I finished the chapter that night, hurriedly, perfunctorily, and only because I had sworn to finish it. Then, in obedience to an instinct which all Grub Street has felt, I picked out the correct “Yellow Book” from a shelf and read my beautiful story again. That enheartened me a little, restored my faith in the existence of art, and suggested the comfortable belief that things were not perhaps as bad as they seemed.
“Well, how’s the novel getting on?” my friend the wall-paper enthusiast inquired jovially at supper.
“Oh, fine!” I said. “It’s going to be immense”
Why one should utter these frightful and senseless lies, I cannot guess. I might just as well have spoken the precise truth to him, for his was a soul designed by Providence for the encouragement of others. Still, having made that remark, I added in my private ear that either the novel must be immense or I must perish in the attempt to make it so.
In six months I had written only about thirty thousand words, and I felt the sort of elation that probably succeeds six months on a tread-mill. But one evening, in the midst of a chapter, a sudden and mysterious satisfaction began to warm my inmost being. I knew that that chapter was good and going to be good. I experienced happiness in the very act of work. Emotion and technique were reconciled. It was as if I had surprisingly come upon the chart with the blood-red cross showing where the Spanish treasure was buried. I dropped my pen, and went out for a walk, and decided to give the book an entirely fresh start. I carefully read through all that I had written. It was bad, but viewed in the mass it produced on me a sort of culminating effect which I had not anticipated. Conceive the poor Usual at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and the region of the Sublime at the top: it seemed to me that I had dragged the haggard thing half-way up, and that it lay there, inert but safe, awaiting my second effort. The next night I braced myself to this second effort, and I thought that I succeeded.
“We’re doing the trick, Charlie,” Edmund Kean whispered into the ear of his son during a poignant scene of “Brutus." And in the very crisis of my emotional chapters, while my hero was rushing fatally to the nether greyness of the suburbs and all the world was at its most sinister and most melancholy, I said to myself with glee: “We’re doing the trick.” My moods have always been a series of violent contrasts, and I was now just as uplifted as I had before been depressed. There were interludes of doubt and difficulty, but on the whole I was charmed with my novel. It would be a despicable affectation to disguise the fact that I deemed it a truly distinguished piece of literature, idiosyncratic, finely imaginative, and of rhythmic contour. As I approached the end, my self-esteem developed in a crescendo. I finished the tale, having sentenced my hero to a marriage infallibly disastrous, at three o’clock one morning. I had laboured for twelve hours without intermission. It was great, this spell; it was histrionic. It was Dumas over again, and the roaring French 'forties.
Nevertheless, to myself I did not yet dare to call myself an artist. I lacked the courage to believe that I had the sacred fire, the inborn and not-to-be-acquired vision. It seemed impossible that this should be so. I have ridiculed the whole artist tribe, and, in the pursuit of my vocation, I shall doubtless ridicule them again; but never seriously. Nothing is more deeply rooted in me than my reverence for the artistic faculty. And whenever I say, “The man’s an artist,” I say it with an instinctive solemnity that so far as I am concerned ends all discussion. Dared I utter this great saying to my shaving-mirror? No, I repeat that I dared not. More than a year elapsed before the little incident described at the commencement of these memoirs provided me with the audacity to inform the author of In the Shadow that he too belonged to the weird tribe of Benjamin.
When my novel had been typewritten and I read it in cold blood, I was absolutely unable to decide whether it was very good, good, medium, bad, or very bad. I could not criticize it. All I knew was that certain sentences, in the vein of the ecriture artiste, persisted beautifully in my mind, like fine lines from a favourite poet. I loosed the brave poor thing into the world over a postoffice counter. “What chance has it, in the fray?” I exclaimed. My novel had become nothing but a parcel. Thus it went in search of its fate.
I have described the composition of my first book in detail as realistic as I can make it, partly because a few years ago the leading novelists of the day seemed to enter into a conspiracy to sentimentalize the first-book episode in their brilliant careers.
VIII
“Will you step this way?” said the publisher’s manager, and after coasting by many shelves loaded with scores of copies of the same book laid flat in piles —to an author the most depressing sight in the world—I was ushered into the sanctum, the star-chamber, the den, the web of the spider.
I beheld the publisher, whose name is a household word wherever the English language is written for posterity. Even at that time his imprint flamed on the title-pages of one or two works of a deathless nature. My manuscript lay on an occasional table by his side, and I had the curious illusion that he was posing for his photograph with my manuscript. As I glanced at it I could not help thinking that its presence there bordered on the miraculous. I had parted with it at a post-office. It had been stamped, sorted, chucked into a van, whirled through the perilous traffic of London’s centre, chucked out of a van, sorted again, and delivered with many other similar parcels at the publisher’s. The publisher had said: “Send this to So-and-so to read.” Then more perils by road and rail, more risks of extinction and disorientation. Then So-and-so, probably a curt man, with a palate cloyed by the sickliness of many manuscripts, and a short way with new authors, had read it or pretended to read it. Then finally the third ordeal of locomotion. And there it was, I saw it once more, safe!
We discussed the weather and new reputations. I was nervous, and I think the publisher was nervous, too. At length, in a manner mysterious and inexplicable, the talk shifted to my manuscript. The publisher permitted himself a few compliments of the guarded sort.
“But there’s no money in it, you know,” he said.
“I suppose not,” I assented. (“You are an ass for assenting to that,” I said to myself.)
“I invariably lose money over new authors,” he remarked, as if I was to blame.
“You didn’t lose much over Mrs.——,” I replied, naming one of his notorious successes.
“Oh, well!” he said, “of course——. But I didn’t make so much as you think, perhaps. Publishing is a very funny business.” And then he added: “Do you think your novel will succeed like Mrs.——’s?”
I said that I hoped it would.
“I’ll be perfectly frank with you,” the publisher exclaimed, smiling beneficently. “My reader likes your book. I’ll tell you what he says.” He took a sheet of paper that lay on the top of the manuscript and read.
I was enchanted, spellbound. The nameless literary adviser used phrases of which the following are specimens (I am recording with exactitude): “Written with great knowledge and a good deal of insight.” “Character delineated by a succession of rare and subtle touches.” “Living, convincing.” “Vigour and accuracy.” “The style is good.”
I had no idea that publishers’ readers were capable of such laudation.
The publisher read on: “I do not think it likely to be a striking success!”
“Oh!” I