so natural.  How can we help it, seeing that we are undisciplined and standardless, seeing that we started without the backbone that schooling gives?  Here and there among us is a genius, here and there a man of exceptional stability who trains himself in spite of all the forces working for his destruction.  But those who do not publish until they can express, and do not express until they have something worth expressing, are so rare that they can be counted on the fingers of three or perhaps four hands; mercifully, we all—­or nearly all believe ourselves of that company.

It is the fashion to say that the public will have what it wants.  Certainly the Public will have what it wants if what it wants is given to the Public.  If what it now wants were suddenly withdrawn, the Public, the big Public, would by an obvious natural law take the lowest of what remained; if that again were withdrawn, it would take the next lowest, until by degrees it took a relatively good article.  The Public, the big Public, is a mechanical and helpless consumer at the mercy of what is supplied to it, and this must ever be so.  The Public then is not to blame for the supply of bad, false fiction.  The Press is not to blame, for the Press, like the Public, must take what is set before it; their Critics, for the most part, like ourselves have been to no school, passed no test of fitness, received no certificate; they cannot lead us, it is we who lead them, for without the Critics we could live but without us the Critics would die.  We cannot, therefore, blame the Press.  Nor is the Publisher to blame; for the Publisher will publish what is set before him.  It is true that if he published no books on commission he would deserve the praise of the State, but it is quite unreasonable for us to expect him to deserve the praise of the State, since it is we who supply him with these books and incite him to publish them.  We cannot, therefore, lay the blame on the Publisher.

We must lay the blame where it clearly should be laid, on ourselves.  We ourselves create the demand for bad and false fiction.  Very many of us have private means; for such there is no excuse.  Very many of us have none; for such, once started on this journey of fiction, there is much, often tragic, excuse—­the less reason then for not having trained ourselves before setting out on our way.  There is no getting out of it; the fault is ours.  If we will not put ourselves to school when we are young; if we must rush into print before we can spell; if we will not repress our natural desires and walk before we run; if we will not learn at least what not to do—­we shall go on wandering through the forest, singing our foolish songs.

And since we cannot train ourselves except by writing, let us write, and burn what we write; then shall we soon stop writing, or produce what we need not burn!

For, as things are now, without compass, without map, we set out into the twilight forest of fiction; without path, without track—­and we never emerge.