“But—there’s the policy of the paper—”
“Oh, well, I’ll buy a controlling interest, and alter your policy. But, as a matter of fact, you know they’ll print anything over your name.”
“Yes—well, there are my own standards, the ideals I have fought for—”
“Rot! Look here, Quince, let’s be honest. We’re both in the writing game for what we can get out of it. We may strut and brag; but we know in our hearts there’s none of us of much account. Why, man, show me half a dozen writers of to-day who’ll be remembered twenty years after they’re dead?”
“I protest—”
“You know it’s true. We’re bagmen in a negligible day. Now, I don’t want you to alter your standards; all I want of you is to adjust them. You know that as soon as you see a book of mine coming along you get your knife out. You’ve flayed me from the start. You do it on principle. You’ve got regular formulas of abuse. My characters are sticks, my plots chaotic, my incidents melodramatic. You judge my work by your academic standards. Don’t do that. Don’t judge it as art—judge it as entertainment. Does it entertain?”
“Possibly it does—the average, unthinking man.”
“Precisely. He’s my audience. My business is to amuse him, to take him outside of himself for an hour or two.”
“It’s our duty to elevate his taste.”
“Fiddlesticks! my dear chap. I don’t take myself so seriously as that. And, anyway, it’s hopeless. If you don’t give him the stuff he wants, he won’t take any. You’ll never educate the masses to anything higher than the satisfaction of their appetites. They want frenzied fiction, plot, action. The men want a good yarn, the women sentiment, and we writers want—the money.”