"I have not found him particularly malleable hitherto," said Mabel.
The bride elect was out of spirits, and inclined to look despondently upon life. She was suffering the bitter pain of disappointed hopes. "The Tragedy of a Sceptic Soul," despite its depth of thought, its exquisite typography and vellum-like paper, had been a dire and irredeemable failure. The reviewers had ground the poor little aristocratic butterfly to powder upon the wheel of ridicule. They had anatomised Lady Mabel's involved sentences, and laughed at her erudite phrases. Her mild adaptations of Greek thought and fancy had been found out, and held up to contempt. Her petty plagiarisms from French and German poets had been traced to their source. The whole work, so smooth and neatly polished on the outside, had been turned the seamy side without, and the knots and flaws and ravelled threads had been exposed without pity.
Happily the book was anonymous: but Mabel writhed under the criticism. There was the crushing disappointment of expectations that had soared high as the topmost throne on Parnassus. She had a long way to descend. And then there was the sickening certainty that in the eyes of her own small circle she had made herself ridiculous. Her mother took those cruel reviews to heart, and wept over them. The Duke, a coarse-minded man, at best, with a soul hardly above guano and chemical composts, laughed aloud at his poor little girl's failure.
"It's a sad disappointment, I daresay," he said, "but never mind, my pet, you'll do better next time, I've no doubt. Or if you don't, it doesn't much matter. Other people have fancied themselves poets, and have been deceived, before to-day."
"Those horrid reviewers don't understand her poetry," protested the Duchess, who would have been hard pushed to comprehend it herself, but who thought it was a critic's business to understand everything.
"I'm afraid I have written above their heads," Lady Mabel said piteously.
Roderick Vawdrey was worst of all.
"Didn't I tell you 'The Sceptic Soul' was too fine for ordinary intellects, Mab?" he said. "You lost yourself in an ocean of obscurity. You knew what you meant, but there's no man alive who could follow you. You ought to have remembered Voltaire's definition of a metaphysical discussion, a conversation in which the man who is talked to doesn't understand the man who talks, and the man who talks doesn't understand himself. You must take a simpler subject and use plainer English if you want to please the multitude."
Mabel had told her lover before that she did not aspire to please the multitude, that she would have esteemed such cheap and tawdry success a humiliating failure. It was almost better not to be read at all than to be appreciated only by the average Mudie subscriber. But she would have liked someone to read her poems. She would have liked critics to praise and understand her. She would have liked to have her own small world of admirers, an esoteric few, the salt of the earth, literary Essenes, holding themselves apart from the vulgar herd. It was dreadful to find herself on a height as lonely as one of those plateaux in the Tyrolean Alps where the cattle crop a scanty herbage in summer, and where the Ice King reigns alone through the long winter.
"You are mistaken, Roderick," Mabel said with chilling dignity; "I have friends who can understand and admire my poetry, incomprehensible and uninteresting as it may be to you."