“Yes; I did like parts of it. But I musn’t say any more.”
“But what parts?” he pleaded.
“You mustn’t ask me. The readers’ opinions”—
“I don’t care for them. I care for your opinion,” said Ray, perversely. “What did you mean by their being all different? Of course, I’m absurd! But you don’t know how much depends upon this book. It isn’t that it’s the only book I expect ever to write; but if it should be rejected! I’ve had to wait a long while already; and then to have to go peddling it around among the other publishers! Do you think that it’s hopelessly bad, or could I make it over? What did you dislike in it? Didn’t you approve of the hypnotism? That was the only thing I could think of to bring about the climax. And did it seem too melodramatic? Romeo and Juliet is melodramatic! I hope you won’t think I’m usually so nervous about my work,” he went on, wondering that he should be giving himself away so freely, when he was really so reserved. “I’ve been a long time writing the story; and I’ve worked over it and worked over it, till I’ve quite lost the sense of it. I don’t believe I can make head or tail of those opinions. That’s the reason why I wanted you to tell me what you thought of it yourself.”
“But I have no right to do that. It would be interfering with other people’s work. It wouldn’t be fair towards Mr. Brandreth,” she pleaded.
“I see. I didn’t see that before. And you’re quite right, and I beg your pardon. Good-night!”
He put his manuscript on the seat in the elevated train, and partly sat upon it, that he might not forget it when he left the car. But as he read the professional opinions of it he wished the thing could lose him, and never find him again. No other novel, he thought, could ever have had such a variety of certain faults, together with the vague merit which each of its critics seemed to feel in greater measure or less. Their work, he had to own, had been faithfully done; he had not even the poor consolation of accusing them of a neglect of duty. They had each read his story, and they spoke of it with intelligence in a way, if not every way. Each condemned it on a different ground, but as it stood they all joined in condemning it; and they did not so much contradict one another as dwell on different defects; so that together they covered the whole field with their censure. One of them reproached it for its crude realism, and the sort of helpless fidelity to provincial conditions which seemed to come from the author’s ignorance of anything different. Another blamed the youthful romanticism of its dealings with passion. A third pointed out the gross improbability of the plot in our modern circumstance. A fourth objected to the employment of hypnotism as a clumsy piece of machinery, and an attempt to reach the public interest through a prevailing fad. A fifth touched upon the obvious imitation of Hawthorne in the psychical analyses. A sixth accused the author of having adopted Thackeray’s manner without Thackeray’s material.
Ray resented, with a keen sense of personal affront, these criticisms in severalty, but their combined effect was utter humiliation, though they were less true taken together than they were separately. At the bottom of his sore and angry heart he could not deny their truth, and yet he knew that there was something in his book which none of them had taken account of, and that this was its life, which had come out of his own. He was aware of all those crude and awkward and affected things, but he believed there was something, too, that went with them, and that had not been in fiction before.
It was this something which he hoped that girl had felt in his story, and which he was trying to get her to own to him before he looked at the opinions. They confounded and distracted him beyond his foreboding even, and it was an added anguish to keep wondering, as he did all night, whether she had really found anything more in the novel than his critics had. As he turned from side to side and beat his pillow into this shape and that, he reconstructed the story after one critic’s suggestion, and then after another’s; but the material only grew more defiant and impossible; if it could not keep the shape it had, it would take no other. That was plain; and the only thing to be done was to throw it away, and write something else; for it was not reasonable to suppose that Mr. Brandreth would think of bringing the book out in the teeth of all these adverse critics. But now he had no heart to think of anything else, although he was always thinking of something else, while there was hope of getting this published. His career as an author was at an end; he must look about for some sort of newspaper work; he ought to be very glad if he could get something to do as a space man.