Questions at Issue

by Edmund Gosse

Making a Name in Literature

An American editor has asked me to say how a literary reputation is formed. It is like asking one how wood is turned into gold, or how real diamonds can be manufactured. If I knew the answer, it is not in the pages of a review that I should print it. I should bury myself in a cottage in the woods, exercise my secret arts, and wait for Fame to turn her trumpet into a hunting-horn, and wake the forest-echoes with my praises. In one of Mr. Stockton's stories a princess sets all the wise men of her dominions searching for the lost secret of what root-beer should be made of. The philosophers fail to discover it, and the magicians exhaust their arts in vain. Not the slightest light is thrown on the abstruse problem, until at last an old woman is persuaded to reveal that it ought to be made of roots. In the same way, the only quite obvious answer to the query, How should a literary reputation be formed? is to reply, By thinking nothing at all about reputation, but by writing earnestly and carefully on the subjects and in the style most congenial to your habits of mind. But this is too obvious, and leads to no further result. Besides, I see that the question is not, how should be, but how is, a literary reputation formed. I will endeavour, then, to give expression to such observations as I may have formed on this latter subject.

A literary reputation, as here intended, is obviously not the eternal fame of a Shakespeare, which appears likely to last for ever, nor even that of a Dickens, which must endure till there comes a complete revolution of taste, but the inferior form of repute which is enjoyed by some dozens of literary people in each generation, and makes a centre for the admiration or envy of the more enthusiastic or idler portion of their contemporaries. There is as much cant in denying the attractiveness of such temporary glory as there is in exaggerating its weight and importance. To stimulate the minds of those who surround him, to captivate their attention and excite their curiosity, is pleasing to the natural man. We look with suspicion on the author who protests too loudly that he does not care whether he is admired or not. We shrewdly surmise that inwardly he cares very much indeed. This instinctive wish for reputation is one of the great incentives to literary exertion.

Fame and money—these are the two chief spurs which drive the author on. The statement may sound ignoble, and the writers of every generation persist in avowing that they write only to amuse themselves and to do good in their generation. The noble lady in Lothair wished that she might never eat, or if at all, only a little fruit by moonlight on a bank. She, nevertheless, was always punctual at her dinner; and the author who protests his utter indifference to money and reputation is commonly excessively sensitive when an attack is made on his claims in either direction. Literary reputation is relative, of course. There may be a village fame which does not burn very brightly in the country town, and provincial stars that look very pale in a great city. The circumstances, however, under which all the various degrees of fame are reached, are, I think, closely analogous, and what is true of the local celebrity is true, relatively, of a Victor Hugo or of a Tennyson. The importance of the reputation is shown by the expanse of the area it covers, not by the curve of its advance. The circle of a great man's fame is extremely wide, but it only repeats on a vast scale the phenomena attending on the fame of a small man.

The three principal ways in which a literary reputation is formed appear to be these: reviews, private conversation among the leaders of opinion, and the instinctive attraction which leads the general public to discover for itself what is calculated to give it pleasure. I will briefly indicate the manner in which these three seem to act at the present moment on the formation of notoriety and its attendant success, in the case of English authors. First of all, it is not unworthy of note that reputation, or fame, and monetary success, are not identical, although the latter is frequently the satellite of the former. One extraordinary example of their occasional remoteness, which may be mentioned without impertinence on the authority of the author himself, is the position of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In any list of living Englishmen eminently distinguished for the originality and importance of their books, Mr. Spencer cannot fail to be ranked high. Yet, as every student of his later work knows, he stated in the preface of one of those bald and inexpensive volumes in which he enshrines his thought, that up to a comparatively recent date the sale of his books did not cover the cost of their publication. This was the case of a man famous, it is not too much to say, in every civilised country in the globe.

In pure literature there is probably no second existing instance so flagrant as this. But, to take only a few of the most illustrious Englishmen of letters, it is matter of common notoriety that the sale of the books of, say, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Leslie Stephen, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Stubbs) and Mr. Lecky, considerable as it may now have become, for a long time by no means responded to the lofty rank which each of these authors has taken in the esteem of educated people throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. The reverse is still more curious and unaccountable. Why is it that there are writers of no merit at all, who sell their books in thousands where people of genius sell theirs in scores, yet without ever making a reputation? At the time when Tupper was far more popular than Tennyson, and Eliza Cook enjoyed ten times the commercial success of Browning, even the votaries of these poetasters did not claim a higher place for them, or even a high place at all. They bought their books because they liked them, but the buyers evidently did not imagine that purchase gave their temporary favourites any rank in the hierarchy of fame. These things are a mystery, but the distinction between commercial success and fame is one which must be drawn. We are speaking here of reputation, whether attended by vast sales or only by barren honour.

Reviews have no longer the power which they enjoyed seventy years ago, of making or even of marring the fortunes of a book. When there existed hundreds of private book clubs throughout the country, each one of which proceeded to buy a copy of whatever the Edinburgh recommended, then the reviewer was a great personage in the land. We may see in Lockhart's Life of Scott that Sir Walter, even at the height of his success, and when, as Ellis said, he was "the greatest elephant in the world" except himself, was seriously agitated by Jeffrey's cold review of Marmion, not through irritable peevishness, which was wholly foreign to Scott's magnanimous nature, but because a slighting review was enough to cripple a book, and a slashing review to destroy it. There is nothing of this kind now. No newspaper exists in Great Britain which is able to sell an edition of a book by praising it. I doubt if any review, under the most favourable circumstances and coming from the most influential quarter, causes two hundred copies of a book to be bought. A signed article by Mr. Gladstone is, of course, an exception; yet some have doubted of late whether a book may not be found so inept and so heavy as not to stir even at the summons of that voice.

The reviews in the professional literary papers are still understood to be useful in the case of unknown writers. A young author without a friend, if he has merit, and above all if he has striking originality, is almost sure to attract the notice of some beneficent reviewer, and be praised in the columns of one or other of the leading weeklies. These are the circumstances under which the native kindliness of the irritable race is displayed most freely. The envy which sees merit in a new man and determines to crush it with silence or malignant attack, is inhuman, and practically, I fancy, scarcely exists. The entirely unheard-of writer wounds no susceptibilities, awakens no suspicions, and even excites a pleasurable warmth of patronage. It is a little later on, when the new man is quite new no longer, but is becoming a formidable rival, that evil passions are aroused, or sometimes seem to have been aroused, in pure literary bosoms. The most sincere reviews are often those which treat the works of unknown writers, and this is perhaps the reason why the shrewd public still permits itself to be moved by these when they are strongly favourable. At any rate, every new-comer must be introduced to our crowded public to be observed at all, and to new-comers the review is still the indispensable master of the ceremonies.

But the power of reviews to create this form of literary reputation has of late been greatly circumscribed. The public grows less and less the dupe of an anonymous judgment, expressed in the columns of one of the too-numerous organs of public opinion. A more naïve generation than ours was overawed by the nameless authority which moved behind a review. Ours, on the contrary, is apt to go too far, and pay no notice, because it does not know the name of a writer. The author who writhed under the humiliation of attack in a famous paper, little suspected that his critic was one Snooks, an inglorious creature whose acquaintance with the matter under discussion was mainly taken from the book he was reviewing. But, on the other hand, there is that story of the writer of some compendium of Greek history severely handled anonymously by the Athenæum, whose scorn of the nameless critic gave way to horror and shame when he discovered him to have been no other than Mr. Grote. On the whole, when we consider the careful, learned, and judicial reviews which are still to be found, like grains of salt, in the vast body of insipid criticism in the newspapers, it may be held that the public pays less attention to the reviews than it should. The fact seems to remain that, except in the case of entirely unknown writers, periodical criticism possesses an ever-dwindling power of recommendation.