"Are you quite sure?" said I, seeing him so positive.
"Parbleu! I ought to know better than you," he said. "I was the last to come out."
The English social failure is much more humble than his like in France, for the simple reason that, in France, poverty is no crime, while in England, as in America, it is. Apart from this the two types do not differ much.
In the commercial world, the English social failure is an agent of some sort; generally wine or coal. In the exercise of his calling, he requires no capital, nor even a cellar. He not unfrequently entitles himself General Agent: this, when the wreck is at hand. Such are the straws he clutches at; if they should break, he sinks, and is heard of no more, unless his wife comes to the rescue, by setting up a lodging house or a boarding school for young ladies. There, once more in smooth water, he wields the blacking brush, makes acquaintance with the knife board, or gets in the provisions. In allowing himself to be kept by his wife, he feels he loses some dignity, but if she should adopt any airs of superiority over him, he can always bring her to a sense of duty by beating her.
In the republics of art and letters, you generally find him playing the part of critic, consoling himself for his failures by abusing the artists who sell their pictures, or the authors who sell their books. For these he knows no pity. He can all the more easily abuse his dear brethren of the quill or brush that he has not to sign his invectives; his prose is anonymous. Once a week, in the columns of some penny paper, he can, with perfect impunity, relieve his heart of the venom it contains.
The mud he scatters has one good quality—it does not stain; one fillip ... and it is gone.
Here is a sample of this kind of production. I extract it from a paper as pretentious as it is little read:
"The fortunate writer woke up one morning to find himself famous, and his book on a tide of popularity which carried it, in one year, through some fifty editions. A grand stroke of this kind insures the ambition to repeat it.... His new book bears throughout manifest evidences of having been scrambled through, and put together anyhow, in order to recapture the notice and the money of the public."
Now Carlyle, who was very sensitive to adverse criticism, used to call these revengeful failures in literature "dirty puppies," and it was kind of him to so far notice them.
But if I were the author in question, an answer somewhat in the following style would rise to my pen: