In sneering at me he sneers at the public, whose taste I have been fortunate enough to please, and whose opinion of what I have to sell has lifted me and those who are dear to me from poverty to comfort. I have worked enormously. I have put all I have got in me into my work, and I feel that work honestly done has been honestly rewarded. If I could write better than I do, I should be very happy. I know perfectly well how inadequate my work is, but I know what this “critic” of mine does not know, and has not inquired into, how much it costs me to do it and how deeply I believe in what I say.
And does not Mr. Roget also seek the suffrages of the public? In the same issue of The Thesaurus to which I have referred above, he uses the phrase “...us who are trying to make an income out of literature.”
Of course, he is trying to be “one of those authors,” etc. He admits it. He tells us he is trying to make an income out of the public. And yet, while he is doing this, he insults the public for preferring “those other authors”—or, at least, that’s how one can hardly help taking it!
Moreover he is a priest as well as a literary man. As a literary man, I attack one who has not yet shown himself to have the slightest right to sneer at people who write—whatever their literary faults may seem to him—always on the side of good, with a belief in the saving power of the Christian faith, and in the same hope as that in which he writes.
A million people read one of Miss Corelli’s books, and they pay her to do so.
Two hundred people listen to one of Mr. Roget’s sermons, and he is paid to preach them. But do authors go down into Worcestershire and sneer at the sermon of the priest because his own congregation love to hear him?
This is the first time in my life that I have ever answered any one who has written unkindly of me. And it will be the last. Literary criticism is a thing done by specialists, and with every right on their side. Literary criticism is in the main correct. When I publish a book, and a literary writer points out this or that fault, I am myself literary man enough to know that he has put his finger on the weak spot nine times out of ten. Then I try again. I have said this before.
But mere unqualified contempt on the part of one who has not been able to qualify himself to express any contempt of value for public judgment deserves remark.
And now it is necessary to say a word about this gentleman’s reprobation of the Bishop of London’s sermons about When it was Dark. It is not a nice thing to have to say, but this young clergyman is typical of a small tribe which make it necessary for me to say it.