many books are published.  Authors and their agents have evidently some miraculous method of forcing publishers to publish books which they do not want to publish.  I am not a member of the trade, but I should have thought that few things could be easier than not to publish a book.  Presumably the agent stands over the publisher with a contract in one hand and a revolver in the other, and, after a glance at the revolver, the publisher signs without glancing at the contract.  Secondly, it appears, authors and their agents habitually compel the publisher to pay too much, so that he habitually publishes at a loss. (Novels, that is.) I should love to know how the trick is done, but “a well-known member of the trade” does not go into details.  He merely states the broad fact.  Thirdly, the sevenpenny reprint of the popular novel is ruining the already ruined six-shilling novel.  It is comforting to perceive that this wickedness on the part of the sevenpenny reprint cannot indefinitely continue.  For when there are no six-shilling novels to reprint, obviously there can be no sevenpenny reprints of them.  There is justice in England yet; but a well-known member of the trade has not noticed that the sevenpenny novel, in killing its own father, must kill itself.  At any rate he does not refer to the point.

I have been young, and now am nearly old.  Silvered is the once brown hair.  Dim is the eye that on a time could decipher minion type by moonlight.  But never have I seen the publisher without a fur coat in winter nor his seed begging bread.  Nor do I expect to see such sights.  Yet I have seen an author begging bread, and instead of bread, I gave him a railway ticket.  Authors have always been in the wrong, and they always will be:  grasping, unscrupulous, mercenary creatures that they are!  Some of them haven’t even the wit to keep their books from being burnt at the stake by the executioners of the National Vigilance Association.  I wonder that publishers don’t dispense with them altogether, and carry on unaided the great tradition of English literature.  Anyhow, publishers have had my warm sympathy this Christmas-time.  When I survey myself, as an example, lapped in luxury and clinking multitudinous gold coins extorted from publishers by my hypnotizing rascal of an agent; and when I think of the publishers, endeavouring in their fur coats to keep warm in fireless rooms and picking turkey limbs while filling up bankruptcy forms—­I blush.  Or I should blush, were not authors notoriously incapable of that action.

1909

“ECCE HOMO”

[7 Jan. ’09]

The people who live in the eye of the public have been asked, as usual, to state what books during the past year have most interested them, and they have stated.  This year I think the lists are less funny than usual.  But some items give joy.  Thus the Bishop of London has read Mr. A.E.W.  Mason’s “The Broken Road” with interest and pleasure.  Mr. Frederic Harrison, along with two historical works,