Suck was my dream—a dream that I never realized, but which I believe to be capable of realization. It is decades since even a second-class imaginative genius devoted itself entirely to the cult of the literary frisson. Sue excited a nation by admirable sensationalism. The feat might be accomplished again, and in this era so prolific in Napoleons of the press, it seems strange that no Napoleon has been able to organize the sensational serial on a Napoleonic scale.
I did not realize my dream, but I was inspired by it. Once more I received from the gods a plot scintillating with possibilities. It was less fine than the previous one; it was of the earth earthly; but it began with a scene quite unique in the annals of syndicates, and by this time I knew a little better how to keep the fire burning. I lavished wit and style on the thing, and there is no material splendour of modern life that I left out. I plunged into it with all my energy and enthusiasm, and wrote the fifteen instalments in fifteen days; I tried to feel as much like Dumas père as I could. But when I had done I felt, physically, rather more like the fragile Shelley or some wan curate than Dumas. I was a wreck.
The syndicate were willing to buy this serial, but they offered me no increase of rates. I declined to accept the old terms, and then the syndicate invited me to lunch. I made one of the greatest financial mistakes of my life on that accurst day, and my only excuse is that I was unaccustomed to being invited out to lunch by syndicates. I ought to have known, with all my boasted knowledge of the world of business, that syndicates do not invite almost unknown authors to lunch without excellent reason. I had refused the syndicate's offer, and the syndicate asked me to name a price for the entire rights of my tale. I named a price; it was a good price for me, then; but the words were scarcely out of my mouth before I saw that I had blundered. Too late! My terms were quietly accepted. Let me cast no slightest aspersion upon the methods of the syndicate: the bargain was completed before lunch had commenced.
The syndicate disposed of the whole first serial rights of my tale to a well-known London weekly. The proprietors of the paper engaged a first-class artist to illustrate it, they issued a special circular about it, they advertised it every week on 800 railway stations. The editor of the paper wrote me an extremely appreciative letter as to the effect of the serial from his point of view. The syndicate informed a friend of mine that it was the best serial they had ever had. After running in London it overran the provincial press like a locust-swarm. It was, in a word, a boom. It came out in volume form, and immediately went into a second edition; it still sells. It was the first of my books that "The Times" ever condescended to review; the "Spectator" took it seriously in a column and a quarter; and my friends took it seriously. I even received cables from foreign lands with offers to buy translation rights. I became known as the author of that serial. And all this, save for an insignificant trifle, to the profit of an exceedingly astute syndicate!
Subsequently I wrote other serials, but never again with the same verve. I found an outlet for my energies more amusing and more remunerative than the concoction of serials; and I am a serialist no longer.
[XIII]
While yet an assistant-editor, I became a dramatic critic through the unwillingness of my chief to attend a theatrical matinée performance given, by some forlorn little society, now defunct, for the rejuvenation of the English drama. My notice of the performance amused him, and soon afterwards he suggested that I should do our dramatic column in his stead. Behold me a "first-nighter"! When, with my best possible air of nonchalance and custom, I sauntered into my stall on a Lyceum first night, I glanced at the first rows of the pit with cold and aloof disdain. "Don't you wish you were me?" I thought behind that supercilious mask. "You have stood for hours imprisoned between parallel iron railings. Many times I have stood with you. But never again, miserable pittites!" Nevertheless I was by no means comfortable in my stall. Around me were dozens of famous or notorious faces, the leading representatives of all that is glittering and factitious in the city of wealth, pleasure, and smartness. And everybody seemed to know everybody else. I alone seemed to be left out in the cold. My exasperated self-conscious fancy perceived in every haughty stare the enquiry: "Who is this whipper-snapper in the dress-suit that obviously cost four guineas in Cheapside?" I knew not a soul in that brilliant resort. During the intervals I went into the foyer and listened to the phrases which the critics tossed to each other over their liqueur-glasses. Never was such a genial confusion of "Old Chap," "Old Man," "Old Boy," "Dear Old Pal"! "Are they all blood-brothers?" I asked myself. The banality, the perfect lack of any sort of aesthetic culture, which characterized their remarks on the piece, astounded me. I said arrogantly: "If I don't know more about the art of the theatre than the whole crowd of you put together, I will go out and hang myself." Yet I was unspeakably proud to be among them. In a corner I caught sight of a renowned novelist whose work I respected. None noticed him, and he looked rather sorry for himself. "You and I . . .!" I thought. I had not attended many first nights before I discovered that the handful of theatrical critics whose articles it is possible to read without fatigue, made a point of never leaving their stalls. They were nobody's old chap, and nobody's old pal. I copied their behaviour.
First on my own paper, and subsequently on two others, I practised dramatic criticism for five or six years. Although I threw it up in the end mainly from sheer lassitude, I enjoyed the work. It means late nights, and late nights are perdition; but there is a meretricious glamour about it that attracts the foolish moth in me, and this I am bound to admit. My trifling influence over the public was decidedly on the side of the angels. I gradually found that I possessed a coherent theory of the drama, definite critical standards, and all the rest of the apparatus; in short, that I had something to say. And my verdicts had a satisfactory habit of coinciding with those of the two foremost theatrical critics in London—perhaps in Europe (I need not name them). It is a somewhat strange fact that I made scarcely any friends in the theatre. After all those years of assiduous first-nighting, I was almost as solitary in the auditorium on the evening when I bade a blase adieu to the critical bench as when I originally entered it. I fancied I had wasted my time and impaired my constitution in emulating the achievements of Théophile Gautier, Hazlitt, Francisque Sarcey and M. Jules Lemaître, to say nothing of Dutton Cook and Mr. Clement Scott. My health may have suffered; but, as it happened, I had not quite wasted my time.
"Why don't you write a play yourself?"
This blunt question was put to me by a friend, an amateur actor, whom I had asked to get up some little piece or other for an entertainment in the Theatre Royal back-drawing-room of my house.