Such is the publishers’ explanation of the crisis.  I shall keep my own explanation till the crisis is a little more advanced and ready to burst.  In the meantime I should like to ask:  How do people manage to range over the whole period of the novel’s history and definitely decide that novels were never so bad as they are now?  I am personally inclined to think that at no time has the average novel been so good as it is to-day. (This view, by the way, is borne out by publishers’ own advertisements, which abound in the word “masterpiece” quoted from infallible critics of great masterpieces!) Let any man who disagrees with me dare go to Mudie’s and get out a few forgotten novels of thirty years ago and try to read them!  Also, I am prepared to offer L50 for the name and address of a literary agent who is capable of getting the better of a publisher.  I am widely acquainted with publishers and literary agents, and though I have often met publishers who have got the better of literary agents, I have never met a literary agent who has come out on top of a publisher.  Such a literary agent is badly wanted.  I have been looking for him for years.  I know a number of authors who would join me in enriching that literary agent.  The publishers are always talking about him.  I seldom go into a publisher’s office but that literary agent has just left (gorged with illicit gold).  It irritates me that I cannot run across him.  If I were a publisher, he would have been in prison ere now.  Briefly, the manner in which certain prominent publishers, even clever ones, talk about literary agents is silly.

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Still, I am ready to believe that publishers have lost money over the six-shilling novel.  I am acquainted with the details of several instances of such loss.  And in every case the loss has been the result of gambling on the part of the publisher.  I do not hesitate to say that the terms offered in late years by some publishers to some popular favourites have been grotesquely inflated.  Publishers compete among themselves, and then, when the moment comes for paying the gambler’s penalty, they complain of having been swindled.  Note that the losses of publishers are nearly always on the works of the idols of the crowd.  They want the idol’s name as an ornament to their lists, and they commit indiscretions in order to get it.  Fantastic terms are never offered to the solid, regular, industrious, medium novelist.  And it is a surety that fantastic terms are never offered to the beginner.  Ask, and learn.

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