The Melancholy Author himself looks hardly more than seventy-five.
“‘Written out, written out’—England said so of Dickens and Tennyson; America said so of Bret Harte; both have for five years been saying so of Kipling. The great writer is likely, by the way, to share that view himself, as Thackeray, reading over some of his early work, exclaimed: ‘What a giant I was in those days!’
“Another lion in the path of genius is its own success—the low kind of success that is called popularity, for which some sons of the gods, with their bellies sticking to their backs, really do strive. Let one of them achieve a result of this kind and he will find it all the harder to achieve another. Read Stockton’s story of ‘My Wife’s Deceased Sister.’ The narrator tells how, having published a popular tale with that title, he was ever thereafter what is called in the slang to which your detestable profession is addicted, ‘a dead one.’ Editors would take nothing that he offered, but always begged for something like ‘My Wife’s Deceased Sister.’ Sir, I know how it feels to go up against that invincible competitor, oneself. After publication of my famous story, ‘The Maiden Pirate,’ my greater (and even longer) work, ‘A Treatise on the Chaldean Dative Case,’ was rejected by twenty editors! Let the man of genius beware of popularity; one slip of that kind and a brilliant future is behind him. But it does not greatly matter, for even without incurring the mischance of a ‘hit,’ the great writer is, as I said, foredoomed to the charge of degeneracy.”
The Timorous Reporter humbly murmured the names of Hall Caine, Henry James, the late F. Marion Crawford, Mrs. Mary Wilkins Freeman, Miss Mary Murfree, Miss Mary Edward Bok, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Sylvester Vierick, and the venerable Hildegarde Hawthorne—then edged himself softly toward an open door. With unforeseen resourcefulness, the sad-eyed deprecator of dissent seized a convenient missile, but it happened to be a decanter of Medford rum, and the situation was saved. With fortified solemnity the father of the maiden pirate again took up his parable:
“Certain literary domains are posted with warnings to the trespasser, and against men of genius the inhibition is fiercely enforced. Irruptions of mediocrity entail no penalty because unobserved by the constabulary. The supposed proprietors of these guarded estates are long dead, leaving no heirs; the ‘notices’ are put up without authority, for the land is really a common. One of these closed areas is that of Jonathan Swift, who dispossessed some of the successors of Lucian. Whom Lucian dispossessed we do not know, all evidences of an earlier occupancy than his having been effaced by the burning of the great library at Alexandria. All, doubtless, incurred ‘the penalty of the law,’ each in his turn, from the dunces of his day. The ‘penalty’ is execration as an imitator. Long before Swift, and probably long before Lucian, an accepted method of satire was comparison of actual with imaginary civilizations, through tales of fictitious travelers in unreal regions. But since Swift, woe to the writer having the hardihood to adopt the method, however candidly avowed, and however different the manner! It is as if guardians of Homer’s fame had chased Dante and Camoëns out of the field of the epic, and had put up the bars against Milton. Nay, it is as if an engineer platting a survey were accused of imitating Euclid. True, Virgil, who did imitate Homer most shamelessly, escapes censure. I fancy the Proponents-Militant of Originality have not heard of him.
“In our own day Bret Harte wrote charming sketches of life and character in Californian mining camps. Many others had done so before him, but for many years after his first work in that field none could enter it without incurring austere denunciation as imitator and plagiarist; and even to-day one having the experience to observe or the genius to imagine the life of a Californian mining camp, or any interesting feature of it, delivers his tidings, like the heralds of old, at his peril.
“Another of these posted preserves is that of satire in iambic pentameter verse. This mode of expression is supposed to belong by right divine to Alexander Pope, who made the most constant and cleverest use of it. With its concomitants of epigram and antithesis, it was old before Pope was young. He was himself a ‘trespasser’; he was roundly reviled for imitating Dryden. The form was used by other Queen Anne’s men, acceptably by Johnson and by many a later; but of this the patrolmen and gatekeepers of the Pope reservation in our day have not been apprised by ‘report divine’—the only way that they can be made to know anything, for read, the devil a bit do they. In the literary landscape they see only the highest peaks of the Delectable Mountains. They know only the large, familiar figures, and these only by their most characteristic work. To their indurated understandings each individual of this bright band stands for a particular field of composition. His title to exclusive possession is res adjudicata. If anybody set foot across the sacred boundary—little fellows excepted—he will find himself the fundamental element in a cone of pummeling custodians. Young man, in your report of this interview you will be good enough to quote me as deprecating that situation.”
The interviewer pledged his life, his sacred fortune and his honor to the performance of that duty, and the great man resumed:
“Of all these inhibiting censores literarum, the most austere and implacable are those guarding the sovereignty of Poe. They have made his area of activity a veritable mare clausum—as if he were
the first that ever burst