“Have you given up writing?” she asked. “I don’t think you have published anything for a long time.”
“Everyone has given up writing,” Alistair returned with a bitterness that surprised himself. It had grown up in his mind unconsciously; his literary disappointments had become part of his general feud with the successful order of mankind.
The look on the face of the Princess made him hasten to explain himself.
“The English public will not tolerate literature; that is the simple truth. The publishers will not publish it, the booksellers will not sell it, the public will not read it, and the police have orders to suppress it. My old publisher told me plainly the other day that it was a waste of time to print anything but four-and-sixpenny novels. He said the booksellers have got used to making up their accounts in items of four-and-sixpence, and they consider it a nuisance to handle anything else. And even the novels are falling more and more into a stereotyped pattern; they must be exactly the same length—a hundred thousand words, I think he said—and be written well down to the level of the vulgar provincial mind.”
“Surely things are not quite so bad as that?”
“Very nearly. The worst of it is that the persecution of literature is purely for reasons of hypocrisy. The public likes what it calls immorality—will have it, in fact: no book that is really pure has much chance of success—but it insists on the writer pandering to the proprieties. Either he must slobber over his adulteress in the Nonconformist vein, or else he must tell the whole thing in an epigrammatic falsetto. It is a choice between ‘East Lynne’ and ‘The Innocence of Henrietta.’”
“But are there no writers before the public now whom you look upon as on a higher level?” And the Princess suggested one or two names.
Stuart shook his head.
“What is their position?” he said. “Granted that they have genius, the conditions of the age give them no chance. Unless they go on producing, and keeping themselves constantly before the public, they are cast on one side. The greatest genius, as a rule, can only give the world one or two masterpieces. Coleridge wrote three short poems, Poe a dozen short stories. Dante and Cervantes each wrote one book—their other work is of no account. Everyone of them would have starved to-day, just as they starved in their own day, while the vulgar novelists made fortunes round them. Writers such as you speak of have to go on writing worse and worse, conscious of their own degradation, and freely reminded of it by the press, and by their publishers’ accounts. It is the torture of the damned.”
“It seems to me there ought to be some remedy,” the Princess said thoughtfully. “I know so many rich men who seem to me only anxious to find some way of doing good with their money.”