"But you should say, 'What one will,' dear; it can be done whichever way you like."
"There's only one way possible to me, I assure you; for once 'the wrong way' is the more difficult."
"That which you think is the wrong way," said Cynthia, with gentle firmness.
He looked at her a moment incredulously.
"Good Lord!" he said; "let me know something about my own business! I don't want to pose on the strength of a solitary novel—I'm not arrogant—but let me know something—at all events, more than you! Heavens above! a novelist devotes his life to trying to learn the technique of an art which it wants three lifetimes to acquire, and Mr. Jones, who is a solicitor, and Mr. Smith the shoe manufacturer, and little Miss Pink of Putney, who don't know the first laws of fiction —who aren't even aware there are any laws to know—are all prepared to tell him how his books should be written."
"I am not Miss Pink of Putney," she said. "And if I were, we all know whether we like a book or whether we don't."
"'Like'!" he echoed. "To 'like' and to 'criticise'——Men are paid to criticise books when they can do it; it's thought to be worth payment. Editors, who don't exactly bubble over with generosity, sign cheques for reviews. I don't pretend to teach Mr. Smith how to make his shoes; I've sense enough to understand that he knows the way better than I. Nor do these people think that they can teach a painter how to compose his pictures, or that they can give a musician lessons in counterpoint. Why on earth should they imagine they're competent to instruct a novelist? It is absurd!"
"Your comparisons are far-fetched," she said. "A painter and a musician, we all know, have to study; they—-"
"They're entitled to the consideration due to a certain amount of money sunk—eh? That's really it. There are thousands upon thousands of families in the upper middle classes of England to whom fiction will never be an art, because the novelist hasn't been to an academy and paid fees. As a matter of fact, it is only in artistic and professional circles that a novelist in England is regarded with any other feeling than good-humoured contempt, unless he's publicly known to be making a large income. The commercial majority smile at him. They've a shibboleth—I'm sure it's familiar to you: 'You can't improve your mind by reading novels.' They're persuaded it's true. They have heard it ever since they were children, in these families where no artist, no professional man of any kind, has ever let in a little light. 'You can't improve your mind by reading novels' is one of the stock phrases of middle-class English Philistia. Ask them if they improve their minds by looking at pictures in the National Gallery, or even at the Academy, and they know it is essential that they should answer, 'Certainly.' Ask them how they do it, and they are 'done.' Of course, they don't really improve their minds either way, because, before the contemplation of art in any form can be anything more than a vague amusement, a very much higher standard of education than they have reached is necessary; only they have learnt to pretend about pictures. It's an odd thing—or, perhaps, a natural one—that an author of the sort of book that they are impressed by, a scientist, a brain-worker of any description, literary or not, talks and thinks of a novelist with respect, while these people themselves find him beneath them."
There was a silence, in which both stared again at the sea. His irritation subsiding, it occurred to him that he might have expressed his opinions less freely, considering that Philistia was his wife's birthplace. He was beginning to excuse himself, when she interrupted him.