Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion, disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run too far into the free and easy.
Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50l. is no large capital to commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood; and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his gratitude to her father.
John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known at college. But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst, however, are proud of the double l, and think a good deal of the w—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her Majesty.
Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce, and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “prima virorum,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would not swing back for him. The mare magnum—to mix metaphors, although bars are added to the Lucrine—the mare magnum of letters was more like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he might have swum there.
In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called were gentlemen, and told him the truth.
“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”
“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise; “is there no chance, then, of a sale for it?”
“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers, by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do with it.”
“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However, even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author, &c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever, except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five copies.
However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a few short original pieces—the former at any rate valuable, as having been revised by John Rosedew.