The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
is no injustice about it, any more than there is an injustice in the
survival of beauty or ugliness in human beings, or the early death
of the beautiful or the ugly. There is no more injustice about it
than there is in a dry year hurting a root crop, and a wet harvest
hurting a corn crop. The relationship between the excellence or the
usefulness of a piece of literature, and the number of those who will
buy it in a particular form, is not a causal relationship, it is a
purely capricious one; and I, for my part, have never complained of the
absence of a market, nor flattered myself upon the presence of one when
a market turned up, though I have certainly been astonished at the way
the market would behave.
For some few months thousands upon thousands—at one moment sixty
thousand a week—of the articles I wrote upon the war were demanded by
the public. Some months later the same articles, of the same value, or
lack of value, were no longer demanded. There was no particular reason,
the articles were clear, and based upon such insufficient knowledge as
I shared with all my fellow citizens. I had no private information save
upon the point of numbers, and that was the very point upon which the
public grew most easily fatigued, and were at last most sceptical.
Mr. Hutchinson, for whose work I personally have (though I am afraid my
judgment is not worth much in these things) a great liking, wrote among
other books a book called ‘Once Aboard the Lugger.’ It was exceedingly
amusing, fresh, and, as I should have said, well worth anybody’s
buying. I do not know how many copies he sold of it, but I should
imagine nothing very astonishing. A little while after he wrote a book
called ‘If Winter Comes,’ and it sold by the stack, and by the ton. One
could see it piled up man-high upon the counters of shops in America,
and it sold, and it sold, and it sold.
Mr. Wells wrote a book which is most remarkable, and will probably
make a mark in English literature. It was called ‘The Time Machine.’
When Henley (I think it was) was bringing it out by instalments, the
appearance of each was, for me at least, and for very many others,
the chief event of the month. I do not know how many copies he sold,
but there again I will swear nothing comparable to the numbers
he has sold of later books which certainly will not stand out in
English literature. That one which I hear has sold most largely has
always seemed to me to be a mere repetition of what his audience
already thought they knew, and of a philosophy which they already
held: I mean his ‘Outline of History.’ It was mainly a repetition of
the popular mythology of to-day, of antiquated scientific jargon,
full of the popular errors, but it was clear, well-proportioned and
vivacious, showing a rare economy in the use and placing of words.
It was also (and that is high minor praise for any book purporting
to deal with history) astonishingly accurate in details. The names
were properly spelt; south was never written for north, nor east for
west; the dates were all right. Any one who has attempted the writing
of history will not belittle such a feat: I, least of all, because I
am constitutionally inaccurate in such things, and I will write left
for right and north for south as a matter of course, and the word
‘Tyre’ for the word ‘Acre,’ and so on. At any rate, the book, with
all its good and bad qualities, is obviously not of the first class,
and equally obviously is not destined to endure, while ‘The Time
Machine’ is quite certainly of the first class, and is quite likely to
endure. But I believe that the huge ephemeral demand for the ‘Outline
of History’ created no special, certainly no very great, demand for
the more permanent ‘The Time Machine.’ In general, I am assured by
publishers, that when there is a sudden boom in a writer’s work, they
hardly ever manage to float on that boom a resale of earlier works;
while if these earlier works are unknown, it is almost impossible to
give them a popular fame on the strength of the later works. Witness
the late Mr. Hudson’s ‘Crystal Age.’ I came across it as a young man
in a bookshop in the Euston Road on a winter evening. I took it up and
began reading it, and I read it so long that the bookseller told me I
must buy it, which I did. Now, towards the end of Mr. Hudson’s life,
he became deservedly famous as a writer upon the things of the natural
world, and especially upon animals. But what made him famous was not
his subject, though he was both accurate and learned; it was his manner
of writing. One would have expected, therefore, that the ‘Crystal Age’
would, upon his fame tardily arising, have a quiet and equal fame. It
did not. I say that there are no laws governing these movements. They
are capricious and incalculable.
Sometimes one hears that a great demand for a book, or for a set of
newspaper articles, is due to something touching a common feeling in
a particular fashion, something which great bodies of men necessarily
feel together. There is a sense, of course, in which that is a mere
truism, for it is clear that obscure stuff, or stuff dealing with
matters that could not interest great numbers, will never sell. Why
should it? But if the statement is intended to mean (as it usually is)
that whatever sells in great numbers does so through this quality of
a common appeal, that anything having this quality will always sell
in great numbers, and that this quality is in some way a rare thing
discoverable only in ‘best-sellers,’ then the statement is manifestly
false. A great deal of matter which possesses this appeal—enormously
the greater part of such matter—remains unknown, and that which is
best known is often rather weak in such an appeal. There are a great
many factors entering into the result of a great popular demand which
people forget because they are irrational: fashion is one, routine
is another, inertia is a third. I know one man whose name, for the
honour I bear it (he is now dead), I would not publish, since what I
am about to say of his work is not flattering. He wrote a great number
of stories, all of them with exactly the same plot and exactly the
same characters. There was a beautiful chocolate-box girl, there was
a villain, there was a hero who became rich after being poor, there
were parents who objected to the match, and there was a racehorse.
Had he departed from the formula, he would not have sold. As it was,
he sold by the million. He was not only as modest a man as you could
find, but exceedingly generous. He put on no airs; he made no error as
to the nature of his success; he is already forgotten. Nothing shall
persuade me that any one of many thousand men could not have written
exactly the same; but a certain vast public got used to that particular
insipid food, and wanted it unchanged, just as you and I get used to a
particular kind of breakfast, and eat it every day of our lives.
Of course, there is a different set of factors operating in different
phases of society. The popular best-seller of to-day depends upon the
existence of our great towns with their machine-made citizens, all
working blindly in little grooves, lacking any common direction—a dust
of individuals. He depends also on that new-fangled, mechanical, and,
let us hope, ephemeral, institution called ‘popular education.’ If you
tell millions of boys and girls (nearly all the citizens of the state),
at the age when they receive unquestioning any dogmatic teaching, that
their ancestors were repulsive savages, first actually bestial, later
exceedingly vile, and that these ancestors passed through certain
stages, and were ‘Cavemen,’ and men of the ‘Stone Age,’ and of the
‘Bronze Age,’ and so forth; then, obviously, writers using such terms,
and taking for granted such a mythology, will fit in with the popular
market. The demand for books, or for writing in any form, is created
by minds already moulded, and any kind of writing which tends to break
the mould is resented and left on one side. In older phases of society,
judgment upon writing was passed by a few well-trained and leisured
people, who handed down their judgments to a larger class, but still a
small class compared with the whole state; and it is clear that in such
a condition of society—which was that of England from the last third
of the eighteenth century to the last third of the nineteenth—there
would be no best-sellers in our modern sense, and that there would be
a nearer approach between the demand for a book and its excellence.
But there also the mould had to be considered. Macaulay’s false
rhetoric sold well, because it agreed with the religion of his day. No
historical work telling the truth about James II would have sold in his
day, nor for that matter would any such matter sell in ours.
For religion is here, as elsewhere, at the root of effect. Robert Louis
Stevenson was an excellent writer, but his popularity reposed not upon
his excellence alone, but also upon the consonance of his religion
with that of his readers. A man who was perpetually telling you that
it was your duty to be cheerful, that you must take pleasure in God’s
creation, that you had a ‘task of happiness’ would cut no ice with the
Irish, or with the Italians, or, in general, with the Catholic culture
of Europe, but he rings true in the ears of the Protestant culture.
Conversely, what the French powerfully call the ‘bitter taste of
reality’ has very little chance with the crowd of the North. It is a
spur and a relish to the crowd of the South. You could not sell Barrie
in Arles nor Baudelaire in Pudsey.
The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between
the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of
craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the
canon, the attempt to achieve a standard. To get a canon is the first
requirement of letters. For though it is said that time will test
literature for us in any case, this is not universally true; and, even
in so far as it is true, it is better to have the good things to our
hand than to wait for time to establish them. Such a canon requires
not only intelligent analysis, but a common philosophy into which our
rules must fit. It is, therefore, with great difficulty arrived at, or
perhaps not to be arrived at at all, in a period of confusion like
ours. But the attempt to arrive at it never loses interest—no, not
even to-day.
One of the things which always seem to me best worth saying in
connection with letters is that prose should be distinguished, not only
from verse, but also from rhetoric; and that prose in itself, mere
lucid, economic, unornamented prose, is the foundation of good letters.
If the national prose is sound, the rest of national expression will
come of itself. But this matter of prose has to-day been nearly
forgotten. For most of us perhaps the phrase ‘good prose,’ or ‘fine
prose,’ really means rhetoric. It means a passage in which the soul is
stirred by a choice of rhythm and sound, and a mystical connotation
of words in some passage not definitely reduced to versification.
Thus, all the great passages from the Jacobean translation of the
Hebrew Scriptures which are familiar as examples to our generation are
essentially rhetoric; so are the excerpts quoted from Bunyan, such
as the fine closing passage of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; so is every
single passage quoted from Carlyle; so are even those quoted from
Newman and (I am sorry to say) those quoted from the greatest of our
modern prose writers, Huxley.
But prose is rightly to be distinguished from anything of that kind.
The excellence of prose lies in its adaptation to the function of
intelligent expression or of narration. It is a statement; the end of