Arnold Bennett

“ Every one who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that ensues when for the first time in your life you pull the starting lever, and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move. It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like that as I watched the progress of my first play. It was as though I had unwittingly liberated an energy greater than I knew, actually created something vital. This illusion of physical vitality is the exclusive possession of the dramatist; the novelist, the poet, cannot share it. The play was a delicious success. ”

“ I have never known a reviewer to answer this insinuation straightforwardly in print, but I will answer it: No, I do not.
And the man in the street says, shocked: "You are unjust."
And I reply: "Not at all. I am merely an expert."
The performances of the expert in any craft will surprise and amaze the inexpert. Come with me into my study and I will surprise and amaze you. Have I been handling novels for bread-and-cheese all these years and not learnt to judge them by any process quicker than that employed by you who merely pick up a novel for relaxation after dinner? ”

“ It is, I believe, an historical fact that authors seldom attend the funeral of a publisher's reader. They approve the sepulture, but do not, save sometimes in a spirit of ferocious humour, lend to the procession the dignity of their massive figures. Nevertheless, the publisher's reader is the most benevolent person on earth. He is so perforce. He may begin his labours in the slaughterous vein of the "Saturday Review"; but time and the extraordinary level mediocrity of manuscripts soon cure him of any such tendency. He comes to refuse but remains to accept. ”

“ I had regarded fiction as—fiction, a concoction on the plane of the Grand Canal, or the Zocodover at Toledo. But in this other literature I was obliged to begin with life itself. The wheel of a dog-cart spinning off as it jammed against a projecting bit of tram-line; a cyclist overset: what was there in that? Nothing. Yet I had taken that nothing and transformed it into something—something that seemed important, permanent, literary. I did not comprehend the process, but I saw its result. I do not comprehend it now. The man who could explain it could answer the oft-repeated cry: What is Art? ”

“ My moods have always been a series of violent contrasts, and I was now just as uplifted as I had before been depressed. There were interludes of doubt and difficulty, but on the whole I was charmed with my novel. It would be a despicable affectation to disguise the fact that I deemed it a truly distinguished piece of literature, idiosyncratic, finely imaginative, and of rhythmic contour. As I approached the end, my self-esteem developed in a crescendo. I finished the tale, having sentenced my hero to a marriage infallibly disastrous, at three o'clock one morning. ”

“ As a journeyman author, with the ability and inclination to turn my pen in any direction at request, I long ago established a rule never to work for less than ten shillings an hour on piecework. If an editor commissioned an article, he received from me as much fundamental brain-power and as much time as the article demanded—up to the limit of his pay in terms of hours at ten shillings apiece. But each year I raise my price per hour. Of course, when I am working on my own initiative, for the sole advancement of my artistic reputation, I ignore finance and think of glory alone. ”

“ Of course it is not a recipe for every artist. I have known artists, and genuine ones, who could keep their minds empty and suck in the beauty of the world for evermore without the slightest difficulty; who only wrote, as the early Britons hunted, when they were hungry and there was nothing in the pot. But I was not of that species. On the contrary, the incurable habit of industry, the itch for the pen, was my chiefest curse. To be unproductive for more than a couple of days or so was to be miserable. ”

“ I thought I knew all about journalism for women, and I found that I knew scarcely the fringe of it. A man may be a sub-editor, or even an assistant-editor, for half a lifetime, and yet remain ignorant of the true significance of journalism. Those first months were months of experience in a very poignant sense. The proprietary desired certain modifications in the existing policy. O that mysterious "policy," which has to be created and built up out of articles, paragraphs, and pictures! That thrice-mysterious "public taste" which has to be aimed at in the dark and hit! ”

“ When I have decided that it interests the imaginary composite whom I represent, then I become myself again, and proceed scientifically to enquire why it has interested, and why it has not interested more intensely; I proceed to catalogue its good and bad qualities, to calculate its chances, to assay its monetary worth.
The first gift of a publisher's reader should be imagination; without imagination, the power to put himself in a position in which actually he is not, fine taste is useless—indeed, it is worse than useless. ”

“ The point I wish to make, however, is that when I sit down to read for my publisher I first of all forget my literary exclusiveness. I sink the aesthetic aristocrat and become a plain man. By a deliberate act of imagination, I put myself in the place, not of the typical average reader—for there is no such person—but of a composite of the various genera of average reader known to publishing science. I am that composite for the time; and, being so, I remain quiescent and allow f the book to produce its own effect on me. I employ no canons, rules, measures. ”

“ When the last thousand is printed and the parcels are in the vans, then you gaze at the unalterable thing, and you see it coldly as it actually is. You see not what you intended, but what you have accomplished. And the difference! It is like the chill, steely dawn after the vague poetry of a moonlit night.
There is no peace for an editor. He may act the farce of taking a holiday, but the worm of apprehension is always gnawing at the root of pleasure. I once put my organ to bed and went off by a late train in a perfect delirium of joyous anticipation of my holiday. ”

“ Unique among all suspenses is the suspense that occupies the editorial mind between the moment of finally going to press and the moment of examining the issue on the morning of publication. Errors, appalling and disastrous errors, will creep in; and they are irremediable then. These mishaps occur to the most exalted papers, to all papers, except perhaps the "Voce della Verità," which, being the organ of the Pope, is presumably infallible. Tales circulate in Fleet Street that make the hair stand on end; and every editor says: "This might have happened to me." ”

“ Life being grey, sinister, and melancholy, my novel must be grey, sinister, and melancholy. As a matter of strict fact, life deserved none of these epithets; I was having a very good time; but at twenty-seven one is captious, and liable to err in judgment—a liability which fortunately disappears at thirty-five or so. No startling events were to occur in my novel, nor anything out of the way that might bring the blush of shame to the modesty of nature ”

“ Nevertheless, to myself I did not yet dare to call myself an artist. I lacked the courage to believe that I had the sacred fire, the inborn and not-to-be-acquired vision. It seemed impossible that this should be so. I have ridiculed the whole artist tribe, and, in the pursuit of my vocation, I shall doubtless ridicule them again; but never seriously. Nothing is more deeply rooted in me than my reverence for the artistic faculty. And whenever I say, "The man's an artist," I say it with an instinctive solemnity that so far as I am concerned ends all discussion. ”

“ It happened to me to see quite sane and sober writing persons gurgle with joy over the mere recollection of sundry scenes in my autobiography. But Mr. Andrew Chatto, an expert of immense experience, gave me his opinion, with perhaps even more than his customary blandness, that the public would have no use for my autobiography. I could scarcely adopt his view. It seemed to me impossible that so honest a disclosure, which had caused such unholy joy in some of the most weary hearts that London contains, should pass unheeded by a more general public. ”

“ Business is business: and he as well as I knew that arbitrary rules to the exclusion of editors must give way before this great and sublime truth, the foundation of England's glory.
The next thing was to concoct the serial. I had entered into a compact with myself that I would never "write down" to the public in a long fiction. I was almost bound to pander to the vulgar taste, or at any rate to a taste not refined, in my editing, in my articles, and in my short stories, but I had sworn solemnly that I would keep the novel-form unsullied for the pure exercise of the artist in me. ”

“ I must compel people to believe that what I say is true; I cannot argue without getting serious in spite of myself. In literature, but in nothing else, I am a propagandist; I am not content to keep my opinion and let others keep theirs. To have a worthless book in my house (save in the way of business) , to know that any friend of mine is enjoying it, actually distresses me. That book must go, the pretensions of that book must be exposed, if I am to enjoy peace of mind. Some may suspect that I am guilty here of the affectation of a pose. Really it is not so. ”

“ I turned them over, like a woman on remnant-day at a draper's; and after the inevitable Oriental chaffering, we came to terms. I bought Christmas stories in March, and seaside fiction in December, and good solid Baring-Gould or Le Queux or L.T. Meade all the year round.
Excellently as these ingenious narrative confections served their purpose, I dreamed of something better. And in my dream a sudden and beautiful thought accosted me: Why should all the buying be on one side?
And the next time the representative of the syndicate called upon me, I met his overtures with another. ”

“ My thousand increased tenfold; my mind dwelt on all the complex sybaritism of European capitals; and I saw how I could make use of the unequalled advertisement of theatrical renown to find a ready market for the most artistic fiction that I was capable of writing. This new scheme of things sprang into my brain instantaneously, full-grown.
I left the theatre an accepted dramatist.
It never rains but it pours. My kind manager mentioned our stylistic drawing-room melodrama to another manager with such laudation that the second manager was eager to see it. ”

“ The vocation fails in piquancy: that is precisely where it does fail. Occasionally when a manuscript comes from some established author who has been deemed the private property of another house, there is the excitement of discovering from the internal evidence of the manuscript, or from the circumstantial evidence of public facts carefully collated, just why that manuscript has been offered to my employer; and the discovered reason is always either amusing or shameful. But such excitements are rare, and not very thrilling after all. No! Reading for a publisher does not foster the joy of life. ”

“ I would lavish a night on a few paragraphs; and years of this penal servitude left me with a dexterity in the handling of sentences that still surprises the possessor of it. I have heard of Fleet Street hacks who regularly produce sixty thousand words a week; but I well know that there are not many men who can come fresh to a pile of new books, tear the entrails out of them, and write a fifteen-hundred-word causerie on them, passably stylistic, all inside sixty minutes. This means skill, and I am proud of it. But my confessions as a reviewer will come later. ”

“ Assuming that your taste is fairly sound, let us be confronted with the same new novel, and I will show you, though you are a quick reader, that I can anticipate your judgment of that novel by a minimum of fifty-five minutes. The title-page—that conjunction of the title, the name of the author, and the name of the publisher—speaks to me, telling me all sorts of things. The very chapter-headings deliver a message of style. The narrative everywhere discloses to me the merits and defects of the writer; no author ever lived who could write a page without giving himself away. ”

“ I could instruct a fashion-artist as though I knew what I was talking about. I could play Blucher at the Waterloo of the advertisement-manager. I could interview a beauty and make her say the things that a beauty must say in an interview. ”