on a certain monday morning in the following november, lucian’s great epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. lucian found a pile of the london morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through them systematically. when he had made an end of them he looked across the table at haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer way.
‘i say, haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are—well, they’re not very flattering. there are six mighty voices of the press here,—times, telegraph, post, news, chronicle, and standard—and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in their pronunciations. the epic poem seems to be at something of a discount.’
the reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein—taking them as a whole they were cold. there was a ring of disappointment in them. one reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of mr. damerel’s previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. another openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had previously had from the same pen. mr. damerel’s history, said a third, was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much of the norman conquest from his poem as from the pages of freeman, but the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting in{172} his latest. each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental sorrow for the mr. damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an undercurrent of regret that lucian had chosen to explore another path than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. the consensus of opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers lying on lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that mr. damerel’s new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his previous volumes. and to show his exact meaning and make out a good case for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting those of lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which they would have wished mr. damerel to supply for ever.
lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. it was disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what the critics believed him capable of doing. he was amused at the disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred lucian the earlier to lucian the later—and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great effort somewhat looked askance at.
‘i’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘i ought to have remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one—tennyson was wise in giving his public the idylls of the king in fragments—if he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d have had a surfeit. i should have followed his example, but i wanted to present the thing as a whole. and it is good, however they may damn it with faint praise.’{173}
‘does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked haidee, who had gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head of which lucian’s name stood out in bold letters.
‘sell? why, i don’t think reviews make much difference to the sales of a book,’ answered lucian. ‘i really don’t know—i suppose the people who bought all my other volumes will buy this.’
but as he ate his chop and drank his coffee he began to wonder what would happen if the new volume did not sell. he knew exactly how many copies of his other volumes had been sold up to the end of the previous half-year: it was no business instinct that made him carry the figures in his mind, but rather the instinct of the general who counts his prisoners, his captured eagles, and his dead enemies after a victory, and of the sportsman who knows that the magnitude of the winnings of a great racehorse is a tribute to the quality of its blood and bone and muscle. he recalled the figures of the last statement of account rendered to him by his publisher, and their comfortable rotundity cheered him. whatever the critics might say, he had a public, and a public of considerable size. and after all, this was the first time the critics had not burned incense at his shrine—he forgave them with generous readiness, and ere he rose from the breakfast table was as full as ever of confident optimism. he felt as regards those particular reviewers as a man might feel who bids all and sundry to a great feast, and finds that the first-comers are taken aback by the grand proportions of the banquet—he pitied them for their lack of appetite, but he had no doubt of the verdict of the vast majority of later comers.
but if lucian had heard some of the things that were said of him and his beloved epic in those holes and corners of literary life wherein one may hear much trenchant criticism plainly voiced, he would have felt less cock-sure about it and himself. it was the general opinion amongst a certain class of critics, who exercised{174} a certain influence upon public thought, that there was too much of the workshop in his magnum opus. it was a magnificent block of marble that he had handled, but he had handled it too much, and the result would have been greater if he had not perpetually hovered about it with a hungry chisel and an itching mallet. it was perfect in form and language and proportion, but it wanted life and fire and rude strength.
‘it reminds me,’ said one man, discussing it in a club corner where coffee cups, liqueur glasses, and cigarettes were greatly in evidence, ‘of the statue of galatea, flawless, immaculate, but neuter,—yes, neuter—as it appeared at the very moment ere pygmalion’s love breathed into it the very flush, the palpitating, forceful tremor of life.’
this man was young and newly come to town—the others looked at him with shy eyes and tender sympathy, for they knew what it was that he meant to say, and they also knew, being older, how difficult it is to express oneself in words.
‘how very differently one sees things!’ sighed one of them. ‘damerel’s new poem, now, reminds me of a copy of the pink ’un, carefully edited by a committee of old maids for the use of mixed classes in infant schools.’
the young man who used mellifluous words manifested signs of astonishment. he looked at the last speaker with inquiring eyes.
‘you mean——’ he began.
‘ssh!’ whispered a voice at his elbow, ‘don’t ask him what he means at any time. he means that the thing’s lacking in virility.’
it may have been the man who likened lucian’s epic to an emasculated and expurgated pink ’un to whom was due a subsequent article in the porthole, wherein, under the heading lucian the ladylike, much sympathy was expressed with william the conqueror at his sad fate in being sung by a nineteenth-century bard. there was much good-humoured satire in that article, but a{175} good many of its points were sharply barbed, and lucian winced under them. he was beginning to find by that time that his epic was not being greeted with the enthusiasm which he had anticipated for it; the great literary papers, the influential journals of the provinces, and the critics who wrote of it in two or three of the monthly reviews, all concurred that it was very fine as a literary exercise, but each deplored the absence of a certain something which had been very conspicuous indeed in his earlier volumes.
lucian began to think things over. he remembered how his earlier work had been written—he recalled the free, joyous flush of thought, the impulse to write, the fertility and fecundity which had been his in those days, and he contrasted it all with the infinite pains which he had taken in polishing and revising the epic. it must have been the process of revision, he thought, which had sifted the fire and life out of the poem. he read and re-read passages of it—in spite of all that the critics said, they pleased him. he remembered the labour he had gone through, and valued the results by it. and finally, he put the whole affair away from him, feeling that he and his world were not in accord, and that he had better wrap himself in his cloak for a while. he spoke of the epic no more. but unfortunately for lucian, there were monetary considerations at the back of the new volume, and when he discovered at the end of a month that the sales were small and already at a standstill, he felt a sudden, strange sinking at the heart. he looked at mr. robertson, who communicated this news to him, in a fashion which showed the publisher that he did not quite understand this apparently capricious neglect on the part of the public. mr. robertson endeavoured to explain matters to him.
‘after all,’ he said, ‘there is such a thing as a vogue, and the best man may lose it. i don’t say that you have lost yours, but here’s the fact that the book is at a standstill. the faithful bought as a religious duty as soon as we published; those of the outer courts won’t buy. for{176} one thing, your poem is not quite in the fashion—what people are buying just now in poetry is patriotism up-to-date, with extension of the empire, and maxim-guns, and deification of the soldier and sailor, and so on.’
‘you talk as if there were fashions in poetry as there are in clothes,’ said lucian, with some show of scornful indignation.
‘so there are, my dear sir!’ replied the publisher. ‘if you lived less in the clouds and more in the world of plain fact you would know it. you, for instance, would think it strange, if you had ever read it, to find pollok’s poem, the course of time, selling to the extent of thousands and tens of thousands, or of tupper’s proverbial philosophy making almost as prominent a figure in the middle-class household as the bible itself. of course there’s a fashion in poetry, as there is in everything else. byron was once the fashion; mrs. hemans was once the fashion; even robert montgomery was once fashionable. you yourself were very fashionable for three years—you see, if you’ll pardon me for speaking plainly, you were an interesting young man. you had a beautiful face; you were what the women call “interesting”; you aroused all the town by your romantic marriage—you became a personality. i think you’ve had a big run of it,’ concluded mr. robertson. ‘why, lots of men come up and go down within two years—you’ve had four already.’
lucian regarded him with grave eyes.
‘do you think of me as of a rocket or a comet?’ he said. ‘if things are what you say they are, i wish i had never published anything. but i think you are wrong,’ and he went away to consider all that had been said to him. he decided, after some thought and reflection, that his publisher was not arguing on sound lines, and he assured himself for the hundredth time that the production of the tragedy would put everything right.
it was now very near to the day on which the tragedy was to be produced at the athen?um, and both lucian and mr. harcourt had been worried to the point of death{177} by pressmen who wanted to know all about it. chiefly owing to their persistency the public were now in possession of a considerable amount of information as to what it might expect to hear and see. it was to witness—that portion of it, at any rate, which was lucky enough to secure seats for the first night—an attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure greek art. as this attempt was being made at the close of the nineteenth century, it was quite in accordance with everything that vast sums of money should be laid out on costumes, scenery, and accessories, and it was well known to the readers of the halfpenny newspapers that the production involved the employment of so many hundreds of supernumeraries, that so many thousands of pounds had been spent on the scenery, that certain realistic effects had been worked up at enormous cost, and that the whole affair, to put it in plain language, was a gigantic business speculation—nothing more nor less, indeed, than the provision of a gorgeous spectacular drama, full of life and colour and modern stage effects, which should be enthralling and commanding enough to attract the public until a handsome profit had been made on the outlay. but the words ‘an attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure greek art’ looked well in print, and had a highly respectable sound, and the production of lucian’s second tribute to the tragic muse was looked forward to with much interest by many people who ignored the fact that many thousands of pounds were being expended in placing it upon the stage.