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199
was genuine and lasted till death; yet he spoke of him in tones of sar–
castic pity. He was not really a bookman at all, acknowledging no
classic; he was a writer and a popularizer, and science was to him
what Sophocles was to Gissing.
The three of them may suggest something of the qualities of a
literary culture different from our own . Yet the marketplace of
Tit–
bits,
of the unprecedentedly powerful and irresponsible newspaper
tycoons, of new competitive publishing houses built on the ruins of
the sedate old ones, is not without a family resemblance to ours. In
Edward Garnett, we identify the father of many famous literary
midwives, in Pinker the archetype of agents. In that age, as now,
great fortunes were made by writers - by Bennett and Kipling,
Galsworthy and Wells, to say nothing of the bestsellers, the Elinor
Glyns. But the market didn't crush all who refused to play it; there
was Conrad, choosing with his customary perversity to commence
author at this moment, and in his third language at that; and there
was still that avant-garde of bookmen, the innovators, the transmit–
ters, of whom Arthur Symons is the type. There was Henry James,
writing in these years the great Prefaces to his New York Edition;
there was Ford Madox Ford, passionate for the past and the present
of letters; and, over the horizon, Pound and Wyndham Lewis and
Eliot, who would also play their part in the making of our different
world, our different view of what it is to profess letters.
•
•
•
However new the world may appear, it discloses on examina–
tion continuities with old worlds. The lot of the run-of-the-mill pro–
fessional has always been hard. For instance, relations between
authors and readers have never, at any rate since the invention of
printing, been very direct . There is always a middleman, printer or
stationer, or several middlemen. At first the author simply sold his
book to somebody else, who turned it into a commercial product for
his own profit, possessing the copyright and paying no royalty (a
situation which persisted to plague Hardy and Gissing, and indeed,
in the backwaters of scholarly publishing, even me). Authors were
quick to see themselves as exploited primary producers. "While
they did like fleas, but sucke now and then a dropp of the writers
blood from him ... it was somewhat tollerable," complains an Eliza–
bethan author of publishers, "but since they began to feed on him,
like the third plague of
Aegipt
without remooving . . . I say . . . it
