Everybody at Hotel Helicon appeared to have been captivated by this droll fellow.
“How like Tolstoi’s lovely Russians he is!” observed Miss Fidelia Arkwright, of Boston, a near-sighted maiden who did translations and who doted on virile literature.
“When I was in Russia, I visited Tolstoi at his shoe-shop—” began Crane, but nobody appeared to hear him, so busy were all in making notes for a dialect story.
“Tolstoi is the greatest fraud of the nineteenth century,” said Peck. “That shoe-making pretence of his is about on a par with his genius in genuineness and sincerity. His novels are great chunks of raw filth, rank, garlic garnished and hideous. We touch them only because the French critics have called them savory. If the Revue de Deux Mondes should praise a Turkish novel we could not wait to read it before we joined in. Tolstoi is remarkable for two things: his coarseness and his vulgar disregard of decency and truth. His life and his writings are alike crammed with absurdities and contradictory puerilities which would be laughable but for their evil tendencies.”
“But, my dear sir, how then do you account for the many editions of Tolstoi’s books?” inquired the historian, R. Hobbs Lucas.
“Just as I account for the editions of Cowper and Montgomery and Wordsworth and even Shakespeare,” responded Peck. “You put a ten per cent. author’s royalty on all those dear classics and see how soon the publishers will quit uttering them! If Tolstoi’s Russian raw meat stories were put upon the market in a fair competition with American novels the latter would beat them all hollow in selling.”
“Oh, we ought to have international copyright,” plaintively exclaimed a dozen voices, and so the conversation ended.
Strangely enough, each one of the company in growing silent did so in order to weigh certain suggestions arising out of Peck’s assertions. It was as if a score of semi-annual statements of copyright accounts were fluttering in the breeze, and it was as if a score of wistful voices had whispered:
“How in the world do publishers grow rich when the books they publish never sell?”