On a certain Monday morning in the following November, Lucian’s great epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. Lucian found a pile of the London morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through them systematically. When he had made an end of them he looked across the table at Haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer way.

‘I say, Haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are—well, they’re not very flattering. There are six mighty voices of the press here,—Times, Telegraph, Post, News, Chronicle, and Standard—and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in their pronunciations. The epic poem seems to be at something of a discount.’

The reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein—taking them as a whole they were cold. There was a ring of disappointment in them. One reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of Mr. Damerel’s previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. Another openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had previously had from the same pen. Mr. Damerel’s history, said a third, was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much of the Norman Conquest from his poem as from the pages of Freeman, but the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting in{172} his latest. Each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental sorrow for the Mr. Damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an undercurrent of regret that Lucian had chosen to explore another path than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. The consensus of opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers lying on Lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that Mr. Damerel’s new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his previous volumes. And to show his exact meaning and make out a good case for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting those of Lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which they would have wished Mr. Damerel to supply for ever.

Lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. It was disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what the critics believed him capable of doing. He was amused at the disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred Lucian the earlier to Lucian the later—and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great effort somewhat looked askance at.

‘I’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘I ought to have remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one—Tennyson was wise in giving his public the Idylls of the King in fragments—if he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d have had a surfeit. I should have followed his example, but I wanted to present the thing as a whole. And it is good, however they may damn it with faint praise.’{173}

‘Does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked Haidee, who had gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head of which Lucian’s name stood out in bold letters.

‘Sell? Why, I don’t think reviews make much difference to the sales of a book,’ answered Lucian. ‘I really don’t know—I suppose the people who bought all my other volumes will buy this.’

But as he ate his chop and drank his coffee he began to wonder what would happen if the new volume did not sell. He knew exactly how many copies of his other volumes had been sold up to the end of the previous half-year: it was no business instinct that made him carry the figures in his mind, but rather the instinct of the general who counts his prisoners, his captured eagles, and his dead enemies after a victory, and of the sportsman who knows that the magnitude of the winnings of a great racehorse is a tribute to the quality of its blood and bone and muscle. He recalled the figures of the last statement of account rendered to him by his publisher, and their comfortable rotundity cheered him. Whatever the critics might say, he had a public, and a public of considerable size. And after all, this was the first time the critics had not burned incense at his shrine—he forgave them with generous readiness, and ere he rose from the breakfast table was as full as ever of confident optimism. He felt as regards those particular reviewers as a man might feel who bids all and sundry to a great feast, and finds that the first-comers are taken aback by the grand proportions of the banquet—he pitied them for their lack of appetite, but he had no doubt of the verdict of the vast majority of later comers.

But if Lucian had heard some of the things that were said of him and his beloved epic in those holes and corners of literary life wherein one may hear much trenchant criticism plainly voiced, he would have felt less cock-sure about it and himself. It was the general opinion amongst a certain class of critics, who exercised{174} a certain influence upon public thought, that there was too much of the workshop in his magnum opus. It was a magnificent block of marble that he had handled, but he had handled it too much, and the result would have been greater if he had not perpetually hovered about it with a hungry chisel and an itching mallet. It was perfect in form and language and proportion, but it wanted life and fire and rude strength.

‘It reminds me,’ said one man, discussing it in a club corner where coffee cups, liqueur glasses, and cigarettes were greatly in evidence, ‘of the statue of Galatea, flawless, immaculate, but neuter,—yes, neuter—as it appeared at the very moment ere Pygmalion’s love breathed into it the very flush, the palpitating, forceful tremor of life.’

This man was young and newly come to town—the others looked at him with shy eyes and tender sympathy, for they knew what it was that he meant to sa............