II.  The Sleepy Publisher

The publisher to whom our author had confided his manuscript stood, like all publishers, at the very head of his profession.  His business was conducted on sound conservative lines, which means that though he had regretfully abandoned the three-volume novel for the novel published at six shillings, he was not among the intrepid revolutionaries who were beginning to produce new fiction at a still lower price.  Besides novels he published solid works of biography at thirty-one and six, art books at a guinea, travel books at fifteen shillings, flighty historical works at twelve-and-sixpence, and cheap editions of Montaigne’s Essays and “Robinson Crusoe” at a shilling.  Some idea of his business methods may be derived from the fact that it pleased him to reflect that all the other publishers were producing exactly the same books as he was.  And though he would admit that the trade had been ruined by competition and the outrageous royalties demanded by successful authors, and, further, that he made a loss on every separate department of his business, in some mysterious fashion the business as a whole continued to pay him very well.  He left the active part of the management to a confidential clerk, and contented himself with signing cheques and interviewing authors.

With such a publisher the fate of our author’s book was never in doubt.  If it was lacking in those qualities that might be expected to commend it to the reading public, it was conspicuously rich in those merits that determine the favourable judgment of publishers’ readers.  It was above all things a gentlemanly book, without violence and without eccentricities.  It was carefully and grammatically written; but it had not that exotic literary flavour which is so tiresome on a long railway journey.  It could be put into the hands of any schoolgirl, and at most would merely send her to sleep.  The only thing that could be said against it was that the author’s dread of inspiration had made it grievously dull, but it was the publisher’s opinion that after a glut of sensational fiction the six-shilling public had come to regard dullness as the hall-mark of literary merit.  He had no illusions as to its possible success, but, on the other hand, he knew that he could not lose any money on it, so he wrote a letter to the author inviting him to an interview.

As soon as he had read the letter the author told himself that he had been certain all along that his book would be accepted.  Nevertheless, he went to the interview moved by certain emotional flutterings against which circumstance had guarded him ever since his boyhood.  He found this mild excitation of the nervous system by no means unpleasant.  It was like digesting a new and subtle liqueur that made him light-footed and tingled in the tips of his fingers.  He recalled a phrase that had greatly pleased him in the early days of his novel.  “As the sun colours flowers, so Art colours life.”  It seemed to him that this was beginning to come true, and that life was already presenting itself to him in a gayer, brighter dress.  He reached the publisher’s office, therefore, in an unwontedly receptive mood, and was tremendously impressed by the rudeness of the clerks, who treated authors as mendicants and expressed their opinion of literature by handling books as if they were bundles of firewood.