Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

Lady Firmanence pursed her lips and regarded her nephew with a fixed stare which lasted until the smile died out of his face.

‘Or there might be a crocodile, or an alligator, at hand, which he could saddle and bridle, and convert into a park hack,’ she said. ‘There are indeed many things which might happen; what I’m chiefly concerned about is, what would happen if Lucian’s little boat did upset? I confess that I should know Lucian Damerel much more thoroughly, and have a more accurate conception of him, if I knew exactly what he would say and do when the upsetting happened. There is no moment in life, Saxonstowe, wherein a man’s real self, real character, real quality, is so severely tested and laid bare as that unexpected one in which Fortune seizes him by the scruff of his neck and bundles him into the horsepond of adversity—it’s what he says and does when he comes up spluttering that stamps him as a man or a mouse.’

Saxonstowe felt tolerably certain of what any man would say under the circumstances alluded to by Lady Firmanence, but as she seemed highly delighted with her similes and her epigrams, he said nothing of his convictions, and soon afterwards took his departure.

CHAPTER XX

On a certain Monday morning in the following November, Lucian’s great epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. Lucian found a pile of the London morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through them systematically. When he had made an end of them he looked across the table at Haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer way.

‘I say, Haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are—well, they’re not very flattering. There are six mighty voices of the press here,—Times, Telegraph, Post, News, Chronicle, and Standard—and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in their pronunciations. The epic poem seems to be at something of a discount.’

The reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein—taking them as a whole they were cold. There was a ring of disappointment in them. One reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of Mr. Damerel’s previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. Another openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had previously had from the same pen. Mr. Damerel’s history, said a third, was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much of the Norman Conquest from his poem as from the pages of Freeman, but the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting in his latest. Each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental sorrow for the Mr. Damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an undercurrent of regret that Lucian had chosen to explore another path than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. The consensus of opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers lying on Lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that Mr. Damerel’s new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his previous volumes. And to show his exact meaning and make out a good case for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting those of Lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which they would have wished Mr. Damerel to supply for ever.

Lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. It was disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what the critics believed him capable of doing. He was amused at the disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred Lucian the earlier to Lucian the later—and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great effort somewhat looked askance at.

‘I’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘I ought to have remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one—Tennyson was wise in giving his public the Idylls of the King in fragments—if he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d have had a surfeit. I should have followed his example, but I wanted to present the thing as a whole. And it is good, however they may damn it with faint praise.’

‘Does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked Haidee, who had gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head of which Lucian’s name stood out in bold letters.