Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He pushed on to Mr. Brandreth’s room, tense with his purpose, and stood scowling and silent when he found Kane there with him. Perhaps the old fellow divined the danger in Ray’s mood; perhaps he pitied him; perhaps he was really interested in the thing which he was talking of with the publisher, and which he referred to Ray without any preliminary ironies.

  “It’s about the career of a book; how it begins to go, and why, and when.”

  “Apropos of A Modern Romeo?” Ray asked, harshly.

  “If you please, A Modem Romeo Ray took the chair which Mr. Brandreth signed a clerk to bring him from without. Kane went on: “It’s very curious, the history of these things, and I’ve looked into it somewhat. Ordinarily a book makes its fortune, or it doesn’t, at once. I should say this was always the case with a story that had already been published serially; but with a book that first appears as a book, the chances seem to be rather more capricious. The first great success with us was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that was assured before the story was finished in the old National Era, where it was printed. But that had an immense motive power behind it — a vital question that affected the whole nation.”

  “I seem to have come too late for the vital questions,” said Ray.

  “Oh no! oh no! There are always plenty of them left. There is the industrial slavery, which exists on a much more universal scale than the chattel slavery; that is still waiting its novelist.”

  “Or its Trust of novelists,” Ray scornfully suggested.

  “Very good; very excellent good; nothing less than a syndicate perhaps could grapple with a theme of such vast dimensions.”

  “It would antagonize a large part of the reading public,” Mr. Brandreth said; but he had the air of making a mental memorandum to keep an eye out for MSS. dealing with industrial slavery.

  “So much the better! So much the better!” said Kane. “Robert Elsmere antagonized much more than half its readers by its religious positions. But that wasn’t what I was trying to get at. I was thinking about how some of the phenomenally successful books hung fire at first.”

  “Ah, that interests me as the author of a phenominally successful book that is still hanging fire,” sighed Ray.

  Kane smiled approval of his attempt to play with his pain, and went on: “You know that Gates Ajar, which sold up into the hundred thousands, was three months selling the first fifteen hundred.”

  “Is that so?’ Ray asked. “A Modern Romeo has been three weeks selling the first fifteen.” He laughed, and Mr. Brandreth with him; but the fact encouraged him, and he could see that it encouraged the publisher.

  “We won’t speak of Mr. Barnes of New York” —

  “Oh no! Don’t!” cried Ray.

  “You might be very glad to have written it on some accounts, my dear boy,” said Kane.

  “Have you read it?”

  “That’s neither here nor there. I haven’t seen Little Lord Fauntleroy. But I wanted to speak of Looking Backward. Four months after that was published, the first modest edition was still unsold.”

  Kane rose. “I just dropped in to impart these facts to your publisher, in case you and he might be getting a little impatient of the triumph which seems to be rather behind time. I suppose you’ve noticed it? These little disappointments are not suffered in a corner.”

  “Then your inference is that at the end of three or four months A Modern Romeo will be selling at the rate of five hundred a day? I’m glad for Brandreth here, but I shall be dead by that time.”

  “Oh no! Oh no!” Kane softly entreated, while he took Ray’s hand between his two hands. “One doesn’t really die of disappointed literature any more than one dies of disappointed love. That is one of the pathetic superstitions which we like to cherish in a world where we get well of nearly all our hurts, and live on to a hale old imbecility. Depend upon it, my dear boy, you will survive your book at least fifty years.” Kane wrung Ray’s hand, and got himself quickly away.

  “There is a good deal of truth in what he says” — Mr. Brandreth began cheerfully.

  “About my outliving my book?” Ray asked. “Thank you. There’s all the truth in the world in it.”

  “I don’t mean that, of course. I mean the chances that it will pick up any time within three months, and make its fortune.”

  “You’re counting on a lucky accident.”

  “Yes, I am. I’ve done everything I can to push the book, and now we must trust to luck. You have to trust to luck in the book business, in every business. Business is buying on the chance of selling at a profit. The political economists talk about the laws of business; but there are no laws of business. There is nothing but chances, and no amount of wisdom can forecast them or control them. You had better be prudent, but if you are always prudent you will die poor. ‘Be bold; be bold; be not too bold.’ That’s about all there is of it. And I’m going to be cheerful too. I’m still betting on A Modem Romeo.” The young publisher leaned forward and put his hand on Ray’s shoulder, in a kindly way, and shook him a little. “Come! What will you bet that it doesn’t begin to go within the next fortnight? I don’t ask you to put up any money. Will you risk the copyright on the first thousand?”

  “No, I won’t bet,” said Ray, more spiritlessly than he felt, for the proposition to relinquish a part of his copyright realized it to him. Still he found it safest not to allow himself any revival of his hopes; if he did it would be tempting fate to dash them again. In that way he had often got the better of fate; there was no other way to do it, at least for him.

  XLI.

  AFTER a silent and solitary dinner, Hay went to see Mrs. Denton and Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes’s Sunday ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes’s doctrine, and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes’s daughters. They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the machinist’s friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of Ray’s relation to them. She always received him like one of the family, and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.

  That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, “Go right along up; I guess you’ll find them there all right,” and Ray mounted obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in her arms. “Oh, well!” she said. “You’ll find Peace at home; I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between himself and Peace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city’s worst; and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.

  He said: “Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn’t feel my way with Nature at every step she took. It’s like a great loss out of my life. I think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back. I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another spring. Why didn’t I do it?”

  “Perhaps you couldn’t have done your work
there,” she suggested.

  “Oh, my work! That is what people are always sacrificing the good of life to — their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn’t do my newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another unsuccessful novel.”

  “Is your novel a failure?” she asked. “ Don’t you know it is? It’s been out three weeks, and nobody seems to know it. That’s my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don’t complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw him just before dinner. But I haven’t the least hope any more. I think I could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail in a bad cause — that’s bitter.” He stopped, knowing as well as if he had put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if possible, flatter him.

  “I’ve been reading it all through again, since it came out,” she said.

  “Oh, have you?” he palpitated.

  “And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way” —

  “Yes?”

  “And they have been talking to me about it; they have been discussing the characters in it. They like it because they say they can understand just how every one felt. They like the hero, and Mrs. Simpson cried over the last scene. She thinks you have managed the heroine’s character beautifully. Mr. Simpson wondered whether you really believe in hypnotism. They both said they felt as if they were living it.”

  Ray listened with a curious mixture of pleasure and of pain. He knew very well that it was not possible for such people as the Simpsons to judge his story with as fine artistic perception as that old society woman who thought he meant to make his characters cheap and ridiculous, and in the light of this knowledge their praise galled him. But then came the question whether they could not judge better of its truth and reality. If he had made a book which appealed to the feeling and knowledge of the great, simply-conditioned, sound-hearted, common-schooled American mass whom the Simpsons represented, he had made his fortune. He put aside that other question, which from time to time presses upon every artist, whether he would rather please the few who despise the judgment of the many, or the many who have no taste, but somehow have in their keeping the touchstone by which a work of art proves itself a human interest, and not merely a polite pleasure. Ray could not make this choice. He said dreamily: “If Mr. Brandreth could only find out how to reach all the Simpsons with it! I believe a twenty-five-cent paper edition would be the thing after all. I wish you could tell me just what Mr. and Mrs. Simpson said of the book; and if you can remember what they disliked as well as what they liked in it.”

  Peace laughed a little. “Oh, they disliked the wicked people. They thought the hard old father of the heroine was terrible, and was justly punished by his daughter’s death. At the same time they thought you ought to have had her revive in time to seize the hero’s hand, when he is going to shoot himself, and keep him from giving himself a mortal wound. The cousin ought to get well, too; or else confess before he dies that he intended to throw the hero over the cliff, so that it could be made out a case of self-defence. Mr. Simpson says that could be done to the satisfaction of any jury.”

  Ray laughed too. “Yes. It would have been more popular if it had ended well.”

  “Perhaps not,” Peace suggested. “Isn’t it the great thing to make people talk about a book? If it ended well they wouldn’t have half so much to say as they will now about it.”

  “Perhaps,” Ray assented with meek hopefulness. “But, Peace, what do you say about it? You’ve never told me that yet. Do you really despise it so much?”

  “I’ve never said that I despised it.”

  “You’ve never said you didn’t, and by everything that you’ve done, you’ve left me to think that you do. I know,” said the young man, “that I’m bringing up associations and recollections that must be painful to you; they’re painful and humiliating to me. But it seems to me that you owe me that much.”

  “I owe you much more than that,” said the girl. “Do you think that I forget — can forget — anything —— all that you’ve been to us?”

  “Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Ray. “I didn’t mean that. And you needn’t tell me now what you think of my book. But sometime you will, won’t you?” He drew forward a little nearer to her, where they sat in the light which had begun to wane. “Until then — until then — I want you to let me be the best friend you have in the world — the best friend I can be to any one.”

  He stopped for some answer from her, and she said: “No one could be a truer friend to us than you have been, from the very first. And we have mixed you up so in our trouble!”

  “Oh, no! But if it’s given me any sort of right to keep on coming to see Mrs. Denton and you, just as I used?”

  “Why not?” she returned.

  XLII.

  RAT went home ill at ease with himself. He spent a bad night, and he seemed to have sunk away only a moment from his troubles, when a knock at his door brought him up again into the midst of them. He realized them before he realized the knock sufficiently to call out, “Who’s there?”

  “Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth’s voice without; “you’re not up yet! Can I come in?”

  “Certainly,” said Ray, and he leaned forward and slid, back the bolt of his door: it was one advantage of a room so small that he could do this without getting out of bed.

  Mr. Brandreth seemed to beam with one radiance from his silk hat, his collar, his boots, his scarf, his shining eyes and smooth-shaven friendly face, as he entered.

  “Of course,” he said, “you haven’t seen the Metropolis yet?”

  “No; what is the matter with the Metropolis?” Mr. Brandreth, with his perfectly fitted gloves on, and his natty cane dangling from his wrist, unfolded the supplement of the newspaper, and accurately folded it again to the lines of the first three columns of the page. Then he handed it to Ray, and delicately turned away and looked out of the window.

  Ray glanced at the space defined, and saw that it was occupied by a review of A Modern Romeo. There were lengths of large open type for the reviewer’s introduction and comments and conclusion, and embedded among these, in closer and finer print, extracts from the novel, where Ray saw his own language transfigured and glorified.

  The critic struck in the beginning a note which he sounded throughout; a cry of relief, of exultation, at what was apparently the beginning of a new order of things in fiction. He hailed the unknown writer of A Modem Romeo as the champion of the imaginative and the ideal against the photographic and the commonplace, and he expressed a pious joy in the novel as a bold advance in the path that was to lead forever away from the slough of realism. But he put on a philosophic air in making the reader observe that it was not absolutely a new departure, a break, a schism; it was a natural and scientific evolution, it was a development of the spiritual from the material; the essential part of realism was there, but freed from the grossness, the dulness of realism as we had hitherto known it, and imbued with a fresh life. He called attention to the firmness and fineness with which the situation was portrayed and the characters studied before the imagination began to deal with them; and then he asked the reader to notice how, when this foundation had once been laid, it was made to serve as a “star-pointing pyramid” from which the author’s fancy took its bold flight through realms un travelled by the photographic and the commonplace. He praised the style of the book, which he said corresponded to the dual nature of the conception, and recalled Thackeray in the treatment of persons and things, and Hawthorne in the handling of motives and ideas. There was, in fact, so much subtlety in the author’s dealing with these, that one might almost suspect a feminine touch, but for the free and virile strength shown in the passages of passion and action.

  The reviewer quoted several of such passages, and Ray followed with a novel intensity of interest the words he already knew b
y heart. The whole episode of throwing the cousin over the cliff was reprinted; but the parts which the reviewer gave the largest room and the loudest praise were those embodying the incidents of the hypnotic trance and the tragical close of the story. Here, he said, was a piece of the most palpitant actuality, and he applauded it as an instance of how the imagination might deal with actuality. Nothing in the whole range of commonplace, photographic, realistic fiction was of such striking effect as this employment of a scientific discovery in the region of the ideal. He contended that whatever lingering doubt people might have of the usefulness of hypnotism as a remedial agent, there could be no question of the splendid success with which the writer of this remarkable novel had turned it to account in poetic fiction of a very high grade. He did not say the highest grade; the book had many obvious faults. It was evidently the first book of a young writer, whose experience of life had apparently been limited to a narrow and comparatively obscure field. It was in a certain sense provincial, even parochial; but perhaps the very want of an extended horizon had concentrated the author’s thoughts the more penetratingly on the life immediately at hand. What was important was that he had seen this life with the vision of an idealist, and had discerned its poetic uses with the sense of the born artist, and had set it in

  “The light that never was on sea or land.”

  Much more followed to like effect, and the reviewer closed with a promise to look with interest for the future performance of a writer who had already given much more than the promise of mastery; who had given proofs of it. His novel might not be the great American novel which we had so long been expecting, but it was a most notable achievement in the right direction. The author was the prophet of better things; he was a Moses, who, if we followed him, would lead us up from the flesh-pots of Realism toward the promised land of the Ideal.