Prose Fancies by Richard Le Gallienne

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Besides, this sudden change of his spots on the part of the poet is unfair
to the publisher, who is thus apt to find himself surprised out of his
just gain. For, at the present moment, I would back almost any poet of my
acquaintance against any publisher in a matter of business. This is
unfair, for the publisher is a being slow to move, slow to take in changed
conditions, always two generations, at least, behind his authors.
Consequently, this sudden development of capacity on the part of the poet
is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who
can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce
apoplexy. Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every
evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an
instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially in manuscript, that
he has, after all, little to fear from the poet's new gifts.

II

But, indeed, my image just now was both uncomplimentary and unjust: for,
parallel with the change in the poet to which I have referred, a still
more unnatural change is making itself apparent in the type of the
publisher. It would almost seem as if the two are changing places. Instead
of the poet humbly waiting, hat in hand, kicking his heels for half a day
in the publisher's office, it is the publisher who seeks him, who writes
for appointments at his private house, or invites him to dinner. Yet it
behoves the poet to be on his guard. A publisher, like another personage,
has many shapes of beguilement, and it is not unlikely that this
flattering deference is but another wile to entrap the unwary. There is
no way of circumventing the dreamer so subtle as to flatter his business
qualities. We all like to be praised for the something we cannot do. It is
for this reason that Mr. Stevenson interferes with Samoan politics, when
he should be writing romances--just the desire of the dreamer to play the
man of action.

But I am not going to weary you by indulging in the stale old diatribes
against the publisher. For, to speak seriously the honest truth, I think
they are in the main a very much abused race. Thackeray put the matter
with a good deal of common-sense, in that scene in _Pendennis_ where Pen
and Warrington walk home together from the Fleet prison, after hearing
Captain Shandon read that brilliant prospectus of the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
which he had written for bookseller Bungay, and for which that gentleman
disbursed him a L5 note on the spot. Pen, you will remember, was full of
the oppressions of genius, of Apollo being tied down to such an Admetus as
Bungay. Warrington, however, took a maturer view of the matter.

'A fiddlestick about men of genius!' he exclaimed, 'I deny that there are
so many geniuses as people who whimper about the fate of men of letters
assert there are. There are thousands of clever fellows in the world who
could, if they would, turn verses, write articles, read books, and deliver
a judgment upon them; the talk of professional critics and writers is not
a whit more brilliant, or profound, or amusing than that of any other
society of educated people. If a lawyer, or a soldier, or a parson outruns
his income, and does not pay his bills, he must go to gaol; and an author
must go too. If an author fuddles himself, I don't know why he should be
let off a headache the next morning--if he orders a coat from the
tailor's, why he shouldn't pay for it....'

Dr. Johnson, who had no great reason to be prejudiced in their favour,
defined booksellers as 'the patrons of literature,' and M. Anatole France
has recently said that 'a great publisher is a kind of Minister for
_belles-lettres_.' Such definitions are, doubtless, prophecies of the
ideal rather than descriptions of the actual. Yet, fairly dealt with, the
history of publishing would show a much nearer living up to them on the
part of publishers than the poets and their sentimental sympathisers are
inclined to admit. We hear a great deal of Milton getting L10 for
_Paradise Lost_, and the Tonsons riding in their carriage, but seldom of
Cottle adventuring thirty guineas on Coleridge's early poems, or the
Jacksons giving untried boys L10--or, according to some accounts, L20--for
_Poems by Two Brothers_.

To open the case for the bookseller or the publisher. The poet, to start
with, bases his familiar complaints on a wilful disregard of the relation
which poetry bears to average humanity. You often hear him express
indignant surprise that the sale of butcher's meat should be a more
lucrative business than the sale of poetry. But, surely, to argue thus is
to manifest a most absurd misapprehension of the facts of life. Wordsworth
says that 'we live by admiration, joy, and love.' So doubtless we do: but
we live far more by butcher's meat and Burton ale. Poetry is but a
preparation of opium distilled by a minority for a minority. The poet may
test the case by the relative amounts he pays his butcher and his
bookseller. So far as I know, he pays as little for his poetry as
possible, and never buys a volume by a brother-singer till he has vainly
tried six different ways to get a presentation copy. The poet seems
incapable of mastering the rudimentary truth that ethereals must be based
on materials. 'No song, no supper' is the old saw. It is equally true
reversed--no supper, no song. The empty-stomach theory of creation is a
cruel fallacy, though undoubtedly hunger has sometimes been the spur which
the clear soul doth raise.

The conditions of existence compel the publisher to be a tradesman on the
same material basis as any other. Ideally, a poem, like any other
beautiful thing, is beyond price; but, practically, its value depends on
the number of individuals who can be prevailed upon to purchase it. In its
ethereal--otherwise its unprinted--state, it is only subject to the laws
of the celestial ether, one of which is that it yields no money; properly
speaking, money is there an irrelevant condition. Byron, you remember,
would not for a long time accept any money from Murray for his poems,
successful as they were. He had a proper sense of the indignity of
_selling_ the children of his soul. The incongruity is much as though we
might go to Portland Road and buy an angel, just as we buy a parrot. The
transactions of poetry and of sale are on two different planes. But so
soon as, shall we say, you debase poetry by bringing it down to the lower
plane, it becomes subject to the laws of that plane. An unprinted poem is
a spiritual thing, but a printed poem is subject to the laws of matter. In
the heaven of the poet's imagination there are no printers and
paper-makers, no binders, no discounts to the trade and thirteen to the
dozen; but on earth, where alone, so far as we know, books exist, these
terrestrial beings and conditions are of paramount importance, and cannot
be ignored. It may be perfectly true that a certain poem is so fine that,
in a properly constituted cosmogony, it ought to support you to the end of
your days; but is the publisher to blame because, in spite of its manifest
genius, he can sell no more than 500 copies?

Then, to take another point of view, it is, I think, quite demonstrable
that, compared with the men of many other callings, a poet who can get his
verses accepted is very well paid. Take a typical instance. You spend an
absolutely beatific evening with Clarinda in the moonlit woodland. You go
home and relieve your emotions in a sonnet, which, we will say, at a
generous allowance, takes you half an hour to write. Next morning in that
cold calculating mood for which no business man can match a poet, you copy
it out fair and send it to a friendly editor. Perhaps out of Clarinda
alone you beget a sonnet a week, which at L2, 2s. a week is L109, 4s. a
year--not to speak of Phyllis and Dulcinea. At any rate, take that one
sonnet. For an evening with Clarinda, for which alone you would have paid
the sum, and for a beggarly half-hour's work, you receive as much as many
a City clerk earns by six hard days' work, eight hours to the dreary day,
with perhaps a family to keep and a railway contract to pay for.
Half-an-hour's work, and if you can live on L2, 2s. a week, the rest of
your time is free as air! Moreover, you have the option of going about
with a feeling that you are a being vastly superior to your fellows,
because forsooth you can string fourteen lines together in decent
Petrarcan form, and they cannot. And to return for a moment to Clarinda:
it seems to me that your publisher, with all his ill-gotten gains,
compares favourably with you in your treatment of your partner in the
production of that sonnet What about the woman's half-profits in the
matter? For, remember, if the publisher depends on the brains of the poet,
the poet is no less dependent on the heart of the woman. It is from woman,
in nine cases out of ten, that the poets have drawn their inspiration. And
how have they, in eight cases out of this nine, treated her? The story is
but too familiar. Will it always seem so much worse to pick a man's brains
than to break a woman's heart?

We touched just now on the arrogance of the poet. It is one of the most
foolish and distasteful of his faults, and one which unfortunately the
world has conspired from time immemorial to confirm. He has been too long
the spoiled child, too long allowed to think that anything becomes him,
too long allowed to ride rough-shod over the neck of the average man.

Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, while celebrating the poet, sneers at
'your common men' who 'lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap,
dine.' But why? All these--with, perhaps, the exception of reigning--are
very proper and necessary things to be done, and any one of them, done in
the true spirit of work, is every bit as dignified as the writing of
poetry, and often, I am afraid, a great deal more so. This scorn of the
common man is but another instance of the poet's ignorance of the facts of
life and the relations of things. The hysterical bitterness with which
certain sections of modern people of taste are constantly girding at the
_bourgeois_--which, indeed, as Omar Khayyam says, heeds 'as the sea's self
should heed a pebble-cast'--is one of the most melancholy of recent
literary phenomena. It was not so the great masters treated the common
man, nor any full-blooded age. But the torch of taste has for the moment
fallen into the hands of little men, anaemic and atrabilious, with neither
laughter nor pity in their hearts.

Besides, how easy it is to misjudge your so-called 'common man'! That fat,
undistinguished-looking Briton in the corner of the omnibus is as likely
as not Mr. So-and-So, the distinguished poet; and who but those with the
divining-rod of a kind heart know what refined sensibility and nobility of
character may lurk under an extremely _bourgeois_ exterior?

We live in an age of every man his own priest and his own lawyer. At a
pinch we can very well be every man his own poet. If the whole
supercilious crew of modern men of letters, artists, and critics were
wiped off the earth to-morrow, the world would be hardly conscious of the
loss. Nay, if even the entire artistic accumulation of the past were to be
suddenly swallowed up, it would be little worse off. For the world is more
beautiful and wonderful than anything that has ever been written about it,
and the most glorious picture is not so beautiful as the face of a spring
morning.

APOLLO'S MARKET

The question is sometimes asked 'how poets sell.' One feels inclined
idealistically to ask, 'Ought poets to sell?' What can poets want with
money?--dear children of the rainbow, who from time immemorial

... on honeydew have fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Have you never felt a sort of absurdity in paying for a rose--especially
if you paid in copper? To pay for a thing of beauty in coin of extreme
ugliness! There is obviously no equality of exchange in the transaction.
In fact, it is little short of an insult to the flower-girl to pretend
that you thus satisfy the obligation. Far better let her give it you--for
the love of beauty--as very likely, if you explained the incongruity, she
would be glad to do: for flower-girls, no doubt, like every one else, can
only have chosen their particular profession because of its being a joy
for ever. There might be fitness in offering a kiss on account, though
that, of course, would depend on the flower-girl. To buy other things with
flowers were not so incongruous. I have often thought of trying my
tobacconist with a tulip; and certainly an orchid--no very rare one
either--should cover one's household expenses for a week, if not a
fortnight.

Omar Khayyam used to wonder what the vintners buy 'one-half so precious as
the stuff they sell.' It is surely natural to wonder in like manner of the
poet. What have we to offer in exchange for his priceless manna? One feels
that he should be paid on the mercantile principles of 'Goblin Market.'
Said Laura:--

'Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin;
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either....'

Copper! silver even! The goblin-men were more artistic than that; they
realised the absurdity of paying for immortal things in coin of mere
mortality. So--

'You have much gold upon your head,'
They answered all together:
'Buy from us with a golden curl.'

Yes, those are the ideal rates at which poetry should be paid. We should,
of course, pay for fairy goods in fairy-gold.

One of the few such appropriate transactions I remember was Queen
Elizabeth's buying a poem from Sir Philip Sidney, literally, with a lock
of her 'gowden hair.' Poem and lock now lie together at Wilton, both
untouched of time. Or was it that Sir Philip Sidney paid for the lock with
his poem? However it was, the exchange was appropriate. The ratio between
the thing sold and the price given was fairly equal. And, at all times, it
is far less absurd for a poet to pay for the earthly thing with his poem
(thus leaving us to keep the change), than that we should think to pay him
for his incorruptible with our corruptible. There would, no doubt, be a
subtle element of absurdity in a poet consenting to pay his tailor for a
suit with a sonnet, while it would obviously be beyond all proportion
monstrous for a tailor to think to buy a sonnet with a suit. Yet a poet
might, perhaps, be brought to consider the transaction, if he chanced to
be of a gentle disposition.

Yes, the true, the tasteful way to pay a poet is by the exchange of some
other beautiful thing: by beautiful praise, by a beautiful smile, by a
well-shaped tear, by a rose. It is thus that a poet--frequently, I am
bound to confess--finds his highest reward.

At the same time, there is a subtle ironic pleasure in taking the world's
money for poetry--even though one pays it over to a charity
immediately--for one feels that the world, for some reason or another, has
been persuaded to buy something which it didn't really want, and which it
will throw away so soon as we are round the corner. If the reader has ever
published a volume of verse, he must often have chuckled with an unnatural
glee over the number of absolutely unpoetic good souls who, from various
motives--the unhappy accident of relationship, perhaps--have
'subscribed.' Most of us have sound unpoetic uncles. Of course, you make
them buy you--in large-paper too. Have you ever gloatingly pictured their
absolute bewilderment as, with a stern sense of family pride, they sit
down to cut your pages? Think of the poor souls thus 'moving about in
worlds not realised.'

A perfect instance of this cruelty to the Philistine occurs to me. The
poet in question is one whose _forte_ is children's poetry. Very tender
some of his poems are. You will find them now and again in _St. Nicholas_,
and he is not unknown in this country. With a heart like a lamb for
children, he is like a hawk upon the Philistine. I remember an occasion,
before he published a volume, when we were together in a tavern in a
country-town, a tavern thronged with farmers on market-days. The poet had
some prospectuses in his pocket. Suddenly a great John Bull would come
bumping in like a cockchafer, and call for his pint. 'Just you watch,' the
poet would say, and away he crossed over to his victim. 'Good morning,
Mr. Oats!' 'Why, good morning, sir. How-d'ye-do; I hardly know'd thee.'
Then presently the voice of the charmer unto the farmer--'Mr. Oats, you
care for children, don't you?' 'Ay, ay,' would answer the farmer, a little
doubtfully, 'when they're little'uns.' 'Well, you know I'm what they call
a poet.' To this Mr. Oats would respond with a good round laugh, as of a
man enjoying a good thing. This was very subtle of the poet, for it put
the farmer on good terms with himself. He wondered, as he had his laugh
over again, how a man could choose to be a poet, when he might have been a
farmer. 'Well, I'm bringing out a book of poems all about children--here
is one of them!' and the poet would read some humorous thing, such as
'Breeching Tommy.' Then another--such simple pictures of humanity at the
age of two, that the farmer could not but be moved to that primary
artistic delight, the recognition of the familiar. Then the farmer would
grow grave, as he always did at any approach to a purchase, however small,
while the poet would rapidly speak of the fitness of the volume as a
present to the old woman: 'Women cared for such things,' he would add
pityingly. Then the farmer would cautiously ask the price, and blow his
cheeks out in surprise on hearing that it was five shillings. He had never
given so much for a book in his life. The poet would then insidiously
suggest that by subscribing before publication he would save a discount.
This would arouse the farmer's instinct for getting things cheap; and so,
finally, with a little more 'playing,' Mr. Timothy Oats, of Clod Hall,
Salop, was landed high and dry on the subscription list--a list, by the
way, which already included all the poet's tradesmen! This is one example
of 'how poets sell.'

Yet over and above what we may term these forced sales, the demand for
verse, we are assured, is growing. The impression to the contrary on the
part of the Philistine is a delusion, a false security. And the demand, a
well-known publisher has told us, is an intelligent one, for poetry of the
markedly idealistic, or markedly realistic, kind; but to writers of the
merely sentimental he can offer no hope. Their golden age, a pretty long
one while it lasted, has probably gone for ever.

This is good news for those engaged in growing dreams for the London
market.

THE 'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION

It must be very painful to the sentimentalist to notice what common sense
is beginning to prevail on one of his pet subjects: that of the ancient
immunities of 'genius.' Of course, to a great many good people genius
continues still to be accepted as payment in full for every species of
obligation, and if a man were a great poet he might probably still ruin a
woman's life, and some, in secret at least, would deem that he did God
service. There are perhaps even more women than ever nowadays who would,
as Keats put it, like to be married to an epic, and given away by a
three-volume novel. Such an attitude, however, is more and more taking its
place among the superstitions, and the divine right of genius to ride
rough-shod over us is at a discount.

At the same time, our national capacity for reaching right conclusions by
the wrong course is in this matter once more exemplified. In the main, as
usual, our reasoning seems to have been quite astray. We have argued as
though for ourselves, and that on those lines we should have reached the
sane conclusion is somewhat surprising. Because, indeed, it does pay _the
world_ to allow genius to do its pleasure: its victims even have little to
complain of; they wear the martyr's crown, and if a few tradesmen or a few
women are the worse, it has been deemed just, time out of mind, that such
should suffer for the people. But the one whom it does not pay, either in
this world or the next, is emphatically the man of genius himself. It is
really on his behalf that the protest against his ancient immunities
should be made, for

'Whether a man serve God or his own whim
Matters not much in the end to any one but Him.'

To take the threadbare instance, the world suffered nothing from the
suicide of Harriet Westbrook: rather it gained by one more story of tragic
pathos. Harriet herself was no loser, for she had lived her dream, and
the stern joy of a great sorrow was granted her to die with: it was only
the selfish heart that could leave her thus to suffer and die that was the
loser. Not in its relations with the world, fair or ill--such, like all
external things, are important only as we take them: but in its diminished
capacity to feel greatly and tenderly, in its added numbness, in its less
noble beat. It was thus that the _cor cordium_ lost what no lyric passion,
no triumphant exultation of success, could give to it again.

However, Shelley and his story belong more or less to the tragic muse, and
this subject is, perhaps, rather more the property of the comic: for great
poets are rare, and really it is the smaller genius we have always with us
that is likely to suffer most from those 'immunities'; still more the
talent that would fain bear the greater name, and most of all the
misguided industry which is neither the one nor the other.

In this lower sphere, it is not murder and sudden death, and other such
volcanic aberrations, that call for condonation; but those offences
against that code of daily intercourse which some faulty observer of human
life has characterised as 'the minor morals.'

The type of 'genius' I am thinking of probably began life by a
misapplication, to himself, of Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance: a great
and beautiful essay, but Oh! how much has it to answer for in the survival
of the unfittest. Alas! that the wheat and tares must grow together till
the harvest. It is the syrup of phosphorus by which weakly mediocrity
develops into sturdiness, a sturdy coarseness that else might have died
down and been spared us. But, thanks to that or some other artificial
fertiliser, it grows up with the idea that the duty which lies nearest to
it is to write weary books, paint monotonous pictures, persevere in
'd----d bad acting'; and it fulfils that duty with an energy known only to
mediocrity. The literary variety, probably, has the characteristics of the
type most fully developed. No one takes himself with more touching
seriousness. Day by day he grows in conceit, neglects his temper,
especially at home, with a wife who is worth ten of him and all his
'works,' and generally behaves, as the phrase goes, 'as if anything
becomes him.' If you visit him _en famille_, you will find him especially
characteristic at meals, during which he is wont to sit absorbed, with an
air of 'I cannot shake off the god'; and when they are over he goes off,
moodily chewing a toothpick, to his den, where, maybe, the genius finds
vent in a dissertation on 'Peg-Tops,' for _The Boy's Own_, or 'The Noses
of Great Men,' for _Chambers' Journal_.

But if such genius as this be chiefly comic, its work cannot but awaken in
one a deep sense of the pathetic. To stand before the poor little picture
that has been so much to its painter, and yet holds no spark of vitality
or touch of distinction; to take up the poor little book into which all
the toil of so many wasted days could breathe no breath of life, formless,
uninspired, unnecessary. Think of the pathos of the illusion that has
waved 'its purple wings' around these lifeless products, endowing with
sensitive expression the wooden lineaments that have really been dead and
unexpressive all the time, never glowed at all save to the wistful
yearning eye of their befooled creator. Yet if nature be thus cruel to
afflict, she is no less kind to console: for the victim of this species of
hallucination seldom wakens from the dream. That essay on Self-Reliance is
with him to the end.

Yet no less pathetic is it to reflect how his whole development has
suffered for this mistake, all his life-blood gone to feed this abortive
thing. The gentler charities of life have been neglected, fine qualities
atrophied, the man has grown narrow and selfish, all the real things have
been lost for this shadow: that he might become, what nature never meant
him to be--an artist. All along, when he has made any excuse, it has been
'art.' But, more likely, he has not been asked for excuse, he has lived
under the shelter of the 'genius' superstition. He has worn the air of
making great sacrifices for the goddess, and in these his intimates have
felt a proud sense of awful participation, as of a family whom the gods
love. They have never understood that art is a particular form of
self-indulgence, by no means confined to artists; that it often becomes no
less a vice than opium-eating, and that the same question has to be asked
of both--whether the dreams are worth the cost. This might occasionally be
asked of the world's famous: not only of those whose art has been the
evilly exquisite outcome of spiritual disease, but even of the great sane
successful reputations.

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