If the last work of the last great mediocrity in the way of novelists were to be ignored, and only reviewed a couple of years after its publication, many an estimable gentleman and lady would step down from their pedestal and walk quite modestly on a level with their fellow beings.
If the poets received their meed of praise long after they were nicely buried instead of at afternoon teas, they would write better, indeed they would. Weak tea praise has never been good for the mental stamina, and it is awfully misleading. Because a gushing thing with an ardent eye protests over a tea-cup that your poems are the most beautiful poems she has ever read, it is not necessary to believe her. Do not on the strength of that go home and snub your old mother who, to her sorrow, has been educated to believe that among her goslings she has hatched a swan. Gosling or swan in these days at best you can reach no higher altitude than to be called a minor poet.
One wonders who was the first reviewing misanthrope who called the modern singers "minor poets"? Why should that branch of the writing Art have evoked his particular animosity? Do we say minor historian, minor novelist, minor painter, minor composer? Why should we belittle an artist who may be infinitely greater than all these, and damn his art with an adjective? It is not for us to judge if a poet be minor or major. That is usually the business of the future, and there is no prophet among us able to prophesy which of our poets will join the immortals. Thank Heaven, advertising is only a temporary product, and has no influence on immortality.
The misfortune of our age is that the tools for the divine arts have became so cheap and handy. Literature, especially, is at the mercy of every irresponsible infant with ambition and a penny to spare. Why, the snub-nosed board-school youngster down there skipping joyfully along the gutter has a sheet of paper and a lead-pencil, the excellence of which were beyond the imagination of Shakespeare. It is this cheap and fatal luxury which makes such triumphant mediocrity and so little greatness, and it is the fault of the newspapers, the publishers, too much education, and afternoon teas. May they all be forgiven!
The truth is the poets should not be published, nor should the newspapers be permitted to crown the singer with a laurel-wreath still dripping with printers' ink. The poet should be handed down as was old Homer and sung in the market place; if then in the future there is enough of him left to be considered at all, let him then be considered seriously, but let him not, O let him not, do it for himself prematurely, for fear. Remember the famous and classic tragedy of Humpty Dumpty who sat on a wall.
Once I came upon an editor—a great editor!—who in a moment of frenzy was sincere. I was looking respectfully at that tomb of fame, his wastepaper basket.
"Did you pass a fellow going down?" and he threw a scowl after the departed one. "That is Jones." He really didn't say Jones, but he mentioned a name so famous in literature that the tramcars proclaim it along with the best brands of whiskies, soap, corsets, and sapolio, and it adorns sandwich men in the gutter by the dozens; hoardings bellow it forth silently, and the newspapers devote pages to it as if it were the greatest thing in patent medicine.
"I made him," and the editor thumped his sacred desk. "I boomed him and I printed his first confounded rot," and he strode up and down the room with a full head of steam on.
"I've always said it is the advertising that does it, not the stuff one advertises. Proved it, too, and then sat back and watched their heads swell. He is the last. A year ago he sat in that very chair and gurgled obsequious thanks. Last week we invited him to dinner and he forgot to come. To-day he came in just to say if I don't pay him just double the rate I've been giving him he'll take his stuff to the "Rocket," for the "Rocket" editor has made him an offer. And this to me who boomed him and made him out of nothing. O, by Jove!"
"That is only the artistic temperament," I said soothingly.