“That is what everybody tells me to do,” George answered. He was disappointed, for he believed that what he did was really good, and he had expected that the man with whom he was now speaking would have been the one of all others to appreciate his work. “That is what they all tell me,” he continued, “but they do not tell me how to get my articles accepted. Have you a recipe for that, Johnson?”
The pale young man did not answer at once. He was extremely conscientious, which was one reason why he was a good critic.
“I cannot promise much,” he said at last. “But I will tell you what I will do for you. If you will write an article, or a short story — say five to eight thousand words — I will read it and give you my honest opinion. If I like it, I’ll push it, and it may get into print. If I don’t, I’ll tell you so, and I’ll do nothing. You will have to try again. But I am convinced that you are naturally an author and not a critic.”
“Thank you,” said George gratefully. He knew what the promise meant, from such a man as Johnson, who would have to sacrifice his time to the reading of the manuscript, and whose opinion was worth having.
“Can you give me any work this week?” he asked, before he took his leave.
Johnson looked at him quietly, as though making up his mind what to say.
“I would rather not. You do not do it as well as you did, and I am responsible. If there is anything else I could do for you — —” He stopped.
“If you will be so kind as to read my article — —”
“Yes, of course. I said I would. I mean — —” Johnson looked away, and his pale face blushed to the roots of his hair. “I mean — if you should need twenty dollars while the article is being written, I can — —”
George felt a very peculiar emotion, and his voice was a little thick, as he took the other’s hand.
“Thank you, Johnson, but I don’t need it. You are awfully kind, though. Nobody ever did as much for me before.”
When he left the room, the nervous flush had not yet disappeared from the literary editor’s forehead, nor had the odd sensation quite subsided from George’s own throat. If Tom Craik had offered him the loan of twenty dollars, he would have turned his back on him with a bitter answer. It was a very different matter when poor, overworked Johnson put his hand in his pocket and proffered all he could spare. For a minute George forgot all his disappointments and troubles in the gratitude he felt to the pale young man. Nor did he ever lose remembrance of the kindly generosity that had prompted the offer.
But as he walked slowly homewards the bitterness of his heart began to show itself in another direction. He thought of the repeated admonitions and parcels of advice which had been thrust upon him during the last few days, he thought of his poverty, of his failures, and he compared all these facts with his aspirations. He, a poor devil who seemed to be losing the power to earn a miserable ten dollars with his pen, he, whose carefully prepared articles had been rejected again and again, often without a word of explanation, he, the unsuccessful scribbler of second-rate notices, had aspired, and did still aspire, not only to marry Constance Fearing, but to earn for himself such a position as should make him independent of her fortune, so far as money was concerned, and which, in the direction of personal reputation, should place him in the first rank in his own country. Wonderful things happened, sometimes, in the world of letters; but, so far as he knew, they needed a considerable time for their accomplishment. He was well advanced in his twenty-sixth year already, and it was madness to hope to achieve fame in less than ten years at the least. In ten years, Constance would be two and thirty. He had not thought of that before, and the idea filled him with dismay. It seemed a great age, an absurd age for marriage. And, after all, there was not the slightest probability of her waiting for him. In the first place, she did not love him, or, at least, she said that she did not, and if her affection was not strong enough to declare itself, it could hardly be taken into consideration as an element in the great problem. The whole thing was ridiculous, and he would give up the idea — if he could.
But he could not. He recognised that the thought of Constance was the bright spot in his life, and that without her image he should lose half his energy. In the beginning, there had been a sort of complacent acquiescence in the growth of his love, which made it seem as though he had voluntarily set up an idol of his own choosing, which he could change at will. But the idol had begun to feed on his heart, and was already exerting its mysterious, dominating influence over his actions and beliefs. He began to concoct a philosophy of self-deception, in the hope of obtaining a good result. It seemed certain that he could never marry Constance — certain, at all events, while this mood lasted — but he could still dream of her and look forward to his union with her. The great day would come, of course, when she would marry some one else, and when he should doubtless be buried in the ruin of his dreams, but until then he would sustain the illusion.
And what an illusion it was! The magnitude of it appalled him. Penniless, almost; dependent for his bread upon his ruined father; baffled at every turn; taught by experience that he had none of the power he seemed to feel — that was the list of his advantages, to be set in the balance against those possessed by Constance Fearing. George laughed bitterly to himself as he pursued his way through the crowded streets. It struck him that he must be a singularly unlucky man, and he wondered how men felt upon whom fortune smiled perpetually, who had never known what it meant to work hard to earn a dollar, to whom money seemed as common and necessary an element as air. He remembered indeed the time when, as a boy, he had known luxury, and existed in unbroken comfort, and the memory added a bitterness to his present case. Nevertheless he was not downhearted. Black as the world looked, he could look blacker, he fancied, and make the cheeks of fortune smart with the empty purse she had tossed in his face. His walk quickened, and his fingers itched for the pen. He was one of those men who harden and grow savage under defeat, reserving such luxuries as despondency for the hours of success.
Without the slightest hesitation, he set to work. He scarcely knew how it was that he determined to write an article upon critics and criticism; but when he sat down to his table the idea was already present, and phrases of direful import were seething in the fire of his brain. All at once he realised how he hated the work he had been doing, how he loathed himself for doing it, how he detested those who had doled out to him his daily portion. What a royal satisfaction it was to “sling ink,” as the reporters called it! To heap his full-stocked thesaurus of abuse upon somebody and something, and most especially upon himself, in his capacity as one of the critics! To devote the whole profession to the perdition of an everlasting contempt, to hold it up as a target for the public wrath, to spit upon it, to stamp upon it, to tear it to rags, and to scatter the tatters abroad upon the tempest of his reprobation! The phrases ran like wildfire along the paper, as he warmed to his work, and dragged old-fashioned anathemas from the closets of his memory to swell the hailstorm of epithets that had fallen first. Anathema Maranatha! Damn criticism! Damn the critics! Damn everything!
It was a very remarkable piece of work when it was finished, more remarkable in some ways than anything he ever produced afterwards, and if he had taken it to Johnson in its original form, the pale young man’s future career might have been endangered by a fit of sudden and immoderate mirth. Fortunately, George already knew the adage — is it not Hood’s? — which says “it is the print that tells the tale.” He was well aware that writing ink is to printers’ ink as a pencil drawing to a painted canvas, and that what looks mild and almost gentle when it appears in an irregular handwriting upon a sheet of foolscap can seem startlingly forcible when impressed upon perfectly new and very expensive paper, in perfectly new and very expensive type. He read the article over.
“Perhaps it is a little strong,” he said to himself, with a grim smile, as he reviewed what he had written. “I feel a little like Wellington revisiting Waterloo!”
Indeed, from the
style of the discourse, one might have supposed that George had published a dozen volumes simultaneously, and that every critic in the civilised world had sprung up and rent him with one accord. “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” was but milk and water, with very little milk, compared with his onslaught. The dead lay in heaps, as it were, in the track of his destroying charge, and he had hanged, drawn and quartered himself several times for his own satisfaction, gibbeting the quarters on every page. In his fury and unquenchable thirst for vengeance, he had quoted whole passages from notices he had written, only to tear them to pieces and make bonfires of their remains.
“I think I had better wait a day or two,” he remarked, as he folded up the manuscript and put it into a drawer of his table.
It is characteristic of the profession and its necessities, that, after having crushed and dismembered all critics, past, present and to come, in the most complete and satisfactory manner, George Wood laid his hand upon the new volumes which he had last brought home and proceeded during several days with the task of reviewing them. Moreover, he did the work much better than usual, taking an odd delight in affecting the attitude of a gentle taster, and in using the very language he most despised, just for the sake of persuading himself that he was right in despising it. The two editors who had given him work to do that week were surprised to find that he had returned with such success to his former style of writing. They were still further surprised when an article entitled “Cheap Criticism” appeared, about six weeks later, in a well known magazine, signed with his name in full. They did not like it all.
George had recast the paper more than once, and at last, when he had regretfully “rinsed all the starch out of it,” as he said to himself, he had taken it to Johnson.
“I did not know that any modern human being could use such violent language without swearing,” said the pale young man, catching a phrase here and there as he ran his eye over the manuscript.
“Do you call that violent?” asked George, delighted to find that he had left his work more forcible than he had supposed. “I wish you could have seen the first copy! This looked like prayer and meditation compared with it.”
“If you pray in that style,” remarked Johnson, “your prayers will be at least heard, if they are not answered. They will attract attention in some quarter, though perhaps not in the right one.”
George’s face fell.
“Do you think it is too red-hot?” he asked. “I have been spreading butter on the public nose so long,” he added, almost apologetically.
“Oleomargarine,” suggested Johnson. “It is rather warm. That phrase— ‘revelling in the contempt of appearing contemptible’ — I say, Wood, that is not English, you know, and it’s a scorcher, too.”
“Not English!” exclaimed George, whose blood was up at once. “Why not?”
“Because it is Volapück, or Malay — or something else, I don’t know what it is, though I admit its force.”
“I do not see how I can put it, then. It is just what we all feel.”
“Look here. You do not mean that your victim despises himself for appearing to be despicable, do you? He does, I dare say, but you wanted to hit him, not to show that he is still capable of human feeling. I think you meant to say that he rejoiced in his own indifference to contempt.”
“I believe I did,” said George, relinquishing the contest as soon as he saw he was wrong. “But ‘revel’ is not bad. Let that stand, at least.”
“You cannot revel in indifference, can you?” asked Johnson pitilessly.
“No. That is true. But it was English, all the same, though it did not mean what I intended.”
“I think not. You would not say an author appears green, would you? You would say he appears to be green. Then why say that a critic appears contemptible?”
“You are always right, Johnson,” George answered with a good-natured laugh. “I should have seen the mistake in the proof.”
“But that is the most expensive way of seeing mistakes. I will read this carefully, and I will send you word to-morrow what I think of it.”
“What makes you so quick at these things?” asked George, as he rose to go.
“Habit. I read manuscript novels for a publishing house here. I do it in the evening, when I can find time. Yes — it is hard work, but it is interesting. I am both prophet and historian. The book is the reality which I see alternately from the point of view of the future and the past.”
The result was that Johnson, who possessed much more real power than George had imagined, wrote a note, with which the manuscript was sent, and to George’s amazement the paper was at once accepted and put into type, and the proofs were sent to him. Moreover the number of the magazine in which his composition appeared was no sooner published than he received a cheque, of which the amount at once demonstrated the practical advantages of original writing as compared with those of second-rate criticism.
With regard to the attention attracted by his article, however, George was bitterly disappointed. He was on the alert for the daily papers in which an account of the contents of the periodicals is generally given, and he expected at least a paragraph from each.
In the first one he took up, after an elaborate notice of articles by known persons, he found the following line: —
“Mr. George Winton Wood airs his views upon criticism in the present number.”
That was all. There was not a remark, nor a hint at the contents of his paper, nothing to break the icy irony of the statement. He pondered long over the words, and then crammed the open sheet into the waste-paper basket. This was the first. There might be better in store for him. On the evening of the same day he found another.
“An unknown writer has an article upon criticism,” said the oracle, without further comment.
This was, if possible, worse. George felt inclined to write to the editor and request that his name might be mentioned. It was a peculiarly hard case, as he had reviewed books for this very paper during the last two years, and was well known in the office. The third remark was in one of those ghastly-spritely medleys written under the heading of “Chit-Chat.”
“By the way,” inquired the reviewer, “who is Mr. George Winton Wood? And why is he so angry with the critics? And does anybody mind? And who is he, any way?”
Half a dozen similar observations had the effect of cooling George’s hopes of fame very considerably. They probably did him good by eradicating a great deal of nonsense from his dreams. He had before imagined that in labouring at his book notices he had seen and known the dreariest apartment in the literary workhouse, forgetting that all he wrote appeared anonymously and that he himself was shielded behind the ægis of a prosperous newspaper’s name. He had not known that a beginner is generally received, to use a French simile, like a dog in a game of ninepins, with kicks and execrations, unless he is treated with the cold indifference which is harder to bear than any attack could be. And yet, cruel as the method seems, it is the best one in most cases, and saves the sufferer from far greater torments in the future. What would happen if every beginner in literature were received at the threshold with cakes and ale, and were welcomed by a chorus of approving and encouraging critics? The nine hundred out of every thousand who try the profession and fail, would fail almost as certainly a little later in their lives, and with infinitely greater damage to their sensibilities. Moreover the cakes and ale would have been unworthily wasted, and the chorus of critics would have been necessarily largely leavened with skilful liars, which, it is to be hoped and believed, is not the case in the present condition of criticism, in spite of George Wood and his opinions. Is it better that boys should be allowed to remain in school two or three years without being examined, and that the ignorant ones should then be put to shame before their comrades? Or is it better that the half-witted should be excluded from the first, and separately taught? The question answers itself. We who, rightly or wrongly, have fought our way into public notice, have all, at one time or another, been
made to run the gauntlet of abuse, or to swim the dead sea of indifference. The public knows little of our lives. It remembers the first book of which everybody talked and which, it foolishly supposed, represented our first experiment in print. It knows nothing of the many years of thankless labour in the columns of the daily press, it has never heard of our first paper in a magazine, nor of our pride at seeing our signature in a periodical of some repute, nor of the sovereign contempt with which the article and the name were received. The comfortable public has never dreamed of the wretched prices most of us received when we entered the ranks, and, to be honest, there is no reason why it should. It would be quite as sensible to found a society for the purpose of condoling with school-boys during their examinations, as to excite the public sympathy on behalf of what one may call undergraduate authors. The weeding at the beginning keeps the garden clean and gay — and amputations must be performed in good time, if the gangrene is to be arrested effectually.
George Wood, as has been said before, was not of the kind to be despondent, though he was easily roused to anger. The porcupine is an animal known to literature, as well as a beast of the field, and the quills of the literary porcupine can be very easily made to stand on end. George was one of the species and, on the whole, a very favourable specimen. Fortunately for those who had accorded so little appreciation to his early efforts, he was at that time imprisoned in the enclosure appropriated to unknown persons. He bristled unseen and wasted his wrath on the desert air. He had looked forward to the publication of his first article, as to an emancipation from slavery, whereas he soon discovered that he had only been advanced to a higher rank in servitude. That is what most men find out when they have looked forward to emancipation of any kind, and wake up to find that instead of being chained to one side of the wall, they are chained to the other.
George supposed that it would now be an easier matter to get some of his former work into print. He had four or five things in very tolerable shape, resting in a drawer where he had put them when last rejected. He got them out again, and again began to send them to periodicals, without consulting his friend Johnson. To his surprise, they were all returned without comment.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 499
