“Well, Clay, how are you getting on, anyway?”
“That’s a d—— general question. How do you want me to answer it?”
“Oh, not at all, if you don’t like.”
“Well, don’t get miffed. Suppose I answer, ‘Pretty well, I thank you, sir.’ How will that do?”
“Are you writing anything now?”
“I’m always scribbling something or other. At present, I’ve got the position of dramatic critic on the ‘Daily Boreas,’ which is not a very bad bore, and keeps the pot boiling. And I do more or less work of a hack kind for the magazines and cyclopedias, etc.”
“I thought you were on the ‘Weekly Prig.’ Berkeley or somebody told me so.”
“So I was at one time, but I got out of it. The work was drying me up too fast. The concern is run by a lot of cusses who have failed in various branches of literature themselves, and undertake, in consequence, to make it unpleasant for every one else who tries to write anything. I got so that I could sling as cynical a quill as the rest of them. But the trick is an easy one and hardly worth learning. It’s a great fraud, this business of reviewing. Here’s a man of learning, for instance, who has spent years of research on a particular work. He has collected a large library, perhaps, on his subject; knows more about it than any one else living. Then along comes some insolent little whipper-snapper,—like me,—whose sole knowledge of the matter in hand is drawn from the very book that he pretends to criticise, and patronizes the learned author in a book notice. No, I got out of it; I hadn’t the cheek.”
“I bought your book,”[A] said I, “as soon as it came out.”
“That’s more than the public did.”