“By the way,” inquired the reviewer, “who is Mr. George Winton Wood? And why is he so angry with the critics? And does anybody mind? And who is he, any way?”
Half a dozen similar observations had the effect of cooling George’s hopes of fame very considerably. They probably did him good by eradicating a great deal of nonsense from his dreams. He had before imagined that in labouring at his book notices he had seen and known the dreariest apartment in the literary workhouse, forgetting that all he wrote appeared anonymously and that he himself was shielded behind the ægis of a prosperous newspaper’s name. He had not known that a beginner is generally received, to use a French simile, like a dog in a game of ninepins, with kicks and execrations, unless he is treated with the cold indifference which is harder to bear than any attack could be. And yet, cruel as the method seems, it is the best one in most cases, and saves the sufferer from far greater torments in the future. What would happen if every beginner in literature were received at the threshold with cakes and ale, and were welcomed by a chorus of approving and encouraging critics? The nine hundred out of every thousand who try the profession and fail, would fail almost as certainly a little later in their lives, and with infinitely greater damage to their sensibilities. Moreover the cakes and ale would have been unworthily wasted, and the chorus of critics would have been necessarily largely leavened with skilful liars, which, it is to be hoped and believed, is not the case in the present condition of criticism, in spite of George Wood and his opinions. Is it better that boys should be allowed to remain in school two or three years without being examined, and that the ignorant ones should then be put to shame before their comrades? Or is it better that the half-witted should be excluded from the first, and separately taught? The question answers itself. We who, rightly or wrongly, have fought our way into public notice, have all, at one time or another, been made to run the gauntlet of abuse, or to swim the dead sea of indifference. The public knows little of our lives. It remembers the first book of which everybody talked and which, it foolishly supposed, represented our first experiment in print. It knows nothing of the many years of thankless labour in the columns of the daily press, it has never heard of our first paper in a magazine, nor of our pride at seeing our signature in a periodical of some repute, nor of the sovereign contempt with which the article and the name were received. The comfortable public has never dreamed of the wretched prices most of us received when we entered the ranks, and, to be honest, there is no reason why it should. It would be quite as sensible to found a society for the purpose of condoling with school-boys during their examinations, as to excite the public sympathy on behalf of what one may call undergraduate authors. The weeding at the beginning keeps the garden clean and gay—and amputations must be performed in good time, if the gangrene is to be arrested effectually.
George Wood, as has been said before, was not of the kind to be despondent, though he was easily roused to anger. The porcupine is an animal known to literature, as well as a beast of the field, and the quills of the literary porcupine can be very easily made to stand on end. George was one of the species and, on the whole, a very favourable specimen. Fortunately for those who had accorded so little appreciation to his early efforts, he was at that time imprisoned in the enclosure appropriated to unknown persons. He bristled unseen and wasted his wrath on the desert air. He had looked forward to the publication of his first article, as to an emancipation from slavery, whereas he soon discovered that he had only been advanced to a higher rank in servitude. That is what most men find out when they have looked forward to emancipation of any kind, and wake up to find that instead of being chained to one side of the wall, they are chained to the other.
George supposed that it would now be an easier matter to get some of his former work into print. He had four or five things in very tolerable shape, resting in a drawer where he had put them when last rejected. He got them out again, and again began to send them to periodicals, without consulting his friend Johnson. To his surprise, they were all returned without comment.
“Go and ask for a job,” said Johnson, the omniscient, when he heard of the failure. “Suggestion on the part of the editor is the better part of valour in the writer.”
“What do you mean?” asked George. He had supposed that there was nothing he did not know in this connection.
“They won’t take articles on general subjects without a deal of interest and urging,” answered the other. “Get introduced to them in person. I will do it with most of them. Then go to them and say, ‘I am a very remarkable young man, though you do not seem to know it. I will write anything about anything in the earth or under the earth. Sanskrit, botany and the differential calculus are my especially strong points, but the North Pole has great attractions for me, I am strong in theology and political economy, and, if anything, I would rather spend a year in writing up the Fiji Islands than not. If you have nothing in this line, there is music and high art, in which I am sound, I have a taste for architecture and I understand practical lobster-fishing. Have you anything for me to do?’ That is the way to talk to these men,” Johnson added with a smile. “Try it.”
George laughed.
“But that is not literature,” he objected.
“Not literature? Everything that can be written about is literature, just as everything that can be eaten is man—in another form. You can learn as much English in writing up lobster-fishing, as in trying to compose a five-act tragedy, and you will be paid for it into the bargain. Besides, if you are ever going to write anything worth reading, you must see more and think less. Don’t read books for a while; read things and people. Thinking too much, without seeing, is like eating too much—it makes your writing bilious.”