R. A.—Certainly not. I did not expect my book to be popular, but hoped that it might have a steady and perhaps increasing sale and eventually become famous. You sometimes publish new editions of the great works in our language—“the English classics.” Do you lose money by them?
C. P.—Not usually. They have had the advantage of generations of advertising by scholars and by critics whose words had weight in their time and have in ours. If your excellent book finds a publisher pretty soon and is kept going until the year 2100, we shall be glad to put it on our list. You see it is very simple: you have only to conform to the conditions of success.
R. A.—I see. But are these the only conditions? Some great work succeeds in its author’s time—that of Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, and so forth, in England; and in America that of—m, er, huh.
C. P.—Is it surely great work? The ink is hardly dry. The literary fashions determining its form and substance are still with us. Posterity will have to pass judgment upon it, which posterity will indubitably do without reference to our view of the matter. Then, if you and I happen to be in communication with this vale of tears we shall know if these noted authors were mining the great mother-lode of human interest, or, occasionally touching some of its dips, spurs and angles, taking out barren rock. It looks to us like a rich enough ore, but it is a long journey to where there is an assaying-plant capable of dealing with that particular product. When it is “heard from” we shall not be here. Those who mined it are gone already.
R. A.—Then there can be no valuable contemporary criticism?
C. P.—None that any one can know to be valuable.
R. A.—And no man can live long enough to know if he is a good writer?
C. P.—The trade of writing has that disadvantage.
R. A.—We are getting a long way from business. Am I to understand that you reject my book because, as you say, “it is exquisitely touching and beautiful”?
C. P.—You outline the painful situation with accuracy.