“But, man,” said he—“I have been trying all my life, and with every advantage, to create a work of art such as this; and here are you, a mere stripling—damn it, scarcely out of knickerbockers—though, on my soul, you are nearly as old as your trousers—here are you, a mere stripling, famous!” He came to him, gripped him affectionately by the shoulder. “Of all men that I know, I would rather this thing had come to you than to any.” He turned and got to striding up and down the room again. “Famous!—at least you will be as soon as you give out your own name.”
Gomme’s face had flushed a little with the praise:
“But,” said he, “when I write my tragedy——”
Baddlesmere turned on him sharply:
“Tragedy be hanged!” said he. “My dear Gomme, you’ve got to recognise that the world never takes its humorists seriously. It’s always looking for the joke in their tragedies.... Which reminds me, Gomme, I’m afraid to-morrow must see us out of this.”
Gomme’s face lost its mask:
“But, sir!” he faltered—fidgeting nervously with the papers by his hand—“what are you going to do? and Noll?—and Mrs. Baddlesmere—when the blinds are pulled down?”
Baddlesmere strode over to the window, and, gazing down into the dusk of the chilly street below, made no answer. He stood so for a long while, and wondered.
He wondered if he had given the public vital things!
His mind ran rapidly over the failure of his scheme—a scheme that, as he now saw, had been inherent with failure at its very inception. He saw now, as he stood there ruined by it, that it was folly to expect a public to buy literature built up on the mere brilliant literary exercises in technical skill of a smart group of young fellows who had really had no claim upon the consideration of the world, nothing to say, no gift but a capacity to use the machinery of letters prettily; who had had positively nothing to offer to the world but old idioms freshly arrayed in pretty clothes—make-believe kings at a calico-ball. These had been but smart mediocrities—not an ounce of wisdom amongst them all. It came to him now with grim irony, as he stood there in confession to the clear-eyed judge of Self, that for all their cackle of literary style and their contempt for everyone else, these men had uttered no single thought worth preserving—that they had left their youth behind and were growing bald a-top, and full-blown and ordinary—except——