a decadence in taste or not, the future alone can decide. About the literary demands of the future it is at present impossible to say anything excepting what may be surely asserted of every epoch, that its literary demand will be different from those of the epoch that preceded it.

No reason is apparent why a novelist who should meet the literary demand of his day, and speak to the sentiments of the thousands, as Scott and Dickens spoke to the sentiments of their respective epochs, should not find the same welcome that the public accorded to Dickens and Scott. Only to secure that result, there must be some communion of thought between the novelist and his readers. That is a point which deserves every novelist's consideration. Even the very greatest novels are read more for the pleasure and entertainment which they afford then for any other reason; and unless he can please and entertain, the novelist is hardly justified in asking for a welcome. There have been great novelists who have not chosen to meet the wishes of the wide public. Thackeray was one of them. No man possessed a gentler heart: but his own gentleness was the occasion of his perceiving plainly the coarseness and callous hy

pocrisies that are in the world. "He wrote of the world and its people as he saw them, and so disgusted many. . . . The principal objections, maintained to this day, are that he never drew a good man or woman who was not insipid; that cynicism an aggravated cynicism—is the key note of his philosophy. . . . He knew that the general reader wants sentiment; not truth: but he would only give them truth. They have not the courage or is it the discernment they lack? to see things as they are, and they only see them, and ask to have them described in books as they wish them to be. This to Thackeray's clear intellect, did not seem honest" (Lewis Melville. Life of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, pp. 239 and 244). This resolution to make no concessions to human frailty narrowed his public. A novelist of the present day may find himself also confronted with the same difficulty, and compelled to ask himself whether he will make concessions or not. The question is one which every man must answer for himself. Mankind are so made that not the novelist alone, but almost every one who would address many, has often to determine whether he will be contented to be partly under

stood by many, or fully understood by very few.

A novelist who has learned his craft, who will do his best and persevere - one of these is not enough without the others may feel certain in time of finding his public. It will not be all the public. No novelist, not even Dickens, ever commanded the whole public. The varieties and the many delicate shades of differing tastes make universal acceptance impossible. The public is never found at once: because (which is the same thing in other words) it always takes the public some time to find out that the author and his works exist. Reviews and advertisements, and all the other inventions for attracting public notice, have some, but not a very great, effect. "The success of fiction depends much more upon what Mrs. Brown says to Mrs. Jones as to the necessity of getting that charming book from the library while there is yet time, than on all the reviews in Christendom" (James Payn. Some Private Views. The Critic on the Hearth).

CHAPTER X

AUTHORSHIP

AUTHORS are by no means necessarily always professional men of letters. Many books, some of them works of inestimable value, have been written by busy men of other professions. Common courtesy assigns to the stranger the right of precedence, and the case of authors who are not professional writers may, therefore, with justice be here considered first. The essential question is, what counsels can be best offered to the men of action, men of science, and others possessed of special knowledge or attainments, who for one reason or another sit down to write a book.

Be it said first of all that there is no man of any calling who may not justly feel that he has solid and cogent reasons for wishing to take up his pen. Knowledge of any kind is a priceless possession, certain to be useful to others besides the individual who first gathers it. Such knowledge can, at the same time, be rescued from oblivion, and

made generally serviceable to mankind only by being recorded in a book. Had not the fruits of the researches of the past been set down in writing, and subsequently made widely accessible by the invention of printing, the successive generations of men would be born incapable of advancing much beyond the condition of the poorest savage. The man who knows anything not generally known has, therefore, ipso facto a sufficient reason for recording it if he can. If he cannot, mankind are by so much the losers when his knowledge departs with him.

Everything is, however, more difficult to do than it appears before it has been attempted; and to this universal rule the writing of a book forms no exception. The man who does not bestow upon the task much serious labour will never succeed in producing a work that is worth publishing. The difficulties which will be encountered will nevertheless vary greatly in the case of different individuals. As a man who has never learned to play, or one who has never learned to paint, may possess some inborn capacity for art or music, so a man who has never attempted to write may have some natural capacity that will very much lighten his toil.