"How can you imagine such a thing?"
He was silent, but "imagined" the more. And after this he began to show her certain scenes and passages in the book he was writing, sometimes reading them aloud to her with all that eager eloquence which an author who loves and feels his work is bound to convey into the pronounced expression of it. And she listened, absorbed and often entranced, for there was no gain-saying the fact that Angus Reay was a man of genius. He was inclined to underrate rather than overestimate his own abilities, and often showed quite a pathetic mistrust of himself in his very best and most original conceptions.
"When I read to you,"—he said to her, one day—"You must tell me the instant you feel bored. That's a great point! Because if you feel bored, other people who read the book will feel bored exactly as you do and at the very same passage. And you must criticise me mercilessly! Rend me to pieces—tear my sentences to rags, and pick holes in every detail, if you like! That will do me a world of good!"
Mary laughed.
"But why?" she asked, "Why do you want me to be so unkind to you?"
"It won't be unkind,"—he declared—"It will be very helpful. And I'll tell you why. There's no longer any real 'criticism' of literary work in the papers nowadays. There's only extravagant eulogium written up by an author's personal friends and wormed somehow into the press—or equally extravagant abuse, written and insinuated in similar fashion by an author's personal enemies. Well now, you can't live without having both friends and enemies—you generally have more of the latter than the former, particularly if you are successful. There's nothing a lazy man won't do to 'down' an industrious one,—nothing an unknown scrub won't attempt in the way of trying to injure a great fame. It's a delightful world for that sort of thing!—so truly 'Christian,' pleasant and charitable! But the consequence of all these mean and petty 'personal' views of life is, that sound, unbiased, honest literary criticism is a dead art. You can't get it anywhere. And yet if you could, there's nothing that would be so helpful, or so strengthening to a man's work. It would make him put his best foot foremost. I should like to think that my book when it comes out, would be 'reviewed' by a man who had no prejudices, no 'party' politics, no personal feeling for or against me,—but who simply and solely considered it from an impartial, thoughtful, just and generous point of view—taking it as a piece of work done honestly and from a deep sense of conviction. Criticism from fellows who just turn over the pages of a book to find fault casually wherever they can—(I've seen them at it in newspaper offices!) or to quote unfairly mere scraps of sentences without context,—or to fly off into a whirlwind of personal and scurrilous calumnies against an author whom they don't know, and perhaps never will know,—that sort of thing is quite useless to me. It neither encourages nor angers me. It is a mere flabby exhibition of incompetency—much as if a jelly-fish should try to fight a sea-gull! Now you,—if you criticise me,—your criticism will be valuable, because it will be quite honest—there will be no 'personal' feeling in it——"
She raised her eyes to his and smiled.
"No?"
Something warm and radiant in her glance flashed into his soul and thrilled it strangely. Vaguely startled by an impression which he did not try to analyse, he went on hastily—"No—because you see you are neither my friend nor my enemy, are you?"
She was quite silent.