But though I admit that money has been lost, I do not think the losses have been heavy.  After all, no idolized author and no diabolic agent can force a publisher to pay more than he really wants to pay.  And no diabolic agent, having once bitten a publisher, can persuade that publisher to hold out his generous hand to be bitten again.  These are truisms.  Lastly, I am quite sure that, out of books, a great deal more money has been made by publishers than by authors, and that this will always be so.  The threatened crisis in publishing has nothing to do with the prices paid to authors, which on the whole are now fairly just (very different from what they were twenty years ago, when authors had to accept whatever was condescendingly offered to them).  And if a crisis does come, the people to suffer will happily be those who can best afford to suffer.

THE NOVEL OF THE SEASON

[11 July ’08]

The publishing season—­the bad publishing season—­is now practically over, and publishers may go away for their holidays comforted by the fact that they will not begin to lose money again till the autumn.  It only remains to be decided which is the novel of the season.  Those interested in the question may expect it to be decided at any moment, either in the British Weekly or the Sphere.  I take up these journals with a thrill of anticipation.  For my part, I am determined only to decide which is not the novel of the season.  There are several novels which are not the novel of the season.  Perhaps the chief of them is Mr. E.C.  Booth’s “The Cliff End,” which counts among sundry successes to the score of Mr. Grant Richards.  Everything has been done for it that reviewing can do, and it has sold, and it is an ingenious and giggling work, but not the novel of the season.

The reviews of “The Cliff End,” almost unanimously laudatory, show in a bright light our national indifference to composition in art.  Some reviewers, while stating that the story itself was a poor one, insisted that Mr. Booth is a born and accomplished story-teller.  Story-tellers born and accomplished do not tell poor stories.  A poor story is the work of a poor story-teller.  And the story of “The Cliff End” is merely absurd.  It is worse, if possible, than the story of Mr. Maxwell’s “Vivien,” which reviewers accepted.  It would appear that with certain novels the story doesn’t matter!  I really believe that composition, the foundation of all arts, including the art of fiction, is utterly unconsidered in England.  Or if it is considered, it is painfully misunderstood.  I remember how the panjandrums condescendingly pointed out the bad construction of Mr. Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” one of the most noble examples of fine composition in modern literature, and but slightly disfigured by a detail of clumsy machinery.  In “The Cliff End” there is simply no composition that is not clumsy and conventional.  All that