"Am I? Well, compare the present day with long ago—with Grub Street—with what Macaulay calls the darkest period of English letters. Read Johnson's early life—Savage—all the historical instances. Look at the sums those beggars got! Twenty-five pounds benefit from a play that ran fourteen nights: fifty pounds for an ode to Royalty once a year: ten pounds for translating a volume of Portuguese travels. Why, to many a man whose name is a household word to-day these things read like a fairy tale. They used to call on publishers with 'projects' and have luncheon served them while he read 'em over."
"What about the novel?" says Waldron, with a half-look at Mackworth.
"In its death throes. Fifty years hence the English novel—considered as literature, mind you—will be as dead as the epic poem. I stick to what I've said. When a thing ceases to pay its way, it's a sign the stage of national development that called for it is over."
"What's going to take its place?"
"Look around you. Something's begun to take its place already: articles, books—by people who've done things, not dreamed them—written in the English any one can write who tries. 'Three months' lion slaughter in Central Africa'; 'One degree nearer that pole'; 'How I made my millions.' Especially the last. People never weary of that. They don't see that the game must be up, or the secrets wouldn't be being given away."
"Come!"—noticing a silence of dissent round the table. "Take a concrete instance. Mackworth, there's only one opinion about 'When the Sky Fell.'"
"You're very good."
"Simple justice, my boy. Now, take us behind the scenes a little. How long did it take you to write it?"
"Nine or ten months."
"Say nine. Working hard?"