of loyalty among Bunyan's 
 countrymen. So skilled editors are made aware how in 
 the treatment of historical questions it is not nowadays 
 so necessary to consider Protestant susceptibilities, 
 but rather those of Catholics whom the truth finds 
 more ticklish : the state of the less regarded Protestant 
 seems the more gracious. Between them poor Clio 
 has often been led astray. 
 
 I have been asked to write a school history of Europe 
 which should make no mention of the Reformation, 
 nor of incidents going to show that some popes have 
 borne characters hardly jS.t for canonization. There 
 is a tale told of the late Pope Leo, that should open 
 the eyes of ostrich-like believers who think it safer 
 to bury their heads in sand. In introducing a cele-
 
 EDITORS 243 
 
 brated historian to the Vatican library, this pope 
 is said to have impressed upon him that he was to 
 feel by no means restricted in his use of its contents, 
 adding with a twinkle in his eye, " There are some 
 good people who would like to edit the Scriptures, 
 cutting out the story of Peter and the cock, for 
 instance, lest it should bring discredit on the Holy 
 See." The Pilgrim's Progress has actually been edited 
 in the interest of Catholic teachers, who thus make 
 John Bunyan recommend views of religion that to 
 him would have been anathema. 
 
 There are, indeed, Protestants as well as Catholics 
 willing to have the truth edited for them. In our 
 country, blessed with a hundred religions and only 
 one sauce, as graceless wits of the Continent reproach 
 us, there have thriven certain societies, concerned to 
 publish and advertise certain forms of religious doc- 
 trine, all others being put upon their Index Expurga- 
 torius. These societies have found their profit in 
 bringing out also books not expressly religious, yet 
 usually flavoured more or less strongly with the 
 particular sauce that is their undertaking's raison 
 d'etre. I often wonder as to one book, how it would 
 fare if brought for the first time, as a new work, 
 before the consideration of any such society. That 
 book is the English Bible. One feels pretty sure of 
 its being declined with thanks, or accepted for 
 publication only with a good deal of editorial correc- 
 tion and improvement. 
 
 I remember well my first encounter with the censor 
 of a publishing society. He seemed to me to have 
 some such concern with its publications as " M. 
 Auguste " used to show in getting into the way of 
 every one in the circus ring ; but I was given to 
 understand that this official had a keen flair for any
 
 244 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 suspicion of unsound doctrine, which made him most 
 useful to his employers, in spite of a testy temper and 
 a contented ignorance of literature. When once I 
 had written a story for one of the magazines under his 
 control, he sent for me to let me know how I offended 
 against one of the articles of the society's faith. To 
 avoid offence, the actual dogma in question need not 
 be stated : let us call it x, y, or say, a persuasion that 
 the moon is made of green cheese. It is a belief 
 natural to a certain stage in human development, 
 which for a time has been held by one section of the 
 Christian Church. No person capable of judging on 
 the matter now holds it in respect. The historic 
 Churches have quietly dropped it out of their creeds ; 
 yet, perhaps for that reason, it still remains in credit 
 with certain sectaries. The consideration of it had 
 never occurred to me ; and heedlessly I had used a 
 phrase implying that the moon was made, perhaps, of 
 red-currant jelly. What my editor had to tell me 
 was that he, of course, knew better than to suppose the 
 moon made of green cheese, yet that it must be so 
 represented in the publications of his society. In those 
 days I was young enough to have much trust in human 
 nature ; and I do not forget my generous contempt 
 for a man who took money to say or have said what 
 he believed untrue. 
 
 Each of the chief shades of opinion as to the nature 
 of the moon and other subjects, supports a publishing 
 society by which the facts of life are duly edited 
 to suit its doctrines. At one time these "concerns," 
 a title officially adopted by one of them, were content 
 with putting forth matter of doctrine ; but they have 
 gone on to publish fiction, history, science and books 
 of amusement, all tuned to the dominant note or at 
 least not in discord with it. The fiction, for instance,
 
 EDITORS 24n 
 
 may sail pretty close to the doctrinal wind, gratifying 
 an unregenerate taste up to a certain point, in the end 
 to be brought up with an orthodox moral. There 
 used to run a tale of one society which by its articles 
 was bound to set forth in every publication what is 
 called the " scheme of salvation." When it proposed 
 to produce a book on natural history, the author was 
 in despair as to the introduction of that doctrinal 
 feature ; but the editor pointed out how it might be 
 done in connection with the chimpanzee : " the 
 chimpanzee is in many respects like man, but in one 
 all-important respect they are unlike ; the chimpanzee 
 has no soul," etc. 
 
 It is easy to see how the editor is here in excelsis. 
 The figureheads of the enterprise are like to be well- 
 meaning gentlemen not versed in the business they 
 profess to conduct, qualified mainly by zeal for the 
 principles they seek to foster. The helm is in the 
 hands of paid officials, to whom principles are a matter 
 of interest. They practically direct a business which 
 is not their own ; and they would be more than 
 mortal, if they did not sometimes take on the insolence 
 of office towards the class of writers employed by them 
 as content with small pay, and usefully subservient to 
 a potentate beset with the temptations of the shop- 
 walker, the slave-driver and the inquisitor. An editor, 
 set in such authority, unchecked by considerations of 
 private profit and loss, is very apt to play the pasha. 
 
 I could tell some woeful tales of what I have known 
 authors obliged to bear from those gang-masters 
 cracking a doctrinal whip. In my own experience, I 
 have never but once known a publisher refuse to carry 
 out a clear contract. That publisher was a religious 
 society, whose directors, honest men individually 
 I doubt not, let themselves be bamboozled by a
 
 246 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 cunning official, who took advantage of my having 
 for the moment mislaid his written undertaking — I 
 found it since, and may publish it some day as an 
 illustration of the difference between practice and 
 profession. That same society had a little time before 
 published a story of mine in which I had spoken of 
 a parish clergyman as on his way to administer the 
 sacrament to a dying man ; no such iniquity indeed 
 happened coram fopulo, but I had suggested this as 
 reason for the parson being out at night, a most 
 unprotestant idea which the editor altered into the 
 catch-word of his sect " to engage in prayer." Even 
 so do Pharisees of all sects pay tithe of mint, anise 
 and cummin, while omitting — the rest of the verse 
 is familiar. 
 
 This is an old story, forms of once vital faith 
 ossified into a smug making the best of both worlds, 
 sanding the sugar but not forgetting to come to 
 prayers. No circle of Satan's invisible world dis- 
 played stirs an honest man's gorge like mean dealings 
 on the part of Mr. Facing-both-ways who, while 
 punctually paying rent for his villa in Clapham or 
 Clapton, takes care to insure an eternal mansion where 
 orthodox belief will be the title to respectability. Yet 
 as often as religion has been debased by its professed 
 pundits, from priest to local preacher, so often have 
 arisen new teachers, poets, prophets, and tellers of 
 true parables, in a word authors, who have refused to 
 let their contributions to human welfare be edited. 
 
 The religious editor is specially apt to grow bloated, 
 as circumstances make him master of the business in 
 an unusual degree. But the altered conditions of the 
 publishing trade bring about in general a rising demand 
 for editorship, as small shop-keepers become heads of 
 departments in gigantic stores. The old-fashioned
 
 EDITORS 247 
 
 publisher who was his own manager, who dealt with his 
 authors face to face, to whom their good will and good 
 word was a valuable asset in his business, seems to be 
 shoved aside by larger concerns whose transactions 
 require many foremen and overseers, all working 
 together to the amassing of a dividend. This kind 
 of joint-stock publishing has thriven mightily since 
 a popular novelist could thus, some twenty years ago, 
 describe the business of " Meeson's." 
 
 The firm employed more than two thousand hands ; and its 
 ■<vorks, lit throughout with the electric light, cover two acres 
 and a quarter of land. One hundred commercial travellers, at 
 three pounds a week and a commission, went forth east and west, 
 and north and south, to sell the books of Meeson (which were 
 largely religious in their nature) in all lands ; and five-and-twenty 
 tame authors (who were illustrated by thirteen tame artists) 
 Bat — at salaries ranging from one to five hundred a year — in 
 vault-Uke hutches in the basement, and week by week poured 
 out that hat-work for which Meeson's was justly famous. Then 
 there were editors and vice-editors, and heads of the various 
 departments, and sub-heads, and financial secretaries, and readers, 
 and many managers ; but what their names were no man knew, 
 because at Meeson's all the employes of the great house were 
 known by numbers ; personalities and personal responsibility 
 being the abomination of the firm. Nor was it allowed to any- 
 one having dealings with these items ever to see the same number 
 twice, presumably for fear lest the number should remember that 
 he was a man and a brother, and his heart should melt towards 
 the unfortunate, and the financial interests of Meeson's should 
 suffer. In short, Meeson's was an establishment created for and 
 devoted to money-making, and the fact was kept studiously and 
 even insolently before the eyes of everybody connected with it. 
 
 " It's piety that pays ! " exclaimed the head of 
 this firm ; but since his day new companies, syndicates 
 or expanded partnerships have opened other markets 
 for trading wholesale upon the various sheepishness 
 of the public, scampering into separate flocks that 
 may be profitably penned, fed and shorn each by an
 
 248 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 experienced editor. Sucli businesses promote demand 
 for a kind of authorship which is only raw material 
 to be spun, dressed, and dyed by editorial machinery. 
 The division of labour, it appears, can here be turned 
 to account, one man making the plot of a story, another 
 sketching out the characters, a third filling in the 
 conversations, and a deft hand giving the final gloss. 
 Thus is turned out in huge quantities a cheap " line " 
 of machine-made reading, which, pushed by the arts of 
 boom and by clever devices, pleases the foolish major- 
 ity better than hand-made literature. It looks as if 
 Pegasus, so often meanly bitted and bridled, were in 
 the next generation to be transformed into a motor- 
 car, with the editor for chauffeur, and what used to be 
 the author used up as fuel. It is already told of one 
 popular novelist that he finds a gold mine in bringing 
 up to date forgotten stories of another generation, 
 editing its sentiment into slang, changing nabobs into 
 South African millionaires, four-in-hands into auto- 
 mobiles, whist into bridge, and so forth. There 
 are stories enough extant to keep all the race of 
 readers a-going for generations to come, by help of 
 artful editing. 
 
 The brisk demand for manufactured shoddy, or for 
 old coats turned, makes indeed, a poor look-out for 
 the " hands " of this industry. One finds hope in ob- 
 serving that these factories at present see their account 
 in turning out the standard works of English literature 
 in cheap editions, that may give raw readers a chance 
 of distinguishing what ought to be read from what pays 
 to sell. Yet the apparent popularity of classical 
 reprints, too, puts the living author out of pocket, while 
 making work for the editor, employed to select, 
 introduce and annotate the dead lion, who can even 
 be stuffed by certain editorial arts. More than one
 
 EDITORS 249 
 
 presumptuous editor of our day has undertake q to 
 abridge Scott for the impatience of a generation 
 trained on tit-bits and reviews of reviews. My own 
 conscience sometimes smites me, quum pituita molesta 
 est, that in a popular edition, I cut out the oaths by 
 which Jane Austen thought to carry off the character 
 of a dashing young blood. 
 
 Much more might be said on this suggestive subject ; 
 but enough has been said to show how, under present 
 conditions, the author tends to be eclipsed by the 
 editor. An author by rights is one who writes what, 
 as he imagines, ought to be said. An editor's task is 
 to prepare what, as he judges, readers are willing to 
 have said. Every now and again the author insists 
 on being heard ; laudatur et alget ; but always the 
 editor thrives by studying the conditions of literature 
 as a business. It would be death to the mind of any 
 nation that permanently enslaved authorship to 
 editorship. Till lately, China had the name of being 
 the best edited country in the world, unless its 
 neighbour Korea bore away that palm. But one 
 knows another country that has been the author of 
 its own fame and fortune, yet now seems much inclined 
 to submit to political as well as literary editing.
 
 IX 
 
 CRITICS. 
 
 Another by-product of literature is the critic, who 
 makes a modest, regular and more or less honest living 
 by pointing out the faults or merits of his fellow- 
 authors. So great has been the need of using this 
 function for blame that the critic, who ought to sit 
 as a judge and a law-giver, came to be looked on by 
 authors as a counsel for their prosecution, or even 
 as chastiser of their offences ; and the word criticism, 
 like " Each man's censure,'''' has overbalanced itself 
 towards its harsher implication. Even in our more 
 humane days, when the critical scourge is seldom 
 knotted, authors grow up with an instinctive dread of 
 this corregidor, though they may affect the indiffer- 
 ence of Sir Fretful Plagiary, or the Archbishop of 
 Granada's welcome for a warning voice. 
 
 The present writer's policy, then, should be to 
 propitiate such important opinions after the manner of 
 Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz in appealing to "an enlightened, 
 a high-minded, a right-feeling, a conscientious, a 
 dispassionate, a sympathizing, a contemplative jury." 
 But I present myself as bound to speak the truth, a 
 witness rather than an advocate, free to deal critically 
 with the pretensions of his arbiters. All I will do in 
 my own interest, is to throw this chapter so far on in 
 
 250
 
 CRITICS 251 
 
 the book that it may have a chance to escape 
 the notice of readers likely to find offence in it. Many 
 years ago, a well-known author gave me advice 
 which has often justified itself : to put into the 
 preface what I wanted a critic to say, who would 
 very possibly save himself trouble by reading not 
 much further. There are many such " reviewers," 
 with whom, for once, I venture to deal faithfully, as 
 they do not always with the like of me. 
 
 Every son of Adam is born a critic, as sensitive 
 authors know. The most stolid layman, unable to 
 claim benefit of clergy by his own pen or pencil, will 
 give you his blunt judgment on any work of art, which 
 if he likes not, why then " he likes it not, perdy." I 
 recall among the acquaintances of my youth a Tony 
 Lumpkin, playfully styled " the IMissing Link," who 
 was wont to express his contempt for " all literary 
 stuff," from Shakespeare downwards, the seamy side 
 of such scorn being a most laughable trust in his own 
 innate wisdom, that was clearly to seek. He presented 
 only a caricature of much lay opinion. But I let pass 
 the amateur critic, who never could wTite a verse, 
 unless " Let's to the Prado, and make the most of 
 time ! " The prisoner at our bar is the professional 
 writer who undertakes to tell an author whether and 
 how far he have failed or succeeded, and be a taster for 
 the general reader, whose palate indeed often requires 
 help in distinguishing caviare from the popular brands 
 of ambrosia. 
 
 To the author, how useful should be an honest and 
 competent critic, especially if his services could be 
 brought to bear before the page were irrevocably in 
 print ! Most often your poor scribbler has no advice 
 but from critics on the hearth, too apt to be kind to 
 the virtues and blind to the faults of his work. After
 
 262 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 the pains and perils that went to bring it to birth, he 
 himself cannot but see the child of his imagination 
 with an indulgent eye, — 
 
 Strabonem 
 Appellat Psetum pater, et Pullum male parvus 
 Si cui filius est, ut abortivus fuit olim 
 
 Sisyphus, 
 
 Even if he shrink not from the task of correction, 
 it is hard for him to view his handiwork in clear 
 proportion and perspective. " I, reading and re- 
 reading, patching and touching continually, grew so 
 accustomed to my bantling's face, that, like a mother, 
 I could not tell whether it were handsome or hideous," 
 confesses a modern author. When permitted to 
 examine close at hand Sir William Richmond's mosaics 
 in St. Paul's, one is surprised to find a roughly and 
 coarsely frittered surface that shows so radiantly 
 impressive at a little distance. Even so, the author 
 must laboriously fit in his details, which come before 
 his eyes with microscopic enlargement and dulling 
 familiarity, till he is in danger of losing their general 
 effect, unless he can put the pattern by, to examine it 
 with the fresh discrimination of nine years' forgetful- 
 ness. Even then, the creative not being the same as 
 the critical eye, authors are like to make poor critics, 
 d fortiori of their own works, as often they want relish 
 for those of their rivals. Swinburne, so outspoken 
 in his likes and dislikes, did not care for Byron, who 
 did not care for Wordsworth and abused Southey. 
 Wordsworth cared chiefly for his own verse, though 
 Jeffrey pronounced that it would " never do." Dr. 
 Johnson had no great opinion of Gray, nor duly 
 reverenced Milton,who himself,we understand, thought 
 more of Paradise Regained than of Paradise Lost. 
 William Morris looked coldly both on Milton and
 
 CRITICS 253 
 
 Wordsworth. George Meredith sniffed at the "jewel- 
 lery " of Tennyson, who found the reading of Meredith 
 like " wading through glue." Tennyson's own " pet 
 bantling " was Maud, which the critics received with 
 a chorus of scolding. His friend Edward Fitzgerald 
 had the queerest quips of taste and repugnance. 
 We know what scornful judgments Carlyle passed on 
 the works of his contemporaries, as Harriet Martineau 
 on their characters. To De Quincy Keats' poetry 
 seemed mere " waxwork filigree " and " gilt ginger- 
 bread." Charlotte Bronte did not relish Jane Austen. 
 Macaulay, so enthusiastic over Jane Austen and 
 Richardson, shut his eyes on the rising star of Dickens, 
 and detested Carlyle's style, as his own has been 
 denounced by later critics. Goethe, himself a bore 
 to some authors, was bored by Dante and saw nothing 
 great in Victor Hugo. Charles Lamb pooh-poohed 
 Faust SiSB. "disagreeable, canting tale of seduction." 
 Sir H. Taylor found Burns "tedious." Tourgenief 
 could not stand ten pages of Balzac. Tolstoi thought 
 little of Shakespeare, who has by many writers been 
 judged " overrated," by Wordsworth for one, if we 
 can trust Lamb's report ; but such presumptuous 
 criticism is usually kept unpublished. Hallam and 
 Carlyle called out against each others' histories. 
 W. S. Landor had no more admiration for Spenser than 
 for Dryden, nor for " such trash as Werther and 
 Wilhelm Meister^ More than one celebrated author 
 indeed might have sat for Sir Fretful Plagiary, " who 
 could abide no books but his own." And when we 
 go back to the ancients, we find them too by no 
 means classics for one another. 
 
 It must be noted, however, that there is a special 
 class of authors whose forte and function is criticism 
 in the higher sense, men like Sainte-Beuve, or our own
 
 254 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Leslie Stephen. Such men, as a rule, create little 
 or nothing admirable of their own, but bring their 
 talent to a focus for understanding, explaining and 
 estimating the work of others, with more or less keen 
 and safe jlair for merits as well as faults. But 
 not every writer is tall enough to take the altitude of 
 critics who are critics indeed ; so I confine myself to 
 a larger brood who seem by no means above criticism, 
 such as they get from one of their own Dii majores, 
 Hazlitt to wit, in his account of the common reviewer's 
 relation to authors. " He considers them as pensioners 
 on his bounty for any pittance of praise, and in general 
 sets them up as butts for his wit and spleen, or uses 
 them as a stalking-horse, to convey his own favourite 
 notions and opinions, which he can do by this means 
 without the possibility of censure or appeal." But, 
 indeed, critics of Hazlitt's calibre are sometimes found 
 firing into each other, or coming near to blow up their 
 own reputations by some resoundingly rash judgment. 
 New authors have often to go through an ordeal of 
 snubbing from critics who cannot readily adjust the 
 focus of a judgment long exercised according to out- 
 worn rules. In much poring over print, a true lover 
 of literature, and with him perhaps a whole coterie, 
 sometimes appears to contract a mental short-sight, 
 even a squint, as when one Aristarchus pronounces 
 Daniel Deronda the best of George Eliot's works, or 
 another sets up for worship some odder idol, e.g. in 
 the case of Lamb's admiration for the Duchess of 
 Newcastle's works, and the relish in his circle for 
 Amory's eccentric Life of John Buncle. More than 
 one volume has been filled, or spiced, with the blunders 
 and heresies of celebrated critics, exposing themselves 
 to the chuckles of every authorling. 
 
 It may be noted that the great critics have most
 
 CRITICS 256 
 
 successfully exercised their skill on great authors, long 
 dead and widely read : it is in dealing with contem- 
 poraries they seem more apt to judge amiss. And if 
 the Tritons of literature cannot be depended on for 
 catholic soundness of taste, what may we expect of the 
 small fry who produce the reviews — in most cases more 
 fitly named " notices " — of new books for the guidance 
 of the public ? One knows what we get at the mouth 
 of " those scribes, who expound the law from their 
 pulpits in the reviews, weekly, monthly, quarterly " 
 . — and daily. I have naturally looked at thousands of 
 such notices dealing with my own books, and the upshot 
 is to leave me in a very critical frame of mind towards 
 my critics. How seldom did one find a useful hint, a 
 pregnant warning ; how often has one been treated 
 with mere sneers or careless compliments ; how little 
 trouble had most of these valuers taken to estimate 
 what may have cost the author so much pains ! In 
 the same number of one leading organ, I have had the 
 chance to be reviewed both favourably and unfavour- 
 ably, as a writer under different names. Another, 
 then bearing no less high a rank, described me one 
 year as not knowing the elements of my craft, and a 
 year later made amends by styling me one of the best 
 writers on the same subject. The same periodical 
 has spoken sweet and bitter things of the same book 
 of mine, twice submitted to its judgment in different 
 editions. Like other touchy scribes, I have more 
 than once been provoked into challenging a verdict 
 which could be proved as given in the teeth of the 
 evidence. In my salad days, I was green enough to 
 publish a selection of hasty criticisms, arranged 
 alternately fro and con ; and I now quote them, 
 exactly as they stood more than forty years ago.
 
 256 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 The Standard. 
 
 " There is neither wit nor wisdom, satire nor good fooling in it." 
 
 The Observer. 
 
 " We have here a very amusing little brochure, which will afford 
 a good hearty laugh to every reader in these dull days." 
 
 The Telegraph. 
 
 " The book altogether reads like an elaborate and decidedly 
 feeble April joke." 
 
 The Chronicle. 
 
 " It is long since we have been so much amused by any literary 
 brochure." 
 
 The Advertiser. 
 
 " The last part of the paper, 'A visit to the Infernal Regions,' 
 is objectionable in itself, and not ably executed." 
 
 The Chronicle. 
 
 " The article entitled ' A visit to the Infernal Regions ' is full 
 of vigorous satire." 
 
 The Journal. 
 
 " We confess to having read it half through, but, judging from 
 the contents of the first half, we did not think the second half 
 worth the trouble." 
 
 The Guardian. 
 
 " Having thoroughly enjoyed it ourselves, we recommend our 
 readers to purchase the elegant little volume, and judge for them- 
 selves." 
 
 The Telegraph. 
 
 " We cannot profess to regard this jeu d' esprit as a favourable 
 specimen even of Scotch wit." 
 
 The Herald. 
 
 " The sketches are very clever, and the little volume extremely 
 amusing." 
 
 How can a young writer steer his course hy help 
 of such winds of vEolus let loose upon him from port 
 and starboard ? It is, of course, the beginner who
 
 CRITICS 257 
 
 has most to learn from honest and judicious apprecia- 
 tion, which he is least likely to secure, unless on this 
 consideration, that the hasty critic hardly knows the 
 correct thing to say about him. He, also, is more 
 sensitive to such worthless praise or blame, more easily 
 puffed up by windy applause, and more sorely 
 punctured into collapse. Is there any callow author 
 who may not confess to having eagerly looked out for 
 his first notices in the press, almost as sacramental as 
 the marriage of his maiden thought to print and paper ? 
 But, by and by, if he kept on treading that path of 
 thistles and briars as well as primroses, he grows 
 hardened to pricks and rents in his self-satisfaction, 
 and more doubtful of the flattery that once flew to 
 his empty head. He will not even be too much 
 confounded when his slips in grammar, or his printers' 
 in spelling, are held up to reproach. The critic has a 
 keen nose and a sweet tooth for such matters of mint 
 and cummin, as to which some authors can afford to be 
 careless. 
 
 Poluphloisboisterous Homer of old 
 Chucked all his augments into the sea, 
 Although he had often been candidly told 
 That perfects imperfect begin with an e : 
 But the Poet replied with a dignified air, 
 " What the Digamma does any one care ! " 
 
 There was a period in my career when I ceased to pay 
 much attention to periodical criticism of my own 
 work. But in those years I had a charge to select 
 and purchase all the best new books published in 
 English. For this purpose, I carefully studied the 
 reviews supposed to be of chief authority, as well as 
 others that spoke of current drifts of taste ; then, over 
 and over again, I found myself deceived by their 
 recommendations. The strange thing is that one 
 
 S
 
 258 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 could expect illuminating guidance, being by this time 
 so much behind the scenes as to be familiar with the 
 lanterns. 
 
 Later on, I fell into the wiles of press-cutting 
 agencies ; and for some years past, I have made a 
 collection of notices relating to myself. Viewing them 
 with the calmer eye of age and experience, I come back 
 to my old opinion that, as a rule, they were seldom 
 worth reading, or writing. Some few exceptions 
 show care, judgment and knowledge of the matter, 
 so might be welcomed even when they found fault. 
 Others I have thought of nailing up, like dead vermin, 
 as awful examples of spite or stupidity. My favourite 
 specimen I cannot lay hands on, or I would print it 
 as an instance of inept absurdity. It appeared in a 
 religious journal, which poured compliments on a 
 book of mine, the interest of the plot, the drawing of 
 the characters, the moral of the story and so forth. 
 But my book was a sober statement of fact, without 
 plot or hero ; and the critic could have read no word 
 of it beyond the title. A more recent notice, to which 
 a lady boldly signs her name, declares her victim's 
 " rather a dull production," but as she mis-describes 
 its character, ascribes it to a wrong publisher, and is 
 not even correct about its title, one can lay the 
 soothing unction to one's soul that she did not get so 
 far as the title page. And again another organ gives 
 forth that whereas I once wrote good books of a 
 certain kind, the one under dissection shows me to 
 have sadly fallen off, this volume being, in fact, as the 
 critic failed to observe, only a new edition of one of 
 those earlier publications. I have had a volume of 
 stories highly praised as " Essays." I have chuckled 
 to find myself abused as incorrect in an identification 
 of the fictitious scenes of Mr. Thomas Hardy's Wessex,
 
 CRITICS 259 
 
 my critic not being aware that this page was kindly 
 contributed by Mr. Hardy himself, who desired 
 not to put his name to it. Every voluminous author 
 must have a private museum of such boomerang 
 missiles. 
 
 Instead of airing my own grievances against the 
 critics, or showing myself not duly grateful for their 
 good words, it will be more to the purpose to quote 
 what famous authors have said about them. Sir 
 Arthur Helps, for instance, divides critics under three 
 heads. 
 
 1. There are those who are too timid or too fastidious to do 
 anything themselves — men perhaps of considerable ability — and 
 they naturally find an exercise for their abilities in criticizing the 
 works of others. 
 
 2. There are the born critics, men whose powers naturally take 
 the form of criticism. 
 
 3. There are the professional critics, who take up criticism 
 as they would any other occupation which procures them a 
 tolerably easy livelihood. 
 
 The doers are very averse from criticizing ; and as they are the 
 only persons who could criticize consummately, criticism is in 
 general the worst done thing in the world. 
 
 I have already ventured to disagree with the dictum 
 of the last paragraph : as to the rest, old Ben Jonson 
 had much the same opinion, who belittles the critics 
 of his day as " a kind of tinkers that make more faults 
 than they mend." Pope's judgment is " Ten censure 
 wrong for one who writes amiss." Johnson in the 
 Rambler lets out his estimate of a trade he practised 
 not much to his credit. Hazlitt's has been already 
 cited. We all know Disraeli's jibe that critics are 
 those who have failed in literature or art, to which has 
 been moved the amendment, that they are rather 
 those who have not begun to succeed. " We are 
 literary cannibals, living on each other : what the
 
 260 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 mulberry leaf is to the silkworm, the author's book is to 
 the critical larvae that feed upon it," exclaims Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, who had cause to be sore under 
 a peculiarly provoking breed of stings, that elsewhere 
 provoked him into saying " nature made critics from 
 chips left over in her fashioning of authors." This is 
 hardly so, at least in our British Grub Street, where 
 many authors are fain to earn a crust as critics both 
 before and after proving their mettle in original work. 
 Froude puts it more shrewdly and justly : "in litera- 
 ture, the aspirant to fame begins upon the Bench, and 
 when he has served his time in passing judgment on 
 others, he descends to the Bar to practise on his own 
 account." The same metaphor is worked out by 
 Professor Edward Dowden [Transcripts and Studies, 
 p. 261):— 
 
 The word " critic " by its derivation means a judge rather than 
 an interpreter, and the function assumed by these ministers 
 of literature resembles that of a magistrate on the bench. Now 
 a crew of disorderly persons, often of the frailer sex, each of 
 whom, more perhaps through weakness than wickedness, has 
 been guilty of bringing into the world a novel in three volumes ; 
 now a company of abashed and shivering poetlings each charged 
 with the crime of having uttered counterfeit verse, comes before 
 his worship the reviewer, who lightly dismisses some with a 
 caution, and sentences others to public laughter and the stocks 
 during a week. And the sad thing is that though instances have 
 been known in which a poetaster reformed and became a respect- 
 able citizen, the female novelist, having once erred, is lost to all 
 sense of shame, and inevitably appears before the bench again 
 and again, once at least in every six months, during the period of 
 her natural life. We need this police and magistracy of literature, 
 and we may cheerfully admit that, unless bribed by friendship or 
 malice, they do in the main truly and indifferently administer 
 justice of a rough-and-ready kind. 
 
 But, if in the company of petty poetical offenders there happen 
 to be one true prophet—a Shelley, a Wordsworth, a Keats — the 
 chances are that his worship the reviewer, hearing the evidence
 
 CRITICS 261 
 
 against him, and being addressed by the prisoner in an unknown 
 tongue, for which no interpreter can be found in the court or in the 
 city, will, with irritated impatience, sentence him to the stocks 
 for seven days, which under no circumstances can do him much 
 harm, and which may teach him the advantages of learning to 
 speak plain English. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, 
 Tennyson, Carlisle, Browning, Whitman — each in his day has 
 stood in the stocks, and every fool has been free to throw a 
 cabbage stump or a rotten egg at the convicted culprit. 
 
 But more than one wheel of this metaphor drags. 
 The police-magistrate, whatever he may have been 
 in the days of Fielding, is now likely to be a man of 
 judgment, experience, caution, and knowledge of the 
 law. The Solomon of the critical bench has given 
 little security that he be other than a conceited 
 ignoramus, with fads, fancies and prejudices for his 
 code, often so pressed for time and so poorly paid that 
 he cannot afford to go into the case with due attention. 
 Magistrates have been known to accept the evidence 
 of the police too readily ; the mere appearance 
 of a prisoner in the dock, grimy and haggard, seems 
 to blot the legal presumption of innocence ; yet a 
 sensible justice is on his guard against the Rhada- 
 manthus vein, and, in the spirit of the law which he 
 administers, makes a point of honour to give the 
 accused fair play ; whereas one dressed in the critic's 
 brief authority often displays himself chiefly concerned 
 to unmuzzle his own wisdom and let off his smart 
 sayings from the bench. Then the legal luminary, 
 if so dim and smoky, is exposed to be sharply snuffed 
 by the press that tends more and more to erect itself 
 into a court of appeal in criminal cases. But there is 
 no such supervision, almost no criticism of the critic, 
 whose deliverances stand unrevised for his readers ; 
 and the only mitigation of his sentence lies in appeal 
 to some dozens or scores of similar verdicts, the
 
 262 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 upshot of which may well be to leave the prisoner 
 himself in doubt whether he be guilty or innocent. His 
 comfort in such bewilderment must be in comparing 
 the critics to the bishop of Jowett's quip, who can say 
 " you be damned," but is not really so formidable 
 as the judge who can order you to be hanged, and you 
 are hanged. 
 
 The worst of such a penalty is its being an unequal 
 one, harder on Hudibras than on his squire, hardest on 
 one whose sin of unregulated imagination magnifies 
 and envenoms the punishment. The Bohemians and 
 vagrants of real life become callous to it ; such a 
 delinquent is even known to snore in the pillory of 
 public scorn ; then in nine cases out of ten he is aware 
 of getting what he deserves. But the peccant author 
 is often made conscious of his crime only by its 
 chastisement, and but half -conscious if his judges 
 alternately apply the dock and the nettle. Some are 
 so delicately constituted that no soothing applications 
 can allay the smart. Some pine away, sick of sup- 
 pressed good opinion of themselves. That seven 
 days in the stocks may mean a sentence of silence 
 for life. 
 
 Sensible authors, of course, take criticism for what 
 it is worth, take down the useful hints, spit out the 
 gritty lumps, and trust to time for digesting the most 
 stodgy mass of opinion of their work. Some have 
 philosophy enough to paste good notices in their 
 albums, and light their pipes with bad ones. Most of 
 us would rather be noticed unkindly than not noticed 
 at all, which indeed is the capital sentence of criticism. 
 But it is mere affectation in any author to pretend in- 
 difference to the infliction of being publicly corrected, 
 even if he have grace enough to kiss the rod. This 
 race is naturally thin-skinned and proverbially
 
 CRITICS 263 
 
 irritable, doomed to learn in suffering what it niay 
 teach in improved song. Now and then its spirit 
 proves so sensitive as to be snuffed out by an article. 
 More than one admiied author has been known to 
 shrink from reading newspaper reviews of his books, 
 or to have them filtered through some kind censorship, 
 as Lewes guarded George Eliot's peace of mind. 
 If ever there was a sane and wholesome-blooded 
 author, above petty rancours and itchings, it was 
 Walter Scott, yet one recalls how he lost his temper 
 when a mere publisher ventured to criticize his hand- j 
 
 ling of a romance. Kit North, who laid on the 
 critical knout so heartily, confessed himself " sore and 
 silly " as anyone when he felt it on his own shoulders. 
 How then shall minor or meeker scribes suffer and 
 be still, how above all if they feel themselves lashed 
 by an anonymous and invisible executioner, showing 
 neither soul to be damned nor corporeal parts to be 
 kicked ? Let them anoint their stripes at least by the 
 consideration that an executioner is neither loved nor 
 respected : nobody remembers Gilford or Croker with 
 the warm affection in which names like Lamb, Keats 
 and Hood are cherished. And when your Sainte- 
 Beuves and such-like " drop into " verses of their 
 own — well, we must remember Matthew Arnold as a 
 striking exception, if not so in the eyes of Goldwin 
 Smith. 
 
 That self-exiled Aristarchus was an approved but 
 hardly a beloved author, whose famulus has recently 
 revealed him as most sensitive to criticism while him- 
 self nothing if not hypercritical and " poly-antagon- 
 istic " in his judgments. Longfellow's poems, for him, 
 were " barley-water," Browning's " metaphysics in 
 cacophonous verse," Swinburne " a ranting, raving 
 creature," Emerson's prose " a cataract of pebbles,"
 
 264 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 mucli of Carlyle's " weird, hysterical, almost irrational 
 objurgations against all that ever was," George Eliot 
 "a second-rate Jane Austen padded with pseudo-philo- 
 sophical language," then more recent novels he would 
 lay down with exclamations as " chopped straw ! " — 
 " saw-dust ! " — " pig-wash ! " Yet this hanging judge 
 sorely resented any prick to his own self-esteem, and 
 all his life bore a spite against Disraeli for a certain 
 caricature of an Oxford Professor. 
 
 There are, of course, celebrated cases of teased 
 lions turning on their tormentors, to score them with 
 tooth and claw, as when Dryden lifted himself up 
 against Shadwell, and Pope made havoc among the 
 heroes of the Dunciad. Tom Moore defied his censors 
 in advance, by the mouth of the critical Fadladeen 
 whom he brings forward in the interludes of 
 Lalla Rookh. One would as little care to be in the 
 seat of that critic whom Thackeray flayed by his 
 Essay on Thunder and Small Beer, as in the skin of the 
 poor publisher horsewhipped by Grantley Berkeley. 
 Sometimes a mere suspected critic gets damned to 
 an immortality of ill-fame. Byron lived to regret the 
 indiscriminate way in which he mauled back among 
 the Edinburgh Reviewers. In my college days, I 
 just missed by a year sitting under a professor, in every 
 corner of whose class-room irreverent youth had 
 hacked out the stigma, half a century old — Paltry 
 Pillans, — he who thus had been so long set among a 
 whole form of whipping-boys for the real culprit, 
 Brougham was it not ? My father had a story to 
 report of his generation, how, provoked by the 
 illiterateness of some bucolic lad, Pillans rhetorically 
 defied him to quote a single line of English poetry, 
 and was answered back with that too lasting one — 
 Paltry Pillans shall traduce liis friend !
 
 CRITICS 265 
 
 Those were the heroic days of criticism, when 
 Thackeray's Bludyer might slash to his heart's content 
 at authors tied up for chastisement. It is only a birch- 
 rod that is trusted to the latter-day critic, and that 
 only in flagrant cases. The knout style of correction 
 has quite gone out ; and the bludgeon wielded by 
 early reviewers is seldom called into play, even when 
 two doughty champions meet man to man on an open 
 stage, to show which can better guard his head. 
 Indeed, the vice of reviewing, in our soft generation, 
 is seen to be more often on the side of indulgence than 
 of severity. To fall again for a moment into personal 
 considerations, if I hit out at critics, it is not as goaded 
 by wrongs of my own, having remarkably little to 
 complain of in my running the gauntlet of some half- 
 century's notices of the press. This good fortune is 
 largely due to the fact that most of my books have 
 been published for the Christmas season, at which it 
 is the custom to spare the rod and spoil the child of 
 the Muses. The critical Cerberus then lies in a plac- 
 able mood, inspired by beef and pudding, so seldom 
 cares to worry authorkins who at another time 
 might well be suspected of trying to burgle Tartarus or 
 Parnassus. Not to speak of the seasonable spirit of 
 good humour, it seems hardly worth while to spend 
 pains on the mass of well-intended books then offered 
 to the public. 
 
 So the Christmas critic usually gets through his task 
 by ringing the changes on stock compliments, with an 
 occasional growl or snap to persuade himself of being 
 wide awake, more rarely a snarl of personal grudge ; 
 commonly he takes down the honeyed and half- 
 baked cake at a gulp, as not worth the trouble of 
 chewing, and, blinking lazily, lets the seeker of petty 
 fame pass on unchallenged. Forty years ago a friend
 
 266 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 got me to help him out with his job of " reviewing " 
 the Christmas publications of the year for a well- 
 known London paper. My friend made no profession 
 of any familiarity with literature or art, his work being 
 rather on the practical side of journalism, but on some 
 emergency he had been pressed into the critical 
 service. This job had to be done on two afternoons, 
 during which we might turn over some sixty volumes 
 at a noisy office in a Strand, but must take none of 
 them away. It may be supposed what " criticism " 
 was done under these conditions. 
 
 I confess, then, to having been a critic myself a mes 
 heures, that it may be seen how I judge my fellow- 
 sinners not without such experience as makes an Old 
 Bailey champion a stern judge for so moestis reis as 
 he once defended. For my own conscience, I may 
 say that I have not on my hands the blood or tears 
 of any innocent victim, butchered to make a reviewer's 
 holiday. I have never reviewed a book without read- 
 ing it, or most of it ; and I have always declined 
 to tackle one beyond my scope. I have only once 
 attempted what is called a slashing criticism, inspired 
 by the whim of castigating myself : being sickened by 
 the sugary treatment of books of mine in a periodical 
 that was much under my control, by way of variety 
 I flayed one in the good old savage style, at least to 
 appearance, though I fear the scourge was here plied 
 more noisily than sorely, rather in the manner of 
 Sancho Panza than of Ignatius Loyola. It must 
 often have occurred to authors that, if only for the 
 nonce they could get outside of their own self-com- 
 placency and interest, they might write better reviews 
 of their own books than are furnished by the average 
 off-hand notices of the press. 
 
 The criticism of our generation works under the
 
 CRITICS 267 
 
 special disadvantage of being in a hurry to serve a 
 public that will not wait a day, hardly an hour, to 
 know what it is to think about any subject. " Indo- 
 lent reviewers are now lightning reviewers," well says 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison. A day or two before the 
 publication of any book that may be expected to 
 excite general attention, you will see its bulky volumes 
 in the suburban trams, carefully nursed by young 
 gentlemen or ladies who may have a sleepless night or 
 two before them in the effort to present a full, true, 
 and particular account of it in some organ of public 
 opinion, sometimes in more than one organ. What 
 sound criticism is possible in such circumstances, can 
 be iinagined. Criticism, indeed, is hardly wanted so 
 much as such a summary of the book as may be made 
 from a hasty turning over of the pages. If not too 
 modest, the reviewer will perhaps hint at picking one 
 or two holes to show how he could be severe if he 
 liked. He is more likely to take the chance of airing 
 any knowledge of the subject he may happen to have. 
 In how many " reviews " is not the fiece de resistance 
 some such display of information, loosely tacked on 
 to any available statement of the author ! As often, 
 the critic has nothing to show off but his own 
 ignorance. Many years ago an aspirant took me into 
 his confidence as to his first steps in literature, which 
 seem not to have led him far. He had no qualifica- 
 tions except a good opinion of himself and a certain 
 fluency of words, evidently not fed from springs of 
 reading or reflection. Yet somehow, by pushing 
 means, he had got a trial upon a leading London 
 paper. The first job given him, he told me, was to 
 write a column review of the life of a celebrated his- 
 toric personage then alive ; and his only instructions 
 were that this personage must be applauded, accord-
 
 268 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 ing to the policy of the paper. So history is made — 
 in newspaper criticism — yet it should be said in fair- 
 ness that of late years this particular newspaper has 
 gained credit for a more able staff of reviewers. 
 
 Some daily papers now find their account in employ- 
 ing well-known authors to write signed reviews and 
 literary articles. The rank and file of journalists, 
 however, not to say of authors, seem extraordinarily 
 ignorant of literature. There is so much to read 
 nowadays that those who would be " up-to-date " 
 find little time for reading anything that does not 
 belong to " actuality ; " and the newspaper critic 
 often betrays amusingly how he has no standard of 
 taste beyond the " best-sellers " of the hour. I can 
 remember how a promising literary review was said 
 to have been killed by laughter over one flagrant 
 blunder it made in an article on a new edition of John- 
 son's Dictionary. But now similar blunders are 
 made weekly in the press, without attracting much 
 notice unless a low growl from some secluded reader 
 of the old-fashioned retrospective school, still to be 
 found in country parsonages and other nooks far from 
 the madding crowd. Let me give some recent 
 instances from a weekly periodical that professed to 
 guide literary opinion. A writer in it was severe on 
 a novelist who had brought out a book called Belinda, 
 without respect for the same title used by an author 
 still in demand at libraries ; but both critic and author 
 seemed unaware of the existence of a Belinda put 
 forth under a name once so well known as Miss 
 Edgeworth's. About the same time, the same organ 
 made the same oversight as to Miss Burney's Cecilia. 
 I forget if it was this organ or a rival that lent its 
 columns to the bitter complaint of a lady against 
 another novelist stealing a title. The Silent Woman, in
 
 CRITICS 269 
 
 which she claimed monopoly ; then all parties had to 
 be informed as to this title having been for three 
 centuries or so registered in a famous name. 
 
 These are only a bunch of samples going to suggest 
 how writers and readers of to-day may often be little 
 less ignorant of literature than the type-writing 
 agencies which, when a new edition of some classic 
 was announced, are said to have sent their circulars 
 to J. Dry den, Esq., or — Petrarch, Esq, care of the pub- 
 lishers. The most painful example of such ignorance 
 which has come to my eye was when I once quoted a 
 few lines from a poem by a friend and instructor of my 
 youth—" Phairshon swore a feud against the clan 
 Mac Tavish " — then a Scottish journalist expressed his 
 interest in these unknown lines and inquired who might 
 be the author of them. I should not have thought 
 it possible that any Scot was ignorant of the Bon 
 Gaultier Ballads ; but one could easily lay his hand 
 on London journalists who could not recognize an 
 allusion from the Rejected Addresses or the poetry of 
 the Anti-Jacobin. To be familiar with Virgil, Milton 
 or Gibbon, is of course past praying for ; but one 
 might think a critic hardly qualified who had not at 
 least skimmed our light literature. 
 
 In one kind of reading the journalist is like to be 
 well versed, that of his own craft. Night and day he 
 turns over journals and periodicals, so that he has a 
 chance of knowing well what his fellow-craftsmen are 
 saying about a book, and is apt to save himself trouble 
 by joining chorus in growls of abuse or falsetto 
 notes of admiration. The critics, indeed, were always 
 in the way of following each other like a flock of sheep. 
 It is more than ever so, now that they have less time 
 to think for themselves, and not so much outlook on 
 the book world to guide them in taking a line. So,
 
 270 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 every season, we see some book hailed as not far from 
 immortal, which in a few months will cease to be 
 asked for at the libraries. Sometimes an author has 
 to pay for such rash applause by a turn of unjust 
 depreciation. When the reputation that has gone up 
 like a rocket comes to fizzle out in the calm starlight, 
 the critics have a trick of avenging their own error by 
 hooting and jeering at the poor celebrity when again 
 he would soar into fame. One remembers the pro- 
 verbial philosopher whose facile popularity became 
 such a reproach that for a generation to sneer at his 
 very name was the stereotj^ped commonplace of every 
 criticaster. In this instance, perhaps, the rocket had 
 been winged rather by the popular breath than by 
 critical voices. But in the case of a later poet whose 
 editions were numerous, it was the press that cried 
 him up and afterwards unduly ran him down, despising 
 a merit which might have lain in the middle parts 
 of fortune. Of him it is told how, to a wit that went 
 out in scandalous snuff, he complained of the critics, 
 once so loud in applause, having made a conspiracy 
 of silence against him. " Join the conspirators ! " 
 was the sly counsel given him. One can easily recall 
 several " standard authors," Samuel Rogers and 
 W. L. Bowles, for example, who seem now doomed to 
 neglect all the dustier since once they shone too 
 bright in critical favour. 
 
 The public has been so often puzzled and misled by 
 its professional guides, that it is no wonder if it does 
 not now care to follow their guidance. We are told 
 that reviews no longer sell a book ; it is clear that they 
 cannot prevent it from selling. In its favourite 
 pasture of fiction at least, the many -headed beast 
 shows a disposition to crop at will. More than one of 
 the novelists that have been most successful in our
 
 CRITICS 271 
 
 generation, are a proverb in the mouths of all with any 
 daintiness of taste, have even become a standing jest 
 to the critical chorus in whose teeth their works 
 sell by tons, and the writers find in their bankers' 
 books good excuse for taking themselves seriously, 
 while a succes d'estime makes poor comfort to the 
 worthier claimant that has missed the luck of popular 
 favour. From mouth to mouth, from club to club, 
 from tea-table to tea-table, rather than from column 
 to column, swells that wind of fame that fills one sail 
 and leaves another idly flapping after short pufis of 
 appreciating notice. It seems harder to predict our 
 British weather, than to guess from what quarter this 
 prospering breeze will blow, and how long it will hold 
 steady. There are critics, as well as writers, who 
 spend their skill in looking out which way the wind 
 and tide set, so as to follow the drift of public opinion 
 instead of trying to lead it. 
 
 In fact the acute critic is well aware how little the 
 public now looks to him to be instructed as to the 
 merits of a work. When he has shown oS what he 
 knows of the subject, he casts about to please his 
 readers with any other extraneous consideration that 
 may be treated smartly and spicily. Something 
 about the author himself is the sauce that will best 
 recommend his article to the general taste. Even in 
 the Spectator's day, it was slyly noticed how " a reader 
 seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows 
 whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a 
 mild or a choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, 
 with other particulars of the like nature." Nowadays 
 the public's itch for peeping into the private life of 
 its favourites has grown a positive nuisance ; albeit 
 there are authors who make love to this Paul Prying. 
 The newspaper reviewer knows that he can seldom be
 
 272 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 wrong in seasoning his notice with personal talk. At 
 one time, as soon as any book of mine was advertised, 
 I used to receive letters from a gentleman describ- 
 ing himself as the literary editor of a certain London 
 daily, inviting me to furnish him with facts about 
 my private life by way of making straw for his critical 
 bricks, which, as I did not answer these appeals, 
 were not forthcoming in my case. 
 
 Sensitive as one may be to such curiosity, there is 
 this much to be said in its favour, that it is seldom 
 ill-natured. Even in journals that frankly avow them- 
 selves mainly concerned about personalities, the 
 author or other quasi-celebrity thrown upon its sheet 
 may depend on being presented in the best light, with 
 all the dignity to be looked for in a " Portrait of a 
 Gentleman," and wearing such a pleasant smirk as 
 the photographer tries to catch out of the frowns of 
 self -consciousness. If the subject have stolen his 
 neighbour's wife, if he began life eating peas with his 
 knife, if he drops his hs, or gets drunk every evening, 
 such characteristics will be certainly passed over, and 
 nothing told except to his credit, so kindly is the tone 
 of the British press. I believe it is otherwise in 
 America, where the victim of impertinence will be 
 sometimes flayed alive, especially if he kick against 
 the pricks of the interviewing spy. I was a visitor in 
 that republic when General Grant came to be elected 
 as its President. The opposition papers openly 
 attacked him as a drunkard, while those on his side 
 loudly vouched for him as a teetotaller. I asked 
 James Russell Lowell which of these stories were 
 true, to which he replied with a wink, " Both." 
 Brother Jonathan has still a deplorable relish for 
 personalities in print, as satirized by Artemus Ward. 
 " The new road may or may not be a fraud, as
 
 CRITICS 273 
 
 our contemporary says ; but we haven't got a 
 baldheaded aunt Sal, and a one-eyed sister Sue." 
 
 Our press can at least boast this improvement, that 
 spite and slander are much barred from it, both as 
 bad policy and bad form. The critic would hoist 
 himself with his own foul petard, who nowadays bid 
 any rhymer " Back to his gallipots ! " Periodicals 
 such as Blackwood and the old Saturday Review 
 are like Giants Pope and Pagan, that only now 
 and then gnash their teeth in the old style, as by 
 styling a condemned author a " blue-behinded ape." 
 It is not so many years ago, indeed, since I heard a 
 critic say, who wrote statedly for one of these organs, 
 that if So-and-So should bring out another book, he, 
 the critic, had an article ready for it that " would take 
 the skin of! him." Another story I could recall of 
 two friends who began to write a book together and 
 quarrelled over it, then one of them was allowed to 
 pillory the other in the good old style. 
 
 But these are exceptional cases ; and the general 
 tone of our press is as civil as that of priest and non- 
 conformist preacher who controvert each other as if 
 there had never been any question of stakes, racks and 
 thumb-screws in their intercourse. Such attacks as 
 Kenrick's on Goldsmith, or even Macaulay's on 
 Robert Montgomery, would now recoil on their own 
 authors. The reproach of criticism is rather a too 
 easy indulgence. Its ministers appear apt to speak 
 pleasantly of worthless work ; to proclaim monthly 
 masterpieces judged by an ephemeral standard ; and 
 above all to practise the gentle art of log-rolling by 
 giving bold advertisement to their friends and those 
 from whom they themselves expect a turn of lauda- 
 tion. The fashion of signed articles, of course, makes 
 for this weakness, since a writer seldom can afford to be
 
 274 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 as independent in his own name as under the mask of 
 some megaphonic " We." As a counsel of perfection, 
 it has been suggested that the critic should sign his 
 opinion of books presented to him with the title page 
 anonymous. 
 
 There are dark hints abroad as to the relation 
 between advertising columns and favourable notices. 
 The owner of a much-puffed " proprietary article " put 
 his name lately on a large book, of which a publisher 
 gravely remarked to me, " It is sure to be reviewed 
 well, as he commands so much advertisement." 
 One " enterprising " organ some time ago offered 
 publishers a chance of filling so much space, moyen- 
 nant finance, with their own notices of their publica- 
 tions. But even such trumpet-blowing as can thus 
 be got for love or money does not satisfy the up-to- 
 date publisher of our day. He has started a new 
 device, a soit of advertisement sheet in the form of a 
 private literary periodical, that aims at humbugging 
 the public with puffs of his forthcoming books, 
 embellished with pleasing portraits and tempting 
 personalities to recommend his author. This is but 
 a development of the old Quarterlies and Edinburgh, 
 that were not ready to speak ill of their allies or 
 good of works brought out by the opposition firm ; 
 yet those heavy reviews would have commanded 
 no respect if they had offered one monotony of 
 unblushing puffery under pretence of guidance in 
 literature. 
 
 It may be said that, while the petty sessions of 
 literary opinion are open to criticism, I do not show 
 cause to challenge the graver, more considered and 
 better expounded judgment of the Supreme Courts. 
 Has this been always so ? Was the Edinburgh just 
 to Byron or the Quarterly to Keats ? Did Jeffrey take
 
 CRITICS 275 
 
 tlie due measure of Wordsworth or Kit North of 
 Leigh Hunt ? Coming nearer our own time, did 
 Froude have fair play at the hands of Freeman ? 
 Alas ! in all times the paths to the Temple of Fame are 
 seen strewn not only with broken idols and withered 
 laurels, but with rubbish heaps of exaggerated appre- 
 ciation, malicious censure and miscalculated estimates. 
 But to the credit of our day, I would admit that the 
 higher grades of criticism can show a fairer and 
 sounder standard of judgment than in generations of 
 party bitterness and unashamed personal feuds. 
 These are the few ; and I have indeed been speak- 
 ing rather of the many. It is the rank and file of 
 reviewers who raise the loudest noise of hiss or hurrah ; 
 and I doubt if they were ever less worth listening to 
 than now, when they have not time to read half 
 the volumes they review so glibly. 
 
 So what is called criticism has fallen into a bad way, 
 tending to become mere puffery, and of little use as 
 a guide to the reader or a school to the writer. For this 
 the public cares little, being more and more disposed 
 to play its own critic, as always it claimed the right 
 to damn or applaud, with or without reason, the piece 
 presented to its favour ; and in the long run it will still 
 more securely judge upon the quality " that relegates 
 divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil Pontus of the 
 ' British Poets ' and keeps garrulous Pepys within 
 the cheery circle of the evening lamp and fire." Let 
 us ask next, is this plebs of readers any wiser than 
 its professed counsellors ?
 
 X 
 
 READERS 
 
 After all, a book's prosperity lies in the eye of him 
 who reads it. Without readers there would be no 
 authors, or none to their own satisfaction. It 
 seems a moot point whether, had Robinson Crusoe 
 possessed the faculty divine and a liberal supply 
 of writing materials, he would have cared to 
 turn a verse on his desert island, at least before 
 educating Man Friday to be an appreciative public. 
 In our island there is no want of a market for 
 books that go all over the world ; but also we writers 
 have so multiplied ourselves, that but few of us can 
 find readers enough for our encouragement. There was 
 not always such a keen competitive examination for 
 public favour ; yet note how even the best of us has 
 always been fain to coax and flatter his patrons as 
 " friendly reader," " indulgent reader," or with the 
 like compliments from their humble servant. The 
 shop -walker does not put on more winning airs of 
 politeness to customers, nor does the doctor depend 
 more on a genial bedside manner. 
 
 Then comes the question, are there any real readers 
 nowadays, or any worth having ? Some unpopular 
 authors allege the true breed to be extinct in a genera- 
 tion of mere skimmers. What no one can deny is 
 
 276
 
 READERS 277 
 
 the multitude of turners-over of pages which else 
 would hardly be worth printing. In the year 1910, 
 not to come too close to the passing hour,^ there were 
 published in Britain ^a matter of nearly 8,500 books, 
 of which between a fourth and a fifth dealt with 
 fiction, and on the whole had the largest clientele 
 of attention. There was a slight decrease in the 
 output of novels, and a slight increase in religious 
 and scientific works, also in mushroom political 
 publications forced by the temperature of parliamen- 
 tary hot-beds ; and strange to say, the supply of 
 poetry had risen by 20 per cent. One doubts if this 
 indicates a corresponding rise in the demand : two 
 friends of mine who lately brought out volumes of 
 verse report their sales as respectively a dozen and a 
 dozen and half copies, to which may be added some 
 scores " presented by the author." With the poor 
 poets' readers by the dozen, may be set the popular 
 novelists' hundreds, thousands and myriads, the com- 
 panies of examinees who have to read text-books, and 
 the groups of mild martyrs who on Sundays think it a 
 merit to nod over sermons ; then, on the average, each 
 author of sorts has a certain following that makes up 
 a host of readers more or less attentive. But when 
 one comes to examine into the quality of the matter 
 read, one suspects that of being inferior to the quan- 
 tity. And if statistics were available, it might prove 
 that most of our noble army of readers confine their 
 studies mainly to the journal or other periodical rival 
 of the book, which may now get its best chance of 
 fame in a newspaper summary. 
 
 The schoolmaster, for the last generation or two, 
 has been busy turning out by the million scholars 
 
 ^In 1913 the tale had increased to over 12,000.
 
 278 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 who have learned to read without much knowledge 
 of what is worth reading. Such a public has its 
 tastes, which are not those of the bookworm reared 
 on dusty classics. The magic of language leaves it 
 cold ; true wit and humour are caviare to it ; it skips 
 the charm of style and yawns at the dignity of learn- 
 ing ; the glare of the limelight and the blare of the 
 gramophone are its ideals of art ; it needs pictures 
 and advertisements, the more blatant the better, to 
 attract its curiosity. Its curiosity is much for mean 
 things. The sight of Proteus coming from the sea 
 would not draw it like that of any lion of the hour ; the 
 Venus of Milo or of Medici seem lay figures beside 
 the ripe and real beauties disclosed by the more or 
 less deficient drapery of the dancer in vogue ; the 
 great tragedies of pity and terror have no interest for 
 those whose eyes lig]i.t up for any peep at the murderer 
 or swindler of the day, if only in a newspaper 
 biograph ; and, can such a celebrity's name be kept 
 green till he gets out of jail, he is sure of a sale for a 
 shameless volume in which he may describe his moving 
 experience. In short, it pays well to put into print 
 a mass of ephemeral matter which bears the same 
 relation to literature as Madame Tussaud's exhibition 
 does to the Elgin marbles. It is not difficult to mould 
 such matter ; but its titling, its dressing-up and its 
 puffing call for an editorial talent skilled to discrim- 
 inate between the Laocoon and the newest addition to 
 the Chamber of Horrors. In the workshops of this 
 new trade, the sweated author has a miserable life of 
 it, where large fortunes have been made in our 
 time by employers with no other merit than that of 
 being able to exploit ignorance and vulgarity. So in 
 our generation flourishes a garden of weeds to choke 
 the flowers of literature.
 
 READERS 279 
 
 Of course it is an old story, this quarrelling with the 
 ta&te of one's age. 
 
 Tnou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope ; 
 
 Thiu shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey. 
 
 In other arts it is not otherwise. Browning opined 
 
 of Verdi how, 
 
 While the mad houseful's plaudits near out-bang 
 His orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones, 
 He looks through all the roaring and the wreaths. 
 Where sits Rossini patient in his stall. 
 
 But I am creditably informed that by musicians of 
 our day Verdi rather might be conceived to sit patient 
 and Rossini to have the grace of modest doubt as to 
 his superiority. Verdi, to be sure, had an earlier and 
 a later manner, which a little dashes this estimate. 
 And one is aware of meloraaniacs who now stop their 
 ears against that Teuton trumpet that thrilled the 
 last generation, even a reluctant Frenchman being 
 fain to confess it " not so bad as it sounds : " what 
 was to be the music of the future tends already to 
 become a matter of the past. 
 
 Taste is bound to change by the very law of rhythm : 
 a spell of noisy sound raises a desire for softer melodies ; 
 a generation that has indulged in too much heady 
 sentimentalism, turns thirstily to the soda-water of 
 realism ; and when we have grown sick of analysing 
 motives and studying unpleasant problems by way of 
 amusement, there is a natural reaction towards the 
 simpler gust of romance. One hesitates, then, to offer 
 one's own preferences as rule and meaurement for an 
 architecture that must provide cottages and barns as 
 well as palaces and temples. But, taking our authors 
 all round and applying to them the standaid set by 
 acknowledged masters of the world's mind, I can't
 
 280 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 feel so confident as Grant Allen was in proposing :lie 
 toast of " Our noble selves." To me it seems a.s if 
 many of those that best tickle our public's long ear, do 
 so by art that wants either classical grace or romantic 
 charm. Strain and affectation replace strength and 
 dignity. In their eagerness to call attention to them- 
 selves among the press of candidates for favour, some 
 writers turn their hustings into a mountebank stage 
 on which to play impudent tricks that may succeed in 
 drawing curious gapers. They cannot show a plain 
 story acted in broad daylight, but depend on rouge 
 and tawdry bedizenment, confuse one's attention with 
 blue lights and rockets, and accentuate their wordy 
 patter with the creak of the barrel organ and the thump 
 of the big drum. Those that try for high notes are 
 apt to go off into falsetto breaking down as a 
 hoarse growl. Those that would be funny twist them- 
 selves in contortions to make the judicious spectator 
 grieve. Those that would be dull, do that quite 
 naturally ; and there is always a demand for dullness. 
 Thackeray has pointed out how there are many 
 worthy people who resent anything like an appeal to 
 imagination or humour ; and they also need not look 
 far about for mental pasture in a generation that 
 cultivates all sorts of talent, unless the rarest. 
 
 A friend of mine who is an Examiner for a great 
 University, tells me how in a paper set to thousands of 
 young men and maidens all over the country, he lately 
 put the question : Who were the three greatest living 
 English authors ? Swinburne and Meredith being then 
 alive. The votes of this constituency were overwhelm- 
 ingly cast for two novelists of large circulation ; about 
 the third place, there was more difference of opinion, 
 but a majority went to another popular story-teller. 
 I am not going to wound the modesty of these authors
 
 READERS 281 
 
 by mentioning their names, easily guessable by who- 
 ever studies the book market ; but I venture to give 
 my opinon that half a century hence none of the three 
 names will be a household word any more than is that 
 of G. P. R. James, of Eugene Sue or of Carl Gutzkow 
 to-day. With more or less merit, they have caught 
 the taste of their time ; but to label them its greatest 
 writers is a self-published libel on their eager readers. 
 
 Old fogeys like me when we play the laudator tem- 
 foris acti are snubbed by smart scribes of the period 
 with the disparaging epithet of Early Victorian. I, 
 for one, should like to appeal against their verdicts to 
 posterity, that in the long run judges securely on the 
 merit of human achievement. One cannot imagine 
 that any large body of Victorian students, however 
 callow, would not have given that place of honour 
 to Tennyson, Thackeray and Dickens, for which last 
 name a respectable minority might have substituted 
 George Eliot ; and all these stars, I venture to pre- 
 dict, will be shining in the firmament long after the 
 largest circulations of our day have become nebulous 
 memories. Should my pages hold together so long, 
 they may prompt some up-to-date reader, forty years 
 on, to say how the Early Victorian age compares in his 
 eyes with one that affects such a poor opinion of its 
 predecessor. 
 
 In pleading the cause of neglected talent, one is too 
 easily led into abusing the character of witnesses 
 on the other side. It should be owned that, while 
 some of our most boomed writers seem unworthy of 
 their many editions, the general standard has risen ; 
 and if our generation is no Augustan age of literature, 
 it has a greater number than ever of good novelists, 
 essayists, poets, and urbane humorists crowding one 
 another out of conspicuous notice. The company
 
 282 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 officers seem more fit for their work ; it is in Well- 
 ingtons and Maiiboroughs that we fall short. One 
 strong point of our literature seems to be in careful and 
 kindly studies of aspects of homespun life, too much 
 neglected of old by writers who chose rather to draw 
 from heroic models. Even those novelists who find 
 their account in presenting duchesses, bishops, bold 
 bad baronets and the like have to present them as men 
 and women, sometimes with their humanity rather 
 exaggerated in contrast to their position. In a 
 word, the realism of our time is, as becomes it, more 
 widely sympathetic and more subtly observant than 
 the imaginative romanticism it supplanted. 
 
 A less pleasing symptom is the public relish for 
 incidents of biography that might as well be left in 
 Time's dust-bin. " The man with the muck-rake" is 
 too welcome to our circulating-library public, for whom 
 he scents the garbage of the past by arts that make 
 it none the more wholesome. But as the Elizabethan 
 age is distinguished for its dramas and that of Queen 
 Anne for its essayists, so our period will be best 
 represented by the flood of novels that from week to 
 week flush its broad and shallow channels of literature. 
 Theology, history, philosophy, philanthropy, politics, 
 science, scandal, must all be conveyed in the medium 
 of fiction for readers who pout at their powders unless 
 sweetened by such jam. One thinks with pity of the 
 labour of future Macaulays who may have to gather 
 the social characteristics of our day, not from some 
 single Petronius Arbiter or Decameron, some Simpli- 
 cissimus or Gil Bias, some Roman Bourgeois or other 
 early realistic novel, rari nantes among the wrecks of 
 time, but from thousands, perhaps myriads, of such 
 more or less contradictory " documents " as can pass 
 on to posterity in a sixpenny edition.
 
 READERS 283 
 
 Again, the charge of inferior taste may be met by the 
 fact that nothing sells better in our book market than 
 cheap editions of standard works, libraries of the 
 " Hundred Best Authors " and the like, not to speak 
 of various popular series that undertake to give 
 the cream of such books, along with criticism and 
 biography aimed at rousing or guiding the reader to 
 intelligent interest in them and their authors. But 
 one doubts if classic volumes be not more bought 
 than read, as by that millionaire who, when ordering 
 sets of Shakespeare and Milton, desired to be regularly 
 supplied with their new works as published. One 
 knows of some keen book collectors that seem to read 
 little beyond title pages and catalogues ; indeed, 
 I could name a worthy householder who has a good 
 show of books, accumulated at sales, and he would not 
 be aware of my putting him in print, for he cannot 
 read, not even since he served with credit on the School 
 Board of his neighbourhood. 
 
 At least, it will be hoped, such accepted models are 
 much in the hands of living authors, who, if the 
 worst come to the worst, might be expected to read 
 one another's books with due consideration. There 
 is indeed, as already hinted, a whole gang of writers, 
 busy in our generation, whose talent is for comment- 
 ing on, annotating, and illustrating the works of their 
 predecessors, somewhat helping the mass of readers 
 to neglect the great authors themselves for the easier 
 task of reading what has been written about them. 
 The majority of our instructors, one fears, show little 
 sign of having given much time to solid reading. But 
 even were it not so, one guesses how the giants of old 
 would rather have their names in the hearts of the 
 many than in the heads of the few. Authors know 
 from themselves how apt they are to make bad readers,
 
 284 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 impatient, supercilious and with too clear an eye for 
 the seamy side of the work. The very fact of having 
 often to read in the way of business blunts their whole- 
 some appetite for books, as cooks are said to worship 
 Bacchus rather than Ceres. In a life now closing on 
 to three score and ten, I must have had to read 
 hundreds of thousands of books, sometimes a dozen 
 or so a day, if only on the hunt for a reference or a 
 quotation ; and I own to bouts of sickness in so 
 much cramming with print. On this experience, I 
 have long made a rule of reading every Sunday 
 morning some good book, carefully, reverently and 
 without an eye to my own work of the moment. 
 I am not going to confess the names of my Sunday 
 books, that are sometimes the approved books of 
 one's childhood, but may now be varied by a more 
 Catholic selection to fit the mood of the moment 
 or the season : perhaps a sermon by Jeremy Taylor 
 or S. T. Coleridge ; perhaps a portion waled from the 
 works of one who could not be sure whether his lines 
 would turn out a song or a sermon ; perhaps a Scene 
 from Clerical Life ; perhaps one from Auerbach's 
 Cellar ; perhaps a comedy of Moliere, or a canto 
 from a less human Comedy which I have heard a 
 good lady find fault with as treating solemn matters 
 in an unscriptural manner ; but she charitably con- 
 cluded that after all it could not do so much harm, as 
 written in Italian. Among such censors there were 
 upbraidings in my youth when a periodical called Good 
 Words insinuated novels into the course of Sunday 
 reading ; but one learns to take no book as common 
 or unclean for its form, nay, to find more edification 
 in some songs and parables than in the driest and 
 dustiest tomes of orthodox divinity. 
 
 Such leisurely Sunday morning study is the sort
 
 READERS 285 
 
 of reading an author would like to make sure of, or of 
 a place in that company of bed-side books which 
 devout readers laud and magnify, each after his kind. 
 After all, the best readers may be found among the 
 laity, or those who never write anything beyond a 
 casual paper for a mutually improving circle. Cause 
 can be shown to suspect writers by profession of being 
 bad readers. Did not Dr. Johnson let out that he 
 never read a book through ? Yet, indeed, he is 
 reported by Bishop Percy as performing that feat for 
 Felixmarte of Hyrcania, a folio few readers of to-day 
 would care to tackle. Charles Lamb, for all his poring 
 over old folios, was suspiciously given to misquoting 
 his favourite authors, including some that nobody 
 else much cared to read. His friend Hazlitt confessed 
 that he found reading more of a task than an enjoy- 
 ment. Landor in his old age professed to wish that 
 he had wasted less time on books. Dickens was said 
 to read no books but his own, though in youth he had 
 evidently studied his predecessors in fiction. Carlyle 
 has written very forcibly about Dante ; but some of 
 his allusions seem to show that he had not read atten- 
 tively beyond his brother's translation of the Inferno. 
 Spenser has been called the poet of poets ; but one 
 wonders how many of our esteemed bards can count 
 themselves among those fit and few readers "in at 
 the death of the Blatant Beast." Macaulay himself , 
 by the way, ardent and tenacious reader as he was, 
 seems for once at fault here, as if flagging on this 
 labyrinthine hunt, for in fact Time threw a dart at 
 Spenser before that quarry had been run down to the 
 music of his verse. 
 
 There are cases to the contrary, like Pliny the 
 Elder who, while writing some hundred books and 
 more numerous volumes of extracts, spent every
 
 286 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 spare minute in reading or being read to : while in his 
 bath, his nephew tells us, he let eye and ear be idle 
 for a few minutes, but was rubbed dry to the accom- 
 paniment of lection or dictation. Many a modern 
 scholar might be named as a very helluo lihrorum, and 
 as subscribing to Pliny's dictum that a wise reader 
 could get some good out of the worst book. But 
 of one pundit in our own time, who was also editor 
 of the Times, it was said that he kept only three books 
 at home : I forget what they were, one being in 
 Arabic. I once knew a veteran whose reading was 
 confined to the Army List, and that he knew by heart. 
 Mr. Soapy Sponge's studies, if one remember right, 
 were much restricted to Moggs' Cab Fares : know- 
 ledge of the Stud Booh may have come to him by 
 nature. Readers might be all the better off for 
 having few books at hand, the profit of reading being 
 not so much in what we read but in how we read. 
 " Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, 
 and some few to be chewed and digested," as Bacon 
 puts it, who also tells us that " reading makes a full 
 man," without observing how the mind as well as the 
 body may be puffed out by wind. 
 
 The strictest test to which authorial merit could be 
 put appears in that old question : if one were cast on 
 a desert island with a choice of only three books, 
 which should they be ? The Bible and Shakespeare 
 usually figure in most discreet answers to this ques- 
 tion ; but the third choice will be a wide one ; certain 
 grovelling souls have been understood to suggest a 
 cookery-book. It may have been an undergraduate 
 who voted for Plato because there was no getting to 
 the end of him. For a lengthy marooning, one might 
 do worse than choose the Dictionary of National Bio- 
 grafhy, Ersch and Gruber's AUgemeine Encydopddie,
 
 READERS 287 
 
 or the new Oxford Dictionary, a class of work recom- 
 mended by one of Alexander Selkirk's countrymen 
 as having " nae monotony aboot it." A millionaire 
 castaway might wile old Father Time by equipping 
 himself with a great Chinese Encyclopaedia, of 
 which the British Museum copy, which cost £2,000, 
 is bound in 745 thick volumes, containing 800,000 
 pages, each of nine columns. Few western readers 
 would live to win through this seventeenth century 
 compilation, three or four times as large as our 
 greatest Encyclopaedia. 
 
 Familiarity with books has been for our age much 
 furthered by public libraries, open to the most penni- 
 less student, at which gratis fountains of knowledge, 
 one understands, there is a brisker flow for volumes 
 of low specific gravity than for such viscous matter 
 as Bacon's Instauratio Magna or Masson's Life of 
 Milton. Circulating Libraries also offer their merry- 
 go-round amusement in our Vanity Fair. I hear of 
 readers who, on economic and sanitary principles, 
 decline to keep books in their houses, depending on the 
 mental dust -collectors who will call weekly at their 
 door, while others distrust library books as dissemina- 
 ting germs of infection, a charge that seems disproved 
 by the experience of librarians and their assistants. 
 Most readers nowadays get the mass of their reading 
 from such common sources ; yet the best readers may 
 agree rather with that " Poet at the Breakfast Table " 
 who, in setting forth a good model for a well-chosen 
 library, let us know " when I want a book, it is as 
 a tiger wants a sheep," so he did not care to take 
 baffling chances on the shelves of a public institution. 
 Most lovers of any book would choose to have it always 
 at reach, in the raggedest and smokiest of coats, 
 " a poor thing but mine own," whose pages one can
 
 288 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 deface with pencil marks or tobacco ash, and fear not 
 to be called to account. Your greedy reader is apt to 
 be a bit of a sloven, who in dressing-gown and slippers 
 hardly cares to take in hand the sumptuously bound 
 or handsomely illustrated editions that look so well 
 behind glass. Some of my dearest books were picked 
 up on a stall for a few halfpence ; and some I have 
 that ought to sell for pounds were they not dis- 
 figured by annotations I have made on them, of no use 
 except to the owner. Congenial spirits will not blame 
 those scorings and scribblings, with which one can 
 record one's appreciation in cabalistic smudges which 
 the author would welcome as adornments, could he 
 see them. It has been said that a man's character 
 may be known from his library, but better, in truth, 
 from the parts of his library that bear signs of most 
 use, sometimes to the surprise of those who come to 
 possess it after him. I knew once a genial and urbane 
 poet, who bore an unblemished name in the best 
 society ; but when he died, his executors thought 
 well to burn the most costly of his collections, a fact 
 not touched on in his official biography. 
 
 If authors' ghosts revisit the glimpses of the moon, 
 be sure they do not haunt chill and dank churchyards 
 among vulgar spooks, but flit softly into the nearest 
 snug library, peering eagerly upon the shelves for 
 familiar titles, without which, in their view, no 
 library would be complete. How their lack-lustre 
 eyes must sparkle with the reflection of gilt lettering 
 on the backs of a tall and well-tooled copy of the book 
 of books that may have come into the world so naked 
 and with such pains as the author remembers ! But 
 then how the gleam of ghostly light will fade out if the 
 shade find his well-clad volume shrouded in dust and 
 cobwebs, as may be its chance, after a half-forgetful
 
 READERS 289 
 
 centuiy. Rather would lie see that child of his brain 
 tattered, torn and dogs'-eared almost to destruction 
 than treasured in honour, perhaps under lock and 
 key, to be touched only at due intervals by mercenary 
 brooms and dusters. It might as well be one of those 
 mock books, such dummy volumes as were lettered 
 at Chatsworth by the wit of Thomas Hood — Dirge 
 on the Death of Wolfe by Lamb — Boyle on Steam — 
 Cursory Remarks on Swearing — and so on through 
 a string of merry quips. 
 
 Having for forty years or so rummaged the shelves 
 of our largest subscription library, I have often had 
 the surprise of coming on some lauded book with no 
 signs of having been even skimmed : for example, 
 the other day I took out the second part of Faust and 
 found its pages uncut by a generation of English 
 readers. But Goethe's stately ghost need not com- 
 plain, when the translators of the first part alone 
 make up a quite flattering public. It is living authors 
 who may have cause to shudder when for decency's 
 sake they are fain to cut the pages of their own book, 
 which more than once I have noted as in need of 
 such attention. I myself never stumbled on that 
 humiliating personal experience, — to be obviated, 
 indeed, by the bookbinder — ^yet on another hardly 
 less so. I once wrote a serious volume dealing care- 
 fully with a certain episode in history, which I was 
 lately dismayed to find keeping loose company in the 
 department of the said library devoted to Fiction, 
 that by the way includes such flights of fancy as 
 Borrow's Bible in Spain. 
 
 For all the sins an author may have done in life- 
 time, can there be a more bitter penance than 
 spiritually to follow a flesh and blood reader along these 
 shelves, jogging his elbow with inane touch as he 
 
 U
 
 290 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHOKS 
 
 halts opposite the poor ghost's dark corner of fame, 
 then heaving an unheeded sigh as he passes on to 
 consider the titles of a hated or despised rival, now 
 in the alphabetical irony of fate ranked beside his 
 own, Rabelais perhaps beside Rasselas, or Samuel 
 Johnson beside the Sire de Joinville, Lamb cheek 
 by jowl with Lamartine, James and Robert Mont- 
 gomery squeezed together like Hudihras and Ere- 
 whon, Matthew Arnold edging himself away from the 
 Light of Asia, Samuel Smiles ill-neighboured by 
 Horace Smith, Herbert Spencer by Edmund Spenser, 
 Tupper sandwiched between Tolstoi and Turgenev, 
 Miss Yonge purring in the ear of some ribald Yorick, 
 Zola rubbing up against Zoroaster, John Knox fain 
 to hobnob with Paul de Koch on the one side and 
 J. S. Knowles on the other, while Bulwer-Lytton has 
 a choice of uncongenial company between his wife 
 and John Buncle, as Freeman and Froude, unlovely 
 and unpleasant to each other in life, are but little 
 divided in death. 
 
 And even were the dead author able to see his 
 works still in the hands of posterity, as well as on 
 its bookshelves, it might be a drawback to his satis- 
 faction to find the lamplight of fame falling less often 
 on the pages through which he best hoped to live. 
 Milton thought more of Paradise Regained than of 
 Paradise Lost, but how many of his votaries turn by 
 choice to that shrine ? To Johnson's shade all the 
 world must seem vile Whigs for being less interested 
 in his Rasselas and Rambler than in the table talk 
 reported of him by a pitiful North Briton. Does 
 Southey care to be better known by his Life 
 of Nelson than by the epics in which he vainly 
 proclaimed —
 
 READERS 291 
 
 1 am a blessed Glendoveer : 
 
 'Tis mine to speak and yours to hear ! 
 
 What does Wordsworth think of the skipping pace 
 at which we follow his Excursion ? Does Dickens 
 relish our broad grins over Pickwick when he catches 
 us yawning at the death-beds of Paul Dombey and 
 Little Nell ? Are Cicero and Caesar content to have 
 their poems buried beneath their prose, immortal 
 in schools and colleges ? 
 
 These spirits may see matters in another light, 
 now that they have long joined the silent majority. 
 On earth, too, there is a choir invisible that sooner or 
 later decides which writers, and what works of theirs 
 are to be more enduring than brass, or to tinkle 
 only like cymbals. This choir follows the example 
 set in churches and chapels, where breath would fail 
 us to sing through our hyiim book, even to render 
 the whole of the hundredth and nineteenth psalm 
 at one standing or sitting. Under the leadership of 
 some priest or precentor, if not at our own prompting, 
 we learn to " wale a portion with judicious care." 
 To the congregation of posterity is given out. Let 
 us read to the praise and glory of God the first two 
 volumes of The Mill on the Floss ; or The Vicar of 
 Wakefield, omitting the last seven chapters ; or the 
 Roger de Coverley and the Uncle Toby selections 
 from the Spectator and Tristram Shandy respectively. 
 And all famous writers have familiar passages that 
 serve for texts and illustrations to the preachers or 
 teachers of future generations. Homer's " much- 
 sounding ocean," Virgil's " easy descent to Avernus," 
 Dante's " let us look and pass," Shakespeare's 
 " dyer's hand," IVIilton's " autumnal leaves in Vallom- 
 brosa," Wordsworth's " Not too bright and good,"
 
 292 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 Longfellow's " footsteps on tlie sands of time " go 
 current like well-worn coin among those who seldom 
 peep into any mint of such phrases. Some authors 
 seem lucky in putting into circulation a large number 
 of such counters — Shakespeare himself, Pope, Dickens, 
 Tennyson, and Browning in his own province. Many 
 of their phrases are so trite as often to be misquoted, 
 like " fresh ^elds and pastures new," and " the even 
 tenour of their way," or misapplied like Par nohile 
 jratrum, or mistaken like Frankenstein for his mon- 
 ster, errata that must vex a careful poet's shade ; 
 yet surely he would rather be ill-remembered than 
 forgotten. Of one conscientious short-hand writer, 
 indeed, it is told how he ended his report of a speech : 
 " in conclusion, the honourable gentleman ventured 
 to maintain that in his opinion it was only noble to 
 be good, that, in fact, kind hearts were more valuable 
 than coronets, and simple faith to be depended upon 
 rather than Norman blood." 
 
 My own ghost will not at once need to complain of 
 neglect, if it may have to go without affectionate 
 regard. I have written a score or so of volumes on 
 which dogs'-ears may gather but not cobwebs, school 
 books to wit, that go all over one empire on which 
 the sun never sets, and another that would like to 
 have a good stretch in the sun. One of them was 
 reported to me not long ago as reprinted at a Dutch 
 town of which I had never before heard tell ; another 
 as casting a shadow over juvenile minds as far 
 off as Buenos Ayres. I am sure of my readers, by 
 myriads, by millions from first to last. Like the 
 French Minister of Education, I can take out my watch 
 and declare that at a given moment certain fractions 
 of the human race are reading my lessons : in this 
 calculation, indeed, it may be necessary to neglect
 
 READERS 293 
 
 difference of latitude and the incidence of Antipodean 
 holidays. Soorier or later they have to read me, and 
 with attention ; and so I serve them out for neglect 
 of my stories in their hours of ease. My pages are 
 wet with tears and stained by dusky thumb marks. 
 No skimming is allowed in this case : for a whole 
 term, or terms, the volume must remain painfully 
 familiar. It seems as well for one's name not to 
 stand on those title pages : let the publishers rather 
 present themselves to juvenile execration, and for 
 once an author can be content to blush unseen. 
 
 To such manuals I could play the critic as lief as 
 the author. In the school books of this generation, 
 the great point is to make everything plain to the 
 meanest capacity concerned. Science, grammar, use- 
 ful knowledge of all sorts, must be administered in 
 the form of pap or patent food peptonized for mental 
 digestions hitherto supplied with a proportion of 
 fibrous or stodgy matter, as is the way of nature. 
 I am not sure but that this cockering of the young 
 idea be not at the bottom of some disrelish for 
 sound literature in after life, into which will be carried 
 the taste for having everything made easy and 
 pleasant. I am quite sure as to the heresy that the 
 benefit of reading depends on understanding. XATien 
 nature's healthy nursling can stomach a raw turnip 
 or cocoanut on occasion, need we trouble so much to 
 tickle his appetite with artfully cooked messes ? 
 
 I appeal to all true lovers of books, whether they 
 did not begin young, and whether they did not try 
 their teeth on all sorts of fare, settling by choice on 
 the sweets that are wholesome at that stage of growth. 
 Perhaps they had Bridget Elia's luck, who was 
 " tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious 
 closet of good old English reading, without much
 
 294 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon 
 that fair and wholesome pasturage." Surely it 
 never occurred to them to throw away a book because 
 they did not fully comprehend it. The very delight 
 of reading was opening vistas into the unknown, 
 shadowy avenues of wonder and dread, dewy path- 
 ways of dim romance, chequered by rising fancy's 
 sunlight and fairy moonshine, where one lost oneself 
 in daydreams such as will never come under a noon- 
 tide glare of knowledge. Did we ask a schoolmaster 
 to make our visions plain by the light of common 
 day? 
 
 I, for one, learned to read early with so little pains 
 that I cannot recall them. The first book I can 
 remember reading with engrossing enjoyment was 
 given me, if I err not, on my fifth birthday. I 
 forget the title of it and all of its contents except 
 that it dealt with some children going into the 
 country to be treated with a syllabub. I did not 
 know what a syllabub was then ; I am not sure that 
 I know now ; but the word conveyed to me some 
 vaguely refreshing charm, " tasting of Flora and the 
 country green," calling up to my mind's eye a field 
 spangled with daisies and buttercups and to the ear 
 that cheerful lowing of cows on their way to pasture 
 that was my nursery reveille. There was another 
 most entrancing tale which, at a country house now 
 degraded into a railway goods station, I opened to 
 relieve the tedium of my elders' conversation, and 
 read on with deep absorption till the end of the call 
 forced me to leave it half-told at a most thrilling point, 
 where a tricky midshipman poked a broom into the 
 stern first-lieutenant*s face. This must have been 
 a story of sea-life that so interested me when I had 
 never seen a ship and could hardly have known what
 
 READERS 295 
 
 a midshipman was or a lieutenant ; yet from it I 
 date my first crude appreciation of the comic, unless 
 before that came the more rudimentary fun of Jack 
 the Giant Killer's setting old Fee-Fo-Fum to rip 
 himself up by tricks with hasty pudding : what hasty 
 pudding was I knew not, but I could none the less 
 relish the humorous justice of any device to quell 
 such a big, barbarous monster who deserved the 
 worst that could be done with him. I suppose 
 that rather coarse episode will be edited out of 
 contemporary histories of Jack ; but indeed I am 
 informed of the " new child " as not much caring 
 for such good old stories, if which be true, I am 
 sorry for him, and suspect unwise elders of having 
 sophisticated his natural appetite. 
 
 My first impression of poetic power is associated 
 with the hymn " Brightest and best of the sons of 
 the morning," learned by heart when I could not 
 have been able to analyse its sense any more than 
 to parse its grammar. Its tune is still my high-water 
 mark of musical appreciation : on my telling an 
 eminent musician that I liked one of The Songs witliout 
 Words, he at once strummed it on the piano, and 
 to my inquiry how he had guessed which was my 
 favourite, drily remarked, " That's the one people 
 always do like who know nothing about music ! " 
 One of my most inspiring early studies was an odd 
 volume of some Railway Magazine, which sounds 
 like heavily prosaic reading, but such titles as " Great 
 Western " and " London and South -Western " carried 
 my imagination as far as Mesopotamia. The name 
 of " Nine Elms " Station made a recurring spot of 
 light in this dark jungle. The accounts of railway 
 accidents offered thrilling tragedies. What never 
 failed to stir my wonder was the mysterious word
 
 296 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 " deodand." How many grown-up persons, school- 
 book editors even, can unriddle me that hoary word 
 that satisfied m.y childish mind with a vague sense 
 of something solemnly impressive. Such was the 
 experience of a short-sighted nursling at the Muses' 
 apron-string. Yet I am not sure but that those 
 harder reared callants were more to be envied who 
 had fewer books to know well-nigh by heart, and 
 instead of being much allowed to blind themselves 
 over printed pages spelt out by peat-fires, ran bare- 
 foot and open-eyed on heathery braes and bush banks, 
 schooled by storm and sunshine in the lore of nature, 
 till the kindly gloaming brought them home to be 
 sung to sleep by tales 
 
 " of old forgotten things, 
 And battles long ago." 
 
 Such stories are never forgotten, like so much of what 
 we take in by our spectacles. 
 
 To the less artfully schooled generation of young 
 scholars in which I came to run the gauntlet of 
 grammar and exercises, the letters of the alphabet 
 were keys to a wonderland that seems shut to many 
 youngsters now. We had not so many books to 
 read, but we read them better ; and some of our 
 books were the best. We read not only Evenings at 
 Home, Sandford and Merton and the juvenile libraries 
 celebrating such heroes as Tom Thumb, but also with 
 gusto Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, Robinson 
 Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, Scott's novels, nay 
 his poems. 
 
 To thee, dear schoolboy, whom my lay 
 Has cheated of his hour of play, 
 
 appealed that Wizard of the North, not in vain, when 
 an idle Grecian might be seen poring over a translation
 
 READERS 297 
 
 of Homer, which perhaps he could ill construe in 
 the original. 
 
 How many schoolboys now have time or taste for 
 reading poetry ? How few could pass an examination 
 in those classics of our youth. I came across one the 
 other day who had undergone several examinations 
 in English and foreign literature, without becoming 
 aware of such classical opuscules as Hohenlinden and 
 The Burial of Sir John Moore. Our clever schoolboys 
 smile or yawn when they read in Tom Brownhow 
 Arthur's voice broke over Helen's lament for the 
 chivalrous Hector ; and they have nothing but incredu- 
 lous scorn for the habit of poetical quotation attributed 
 to Farrar's heroes. It takes an absorbing study of 
 cricket averages or football records to cheat them 
 of their playtime. What literature they read is a 
 pemmican specially prepared for them after approved 
 recipes. The seasoning and serving up of it is no 
 matter of indifference, since, as Emerson says, a boy is 
 what the pit is in the playhouse, the most independent 
 if not the most fastidious of critics. Yet writing of the 
 kind makes easy work, once you get your hand in at it. 
 Your youngster brings to his book a contributory 
 imagination that colours for himself the plainest of 
 pictures. He is content with the most stiff -jointed 
 mannequin of a hero, so long as its feats be excitedly 
 impossible enough ; and the rudest Guy Fawkes 
 serves for a villain to be helplessly knocked about and 
 squashed like the policeman in the pantomime : his 
 relish for humour, too, is in the elementary stage of 
 clown's pranks upon pantaloon. The dashing writer 
 in this sort appeals to a fancy that comes half-way to 
 meet him. He has only to label his dummy " A bold 
 boy " — British, Yankee, or French, as the case may 
 be — and the sympathy of the reader fills up the barest
 
 298 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 outline, not missing lights and shades from a picture of 
 action. Style is unnecessary ; moral tone is even a 
 blemish, so long as he teach his patrons to hick and to 
 hack, which, as Dame Quickly understood, they learn 
 fast enough of themselves ; and he must bring his 
 hero through all hazards, to due admiration, without 
 turning a hair. Girls, of course, require another model 
 for their heroine ; but in this generation of Amazons, 
 they are said to take very kindly to boys' books as 
 well as to the more sentimental stories that command 
 their natural interest. While fiction for their elders, 
 as Herbert Spencer can point out, is more based upon 
 an analysis of heterogeneous motive, has been growing 
 more subtle, more reflective, more widely sympathetic, 
 the juvenile reader still loves strong contrasts of black 
 and white, and has an eye for only the primary 
 colours of human nature. 
 
 It is not for me to be too contemptuous of a chromo- 
 lithographic and photographic form of art fated to fall 
 to pieces in the hands of hasty readers. Yet I can't 
 but regret that an abundant supply of these ephemera 
 too much takes oif the eyes of our youth from nobler 
 pictures and severer sculpture, familiarity with which 
 should be an abiding habit. There are two tests of a 
 good book, one written for amusement, that is to say, 
 the only kind most young readers read with good will. 
 The first is, does it amuse, does it keep one sitting up 
 when one ought to be in bed ? That test, the books in 
 question may pass with honours. To speak of deafen- 
 ing its votary to the dinner bell might sound a counsel 
 of perfection. Then comes the further criterion, 
 will it bear reading again ? I trow not, in the case of 
 most juvenile literature. Ask a boy about one of his 
 Christmas gift books, and he tells you as of the snows 
 of yester-year, " Oh ! I have read that already."
 
 READERS 299 
 
 Does he ever read it twice ? Can he skim it without a 
 yawn when a lustrum or so has ripened his judgment ? 
 
 It is not thus that the true lover of books reads the 
 Ihad — the Divine Comedy — the Sonnets of Shake- 
 speare or Milton — the Vicar of Wakefield — the Essays 
 of Elia — the Newcomes — books that are for every age 
 and for all time, since each reading brings out more 
 clearly the author's power, or but freshens our relish 
 for the best in its kind. It was not thus that some 
 of us read Don Quixote, missing perhaps at first its 
 ironical purpose, yet dimly seeing more in it than the 
 string of farcical mishaps it presents to grosser natures, 
 and in after life to catch its meaning with an enjoy- 
 ment the keener for blurred recollections. 
 
 But the soft literary pap with which children are 
 now fed hardly strengthens them to pick for them- 
 selves, fastening by instinct, like squirrels, upon such 
 nuts as they can crack, and perhaps relishing the 
 kernel of the matter, before all its flowers and foliage 
 can be brought into the mental lens. Here is the 
 true reader, he who will justify Cicero's commonplace 
 as to books being our best friends, congenial alike in 
 youth and age, the ornament of prosperity, the refuge 
 and consolation of adversity, the delight of the fireside, 
 nor otherwise out of doors, spending the night with us, 
 always available as travelling companions, as welcome 
 in the country as in town. As for less promising tyros, 
 they must read if only by and by to study price lists 
 and advertisements ; yet they might often be better 
 employed than in reading what is fit to be forgotten. 
 
 It is interesting to compare the juvenile literature of 
 our day with that of a century ago, the latter so much 
 more scanty, also notoriously more edifying. Perhaps 
 I am no fair critic of such old favourites as Sandford 
 and Merton and Evenings at Home ; but I can't help
 
 300 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 regretting the neglect into which the like of them have 
 fallen ; and I suspect the young old Adam of being too 
 spicily catered for in the showy prize books of this 
 generation. I speak of Master John Bull and Uncle 
 Sam's children, if the latter have any childhood to 
 speak of. Other nations, among which priestly 
 censorship was longer in esteem, show less progress in 
 this respect. In Italy, for instance, where such moral 
 and instructive works as Giannettino still hold their 
 field, the most successful book for the young published 
 in our time, to sell by hundreds of editions, is E. De 
 Amicis' Cuore, tales informed by such high-flown senti- 
 ment and faith in patriotism that beside it our religious 
 fiction would seem humorous and realistic. This book, 
 besides becoming a household word in its own country, 
 has been translated with acceptance into French and 
 Spanish ; but an English version of it seems to have 
 gained little favour. Under Mr. Squeers' rule young- 
 sters had to begin with stickjaw, which might or 
 might not be an introduction to more dainty fare ; 
 while in carefully regulated nurseries sweets were 
 permitted only in strict moderation, if not barred out 
 iDy austere elders. We have changed all that for the 
 other extreme, our young readers being encouraged to 
 pick and choose their mental diet among the pastry 
 and confectionery of literature, — out of school hours, 
 that is to say, yet even lessons have to be cunningly 
 flavoured and seasoned, no longer with such sharp 
 or hot condiments as brought tears into the eyes and 
 blisters upon the skin. 
 
 The habit of easy reading follows young people into 
 after life, when they find themselves unable or unwill- 
 ing to digest the solid meals of literature. Then the 
 pictures with which these books of theirs must be 
 leavened go to demoralize an appetite keen only for
 
 READERS 301 
 
 kickshaws. The present generation seems childish 
 in its love of pretty pictures as well as smooth pages. 
 A classic must be recommended to us by clever illus- 
 trations reproduced on clayed paper that will perish 
 in half a century or so. The periodicals that flourish 
 most rankly in our literary garden raise their heads 
 in a flowery show of reproductive processes ; while 
 one by one have withered away the sober magazines 
 planted in our father's day. Even the newspaper has 
 to adorn itself with blotched scenes and portraits of 
 due actuality. The very dictionary or cyclopaedia is 
 furnished with cuts. History is taught in pageants to 
 grown-up audiences, who are brought eye to eye with 
 the events of the day in cinematograph panoramas. 
 There appears indeed to be no small demand for 
 illustrated editions of religion, else not so much 
 appealing to a generation that in some ways seems 
 less thoughtful than its forefathers, yet with so much 
 more to think about. 
 
 I should like to say more on this subject ; but I am 
 loth to trust my own judgment about a class of books 
 I myself have written without success. I can see 
 reasons why young readers prefer to mine certain 
 volumes which do not please me. I have taken 
 trouble in mixing black and white into shades of grey, 
 which are lost on the colour sense of undeveloped 
 minds, nor is my vein of humour obvious enough to 
 their sympathy. Then again certain stories of mine 
 have the weak point of being too much in the passive 
 voice ; my interest being in character as developed 
 by outward circumstances, under the conditions of real 
 life. But your boy, however it may be with girls, loves 
 his heroes to be much in the active, performing the 
 most gallant feats without much regard to probability 
 or even possibility. The youth of the world loves
 
 302 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 champions like Achilles and Ajax, bound to come 
 off safe against any earthly odds, and ready to defy 
 even the immortals. Critics of simple grain find the 
 " piety " of iEneas bordering on what they might call 
 priggishness, and the lachrymce rerum are apt to be 
 a jest till human nature develops finer feelings perhaps 
 at the expense of some robustness of temper. 
 
 So much of hint as to a private disappointment, for 
 I am not ashamed to confess here that it is in this 
 despised province of literature I have tried hardest to 
 succeed. I may at least take myself to be its doyen, 
 having, so far as I know, survived all who practised in 
 it when I began to follow their traces, and some who, 
 starting later on the same course, outstripped me while 
 picking up more golden apples than fell in my way. 
 Were the prize but a wreath of wild olive I should not 
 regret the dust and sweat of the contest. Let me 
 write the books of the young, and who will might 
 make sermons, laws and leading articles. Yet, all the 
 same, I would rather see a youngster of mine growing 
 familiar betimes with authors who may be his guides, 
 philosophers, and friends till he come to close the 
 volume of life. 
 
 Youngsters, when they do take to reading, are 
 readers worth having, whose favour the most exalted 
 author should not despise. The greatest compliment 
 I ever had paid me was by a boy, now I believe rising 
 in the world as no frivolous member of parliament, 
 who probably is not aware how we once met without 
 making one another's acquaintance. It was on a 
 Sunday afternoon at a house in the country, where 
 for CO -inmates we had several cultured damsels of the 
 then novel Girton type. They brought into the 
 drawing-room their Brownings, their Ruskins, their 
 Ibsens and such-like, whereon they would pore for a
 
 READERS 303 
 
 few minutes, then break of! to gossip or meditate ; 
 there was even a gentle spirit of slumber abroad that 
 warm afternoon. I happened to be writing letters at 
 a table where the one boy of the company sat reading 
 steadily, for hours, never moving but to turn page 
 after page. He was spoken to but did not answer ; 
 he was summoned to tea but sat fast ; he took no 
 notice of me who once had the curiosity to glance 
 across the table at the book that so engrossed him, but 
 its title told me nothing. I thought to myself how I 
 should like to see one of my stories read with such 
 devotion. But when the reader had at last been torn 
 away by force, to bed, to supper, or other claim of 
 domestic discipline, I presently took up the abandoned 
 volume, and lo ! it proved to be my own handiwork, 
 the name of which I had for a moment forgotten, as 
 may seem incredible to the present reader, informed 
 of authorial vanity — " The mother may forget the 
 child," etc. But the plain truth is that I have in my 
 possession a tiny volume as to which I am not now 
 quite sure whether I did or did not write it more 
 than forty years ago. Is it not on record that Scott, 
 in his old age, took some of his own lines for Byron's, 
 and that he had become entirely oblivious of his 
 authorship in the Bride of Lammermoor ! 
 
 The most neglected author may be supposed to have 
 one faithful reader, himself. But I am not sure if this 
 always holds good. It is said about certain authors 
 that they seem never to read anything but their 
 own books ; and others, like Biles Gridley M.A., ap- 
 pear never tired of fondly perusing the featu-es of some 
 single bantling loved all the more for want of general 
 appreciation. But a writer of many books may be 
 like the mother-bird that hatches her eggs with unfail- 
 ing care and nurses her callow brood with anxious love
 
 304 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 presently to forget them when they have flown into 
 the world. I wonder if my own case be singular : after 
 working over a volume a score of times in manuscript 
 and in proof, it is long before I can face the drudgery 
 of going through it again. Like David, while the 
 child's fate was still in doubt, I fasted and wept over 
 it ; but when it is once coffined in boards, I wash 
 and anoint myself and sit down to meat without more 
 ado. Years afterwards, when its once too trite pages 
 have grown blank in my memory, I may turn to it 
 perhaps with fresh zest, perhaps with candid criticism, 
 perhaps with honest shame for the literary sins of one's 
 youth rising up to gibber against one after many 
 years. 
 
 Anyhow, being one's own reader would bring only 
 the satisfaction of regarding one's face in a mirror, 
 which, even to feminine vanity, needs to be supple- 
 mented by some assurance that our attractions 
 are not lost upon others. Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 addresses as " Beloved " the one reader he assumes as 
 sure not to get sleepy over his pages. " I suppose if 
 any writer, of any distinguishable individuality, could 
 look into the hearts of all his readers, he might very 
 probably find in his parish of a thousand or a million, 
 one who honestly preferred him to any other of his 
 kind." So modestly puts it an author who might 
 have counted his attentive congregation by myriads ; 
 but were they drawn off to other pulpits, he would 
 always have one faithful beloved in the present writer, 
 who has so often decked these pages with feathers of 
 his wit and wisdom. And the merest jay of us all 
 may chance to find some responsive ear that takes 
 our note for a nightingale's. I myself have had assur- 
 ance from readers that they held me a very nonpareil 
 for one or other flavour to their special taste. The
 
 READERS 306 
 
 worst of it is that, on further inquiry, such warm 
 admirers of mine usually turned out to be as little 
 familiar with Shakespeare as with Homer, to prefer 
 Mrs. Henry Wood to George Eliot, Lalla Rookh to 
 Paradise Lost, or not to care for Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes beyond such comic pieces as the One Horse 
 Shay and The Spectre Pig. Once, by the way, in an 
 effusion of after-dinner boldness, I took on me to tell 
 that author of authors that his greatest lines were to 
 be found in The Chambered Nautilus, and instead of 
 being genially snubbed for my impertinence, had 
 the satisfaction of hearing from him that he quite 
 agreed with me. 
 
 I find myself closing upon the personal note struck 
 in my first chapter. As a writer long practised in 
 fiction, I am now going to call up that truly dear 
 reader we all hope to secure ; and, taking him by the 
 spiritual button-hole, to address to him a few words 
 in conclusion, trusting that he at least will listen like 
 a three-years child. I have tried to tell him what I 
 know about authorship ; and the upshot of the matter 
 is that, after all I have had to say against this calling, 
 I would choose no other, were I starting again in life, 
 albeit I might profit by experience to make a better 
 start. Si jeunesse savait ! si vieillesse pouvait ! WTien 
 near the finish it is too late crying over all the milk 
 spilt along one's rash career ; but at least one may do 
 something in pointing out to others the pitfalls on the 
 way to a goal more often desired than reached. Hop- 
 ing to find readers among those who are or would be 
 writers, I am now fain to end with some word of 
 exhortation or encouragement for them ; and such 
 a word I will borrow from an author who more than 
 any other of our time earned richest reward in the 
 love and praise of his peers. 
 
 Z
 
 306 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 There are just two reasons for the choice of any way of life : 
 the first is inbred taste in the chooser ; the second some high 
 utility in the industry selected. Literature, like any other art, 
 is singularly interesting to the artist ; and, in a degree peculiar 
 to itself among the arts, it is useful to mankind. These are the 
 sufficient justifications for any young man or woman who adopts 
 it as the business of his life. I shall not say much about the 
 wages. A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as 
 by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he 
 does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his 
 dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much 
 it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by 
 cheating. We all suflier ourselves to be too much concerned about 
 a little poverty ; but such considerations should not move us in 
 the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of 
 so great a portion of our lives ; and like the missionary, the patriot, 
 or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career 
 in which we can do the most and best for mankind. Now Nature, 
 faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother. A lad, for 
 some liking to the jingle of words, betakes himself to letters for his 
 life ; by-and-by, when he learns more gravity, he finds that he 
 has chosen better than he knew ; that if he earns little, he is 
 earning it amply ; that if he receives a small wage, he is in a 
 position to do considerable services ; that it is in his power, in 
 some small measure, to protect the oppressed and to defend the 
 truth. So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may 
 arise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, 
 in particular is the happy star of this trade of writing, that it 
 should combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at once 
 agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching. 
 
 Another most successful author of our day offers a 
 like good opinion of his craft. 
 
 If literature and occupation with letters were not its own reward, 
 truly they who seem to succeed might envy those who fail. It is 
 not wealth that they win, as fortunate men in other professions 
 count wealth ; it is not rank and fashion that come to their call or 
 come to call on them. Their success is to be let dwell with their 
 own fancies, or with the imaginations of others far greater than 
 themselves ; their success is their living in fantasy, a little remote 
 from the hubbub and the contests of the world. At the best they
 
 READERS 307 
 
 will be vexed by curious eyes and idle tongues, at the best they will 
 die not rich in this worid's goods, yet not unconsoled by friend- 
 ships which they win among men and women whose faces they 
 will never see. They may well be content, and thrice content, 
 with their lot, yet it is not a lot which should provoke envy, nor 
 be coveted by ambition. 
 
 To these good words of his dead schoolfellows, Louis 
 Stevenson and Andrew Lang, the reader's humble 
 servant would heartily say Amen. As a less successful 
 author, I have been not a discontented one. With 
 other tastes and temptations, I might have done other- 
 wise with my time. I might have been a priest or 
 parson to reverence some duck-puddle as the boundless 
 ocean of truth, as I was vainly taught to do by some 
 that had the teaching of me. I might have been 
 a lawyer to sharpen my wits for robbing the widow or 
 orphan by clever making of black into white, by con- 
 fusing of witnesses and bamboozling of j uries. I might 
 have been a doctor, and so better, yet perhaps to look 
 back on some fatal mistake that buried its victim six 
 feet underground instead of hanging him six feet 
 above it. As a merchant, I might have gone about 
 to starve or ruin my neighbour by some smart specula- 
 tion or bold grab at monopoly. As a soldier, I might 
 have more nobly slain Samaritans in my country's 
 cause, without daring to ask were it right or wrong : 
 the Samaritans might have slain me. I was half-bred to 
 more than one honourable profession, but never cared 
 to seek admission to any. For half a century I have 
 been an author of sorts ; and I never was anything 
 else. I have laboured in my chosen vocation without 
 much worldly profit, with no loss of esteem among 
 those whose esteem I value, at some expense of health 
 and ease such as every man incurs who makes him- 
 self useful to the world in a sedentary attitude. By
 
 308 A BOOK ABOUT AUTHORS 
 
 more than three-score years of dealing with written 
 and printed pages I have worn out my eyes, like 
 so many another bookman. 
 
 Round me too the night 
 In ever-nearing circles weaves her shade. 
 
 This book of mine is, for once in a way, written 
 chiefly for one appreciative reader — myself. It may 
 be the last book I write, and if it were my last word, 
 I cannot say that I am dissatisfied with a course of life 
 against the drawbacks of which I have felt bound 
 to warn the aspirant who may take it to be strewn 
 with roses all the way. There is no rose, we know, 
 without a thorn, but also the thorns go with roses. 
 On coming to add up my account, I find a balance 
 on the right side. I have lived my life ; I have 
 spoken my mind ; I have done what I could, in a 
 world where at the best we are all but unprofitable 
 servants. By diligently plying the pen rather than 
 the sword or the plough, one may have more surely 
 helped to turn the wilderness of life into a garden. If 
 one have taken pains not to let one's tool go rusty ; 
 if one have never prostituted it to base uses ; if one 
 have cared to be an honest hireling in this day-work ; 
 if one be aware of having given pleasure to some, 
 of having sought to work harm to none, these are the 
 things that should not make death terrible to an 
 author who, like the silent many, must look to be 
 forgotten ; yet what good or ill he could do for his 
 generation will not die in the lives of men. 
 
 Butlsr & Tanner From* and London
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 BONNIE SCOTLAND. Painted by Sutton Palmer. 
 Containing 75 Full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square 
 demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. Price 20s. net. 
 
 " The illustrations are a most attractive and valuable feature of 
 the volume ; they abound in merit, and the reproduction has been 
 in many cases remarkably successful. . . . The letterpress deserves 
 praise more unqualified ... it is racy of the soil, and not merely 
 entertaining, but edifying to the indweller as well as the visitor of 
 ' Bonnie Scotland.' " — Scotsman. 
 
 SURREY. Painted by Sutton Palmer. Containing 75 
 Full-page Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, 
 cloth, gilt top. Price 20s. net. 
 
 " All who are lovers of Surrey — and who is not ? — will be delighted 
 with this panorama of its potent and diversified charms, and will 
 readily acquiesce in Mr. Moncrieff's suggestion that ' the moral enforced 
 at once by pen and pencil is that few great cities are so lucky as London 
 in having at its backdoors a play-ground, pleasure-ground, and garden 
 ground of such manifold interest and beauty.' " — World. 
 
 THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 Painted by William Smith, Jun. Containing 40 Full-page 
 Illustrations in Colour. Square demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top. 
 Price 10s. net. By Post 10s. 6d. 
 
 " It is amazingly cheap at ten shillings net, for it contains an album 
 of coloured pictures, by the aid of which we can reaUze the grandest 
 scenery of the outer isles. Mr. Smith has done Ms work admirably, 
 and has included the best-loved and loneliest places." — British Weekly. 
 
 LONDON. Containing 32 Full-page Illustrations in colour 
 by Herbert Marshall and others. Size 9^ X 7 inches, 
 cloth, gilt top. Price 7s. 6d. net. By post 8s. 
 
 ' ' An excellent and entertaining volume on the metropolis, presenting 
 the different quarters under their characteristic aspects, and as the 
 author puts it, ' a medley of history, anecdote, reminiscence, observa- 
 tion and reflection.' " — Daily Mail. 
 
 " The book should be eagerly bought by the increasing number of 
 tourists who now make our grim capital into a pleasure centre ; but 
 we should Uke to see it in the hands of the Cockney, who is notorious 
 for knowing Uttle of his own city." — The Globe. 
 
 Publi3hed by A. & C. BLACK, 4, 5 & 6 Soho Square, London,W.
 
 By the same Author under the name of 
 ASCOTT R. HOPE. 
 
 DRAMAS IN DUODECIMO : Abstracts and Brief 
 Chronicles of Youth. Crown 8vo., cloth. Price 5s. 
 
 " He has the secret of youth, and his stories in this new book are 
 as boyish, as cheery, as true in their character studies of schoolmasters 
 and schoolboys as when he was the literary giant of the " Boys' Own 
 Paper." Old boys as well as young should read these dehghtful 
 stories." — Tribune. 
 
 " A bright and exhilarating series of tales." — The Standard. 
 
 " We have no doubt that this collection of dramatic stories will 
 be a foremost favourite." — Educational Times. 
 
 CAP AND GOWN COMEDY : A Schoolmaster's Stories. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 3s. 6d. 
 
 " Admirable and dehghtful humour. The comedy in which the 
 appalling Dr. and Mrs. Spick, the revolting Master Pereira, the excellent 
 Toby, the philosophic Adams, and the rest, play their pleasing parts, 
 never degenerates into the farcical and the extravagant." — Saturday 
 Review. 
 
 HALF AND HALF TRAGEDY : Scenes in Black and 
 
 White. Large crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. 
 
 "The keen enjoyment of youth and schoolboy life which Mr. Ascott 
 Hope has shown in so many books makes these six leisurely stories 
 good to read." — The Times. 
 
 " The style of writing is excellent, and the volume is as readable by 
 ' grown-ups ' as by youngsters." — Edinburgh Evening News. 
 
 " The book will be a joy to every healthy-minded boy and girl, 
 while their parents will find plenty of entertainment in it." — Sussex 
 Daily News. 
 
 THE SCHOOLBOY ABROAD : Autobiographies of 
 European School -life. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. 
 
 This is not a story, but an account of school-hfe in different parts 
 of Europe, which should interest British youngsters, if they have 
 any interest to spare from football and cricket reports. The subject 
 has been mainly illustrated from autobiographical reminiscences, 
 giving pictures of youth in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, 
 Spain, Denmark, etc. 
 
 A. & C. BLACK, 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
 
 OTHER VOLUMES BY ASCOTT R. HOPE. 
 
 BLACK AND BLUE : The Story of a Sailor's Son. With 
 
 Illustrations by C. O. Murray. Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 
 Price 3s. 6ci. 
 
 " It would be hard to overpraise the book : all the characters, 
 
 from the young hero to the eccentric dominie, are intensely real, and 
 
 we are sure that no girl or boy reading the story would doubt for a 
 
 moment the existence of Gerard or Kooby, Uncle James or Aunt 
 
 Joanna." — Si. James' Gazette. 
 
 BEASTS OF BUSINESS. With 8 Illustrations in Colour 
 by S. Vernon Stokes and Alan Wright. Large crown 
 Svo, cloth, gilt top. Price 3s. 6d. 
 
 " All the chapters are full of interesting things." — The Spectator. 
 " Every child loves to read of animals, and Mr. Hope's book is sure 
 to be a first favourite." — Dundee Advertiser. 
 
 " One of the best and healthiest books for children." — Guardian. 
 
 ALL ASTRAY : The Travels and Adventures of 
 Two '♦ Cherubs." With Illustrations by W. H. C. 
 Groome. Crown Svo, cloth. Price 3s. 6d. 
 
 "If ever a school story was dehghtfuUy calculated to take the chill 
 off the plunge for any youngster shivering on the brink of his first 
 term, Ascott R. Hope's new book ' All Astray ' is the book. Who 
 could dread a world peopled by such jovial friends, filled with such 
 happy adventures, governed by such humane powers ? In portraying 
 the resourceful Undy, both the author and his clever artist have found 
 a type quite as new as he is amusing." — Leisure Hour. 
 
 STORIES. With 8 Illustrations in Colour by Dorothy 
 FuRNiss. Large crown 8vo, cloth. Price 3s. 6d. 
 
 ' ' Mr. Hope has had the happy idea of bringing together thirteen 
 of his best stories selected from a dozen different books, and of present- 
 ing them in one single and very attractive one." — Bookman. 
 
 NOW AND THEN : Chronicles of Half-Text History. 
 
 With Illustrations by Gordon Browne, R.I. Crown 
 Svo, cloth. Price 3s. 6d. 
 
 " Stories of school life adroitly arranged to reveal the changes that 
 have taken place in a generation. An admirable book." — T.P.'s 
 Weekly. 
 
 " The book is in its third edition, a fact which speaks for itself." — 
 Sheffield Daily Telegraph. 
 
 A. & C. BLACK, 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
 
 OTHER VOLUMES BY ASCOTT R. HOPE. 
 
 ADVENTURERS IN AMERICA. With 12 Illustrations 
 
 in Colour by H. Sandham. Small square demy 8vo, 
 
 cloth. Price 6s. 
 
 " Will delight the heart of any boy." — Manchester Courier. 
 
 " A more engaging way in which to give boys and girls a true idea 
 of the wonderful history of the American continent could not be 
 imagined." — Glasgow News. 
 
 " Boys will treasure this volume, both for its many thrills, and for 
 its twelve fine illustrations." — Christian World. 
 
 HERE AND THERE : An Album of Adventures. With 
 Illustrations in Colour by D. L. Smith and R. H. Feil- 
 DEN. CrowTi 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. 
 
 "The scenes of the exploits include Exmoor, Dartmoor, Isle of 
 Wight, India, the Brocken, and the Alps ; and there is not one of them 
 that has not its bit of thrill for the young reader, while many of them 
 contain little touches of humour that still further enhance their in- 
 terest." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 " Should appeal to all boys who have a Uking for outdoor life and 
 for the perils of land and sea." — Aberdeen Free Press. 
 
 " There is not one story that has not its thrill for the young reader." — 
 Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 " A series of thrilling scenes of danger." — The Guardian. 
 
 READY-MADE ROMANCE : Reminiscences of Youth- 
 ful Adventure. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 5s. 
 
 ' ' Mr. Hope has produced a work of considerable historic interest, 
 as the stories deal with the adventures of youngsters, most of whom 
 appear as minor actors in the background of famous scenes. The last 
 contribution, ' Schoolboys in a Siege,' is a graphic picture of the heroic 
 defence of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny and the famous reUef 
 of the beleaguered town. It should be read with pride by younger 
 Britons of to-day." — Western Times. 
 
 " There has never been a better boy's book." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 HERO AND HEROINE. With 9 illustrations by A. Hitch- 
 cock. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 3s. 6d. 
 
 " Its main interest lies in the extraordinarily sympathetic study 
 of the new boy's devotion to a school-fellow of older standing. Few 
 boys have ever given such homage ; still fewer men, perhaps, have 
 not looked back upon it with a half-ashamed amusement. Mr. Hope 
 describes the sentiment in aU its stages." — Manchester Guardian. 
 
 A. & C. BLACK, 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 ORION un 26*88 
 
 SEP 2 5 
 
 Form'L9-25m-9,'47(A5618)444 
 
 Tff^ LTCTJARV 
 
 ^T:TVT?XrfA'
 
 <- 005 326 ,25 1 
 
 I ir SOUTHERN RtGlO'.AL . 
 
 AA 000 647 210 4 
 
 PN 
 
 151 
 
 M74b