Litany of the Novelist
There are times when one wearies of literature; when one reads over one's first book, reflects how good it was, and how greatly one was misunderstood; when one considers the perils and misadventures of so accidental a life and likens oneself to those dogs described by Pliny who run fast as they drink from the Nile for fear they should be seized by the crocodiles; when one tires of following Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's advice, 'to sit down in the back garden with pen, ink, and paper, to put vine leaves in one's hair and to write'; when one remembers that in Flaubert's view the literary man's was a dog's life (metaphors about authors lead you back to the dog) but that none other was worth living. In those moods, one does not agree with Flaubert; rather, one agrees with Butler:—
'... those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense and one for rhyme,
I think's sufficient at one time.'
One sees life like Mr Polly, as 'a rotten, beastly thing.' One sighs for adventure, to become a tramp or an expert witness. One knows that one will never be so popular as Beecham's pills; thence is but a step to picture oneself as less worthy.
We novelists are the showmen of life. We hold up its mirror, and, if it look at us at all, it mostly makes faces at us. Indeed a writer might have with impunity sliced Medusa's head: she would never have noticed him. The truth is that the novelist is a despised creature. At moments, when, say, a learned professor has devoted five columns to showing that a particular novelist is one of the pests of society, the writer feels exalted. But as society shows no signs of wanting to be rid of the pest, the novelist begins to doubt his own pestilency. He is wrong. In a way, society knows of our existence, but does not worry; it shows this in a curiously large number of ways, more than can be enumerated here. It sees the novelist as a man apart; as a creature fraught with venom, and, paradoxically, a creature of singularly lamb-like and unpractical temperament.
Consider, indeed, the painful position of a respectable family whose sons make for Threadneedle Street every day, its daughters for Bond Street and fashion, or for the East End, good works, and social advancement. Imagine that family, who enjoys a steady income, shall we say in the neighbourhood of £5000 a year, enough to keep it in modest comfort, confronted with the sudden infatuation of one of its daughters for an unnamed person, met presumably in the East End where he was collecting copy. You can imagine the conversation after dinner:—
Angeline: 'What does he do, father? Oh, well! he's a novelist.'
Father: .... What! a novelist! One of those long-haired, sloppy-collared ragamuffins without any soles to their boots! Do you think that because I've given you a motor-car I'm going to treat you to a husband? A bar loafer ... (we are always intemperate) ... A man whom your mother and sisters ... (our morals are atrocious) ... I should not wonder if the police ... (we are all dishonest, and yet we never have any money) ... I was talking to the Bishop ... (we practise no religion, except that occasionally we are Mormons)....
And so on, and so on. Father won't have it, and if in the end Father does have it he finds that Angeline's eyes are not blacked, but that Angeline's husband's boots are blacked, that the wretched fellow keeps a balance at the bank, can ride a horse, push a perambulator, drive a nail; but he does not believe it for a long time. For it is, if not against all experience, at any rate against all theory that a novelist should be eligible. The bank clerk is eligible, the novelist is not; we are not 'safe,' we are adventurers, we have theories, and sometimes the audacity to live up to them. We are often poor, which happens to other men, and this is always our own fault, while it is often their misfortune. Of late years, we have grown still more respectable than our forefathers, who were painfully such: Dickens lived comfortably in Marylebone; Thackeray reigned in a luxurious house near Kensington Square and in several first-class clubs; Walter Scott reached a terrible extreme of respectability; he went bankrupt, but later on paid his debts in full. Yet we never seem quite respectable, perhaps because respectability is so thin a varnish. Even the unfortunate girls whom we 'entice away from good homes' into the squalor of the arts, do not think us respectable. For them half the thrill of marrying a novelist consists in the horror of the family which must receive him; it is like marrying a quicksand, and the idea is so bitter that a novelist who wears his hair long might do well to marry a girl who wears hers short. He will not find her in the bourgeoisie.