* * * * *

In the Shaw and Co. report, in the arguments of publishers, in the arguments booksellers, not a word about the interests of the consumer!  Yet the consumer will settle the affair ultimately.  That the price of new novels will come down is absolutely certain.  It will come down because it is ridiculous, and no mandarinic efforts can keep it up.  In the process of readjustment many people will temporarily suffer, and a few people will be annihilated.  But things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be.  Why, therefore, should we deceive ourselves?  I quite expect to suffer myself.  I shall not, however, complain of the cosmic movement.  The auctorial report (which, by the way, is full of common sense) envisages immense changes in the book market.  I agree.  And I am sure that these changes will come about in the teeth of violent opposition from both publishers and booksellers.  The book market is growing steadily.  It is enormous compared to what used to be.  And yet it is only in its infancy.  The inhabitants of this country have scarcely even begun to buy books.  Wait a few years and you will see!

MEREDITH

[27 May ’09]

The death of George Meredith removes, not the last of the Victorian novelists, but the first of the modern school.  He was almost the first English novelist whose work reflected an intelligent interest in the art which he practised; and he was certainly the first since Scott who was really a literary man.  Even Scott was more of an antiquary than a man of letters—­apart from his work.  Can one think of Dickens as a man of letters, as one who cared for books, as one whose notions on literature were worth twopence?  And Thackeray’s opinions on contemporary and preceding writers condemn him past hope of forgiveness.  Thackeray was in Paris during the most productive years of French fiction, the sublime decade of Balzac, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo.  And his “Paris Sketch-Book” proves that his attitude towards the marvels by which he was surrounded was the attitude of a clubman.  These men wrote; they got through their writing as quickly as they could; and during the rest of the day they were clubmen, or hosts, or guests.  Trollope, who dashed off his literary work with a watch in front of him before 8.30 of a morning, who hunted three days a week, dined out enormously, and gave his best hours to fighting Rowland Hill in the Post Office—­Trollope merely carried to its logical conclusion the principle of his mightier rivals.  What was the matter with all of them, after a holy fear of their publics, was simple ignorance.  George Eliot was not ignorant.  Her mind was more distinguished than the minds of the great three.  But she was too preoccupied by moral questions to be a first-class creative artist.  And she was a woman.  A woman, at that epoch, dared not write an entirely honest novel!  Nor a man either!  Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England.  The fear of the public, the lust of popularity, feminine prudery, sentimentalism, Victorian niceness—­one or other of these things prevented honesty.