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Page 18
I have been young, and now am nearly old. Silvered is the once brown
hair. Dim is the eye that on a time could decipher minion type by
moonlight. But never have I seen the publisher without a fur coat in
winter nor his seed begging bread. Nor do I expect to see such sights. Yet
I have seen an author begging bread, and instead of bread, I gave him a
railway ticket. Authors have always been in the wrong, and they always
will be: grasping, unscrupulous, mercenary creatures that they are! Some
of them haven't even the wit to keep their books from being burnt at the
stake by the executioners of the National Vigilance Association. I wonder
that publishers don't dispense with them altogether, and carry on unaided
the great tradition of English literature. Anyhow, publishers have had my
warm sympathy this Christmas-time. When I survey myself, as an example,
lapped in luxury and clinking multitudinous gold coins extorted from
publishers by my hypnotizing rascal of an agent; and when I think of the
publishers, endeavouring in their fur coats to keep warm in fireless rooms
and picking turkey limbs while filling up bankruptcy forms--I blush. Or I
should blush, were not authors notoriously incapable of that action.
1909
"ECCE HOMO"
[_7 Jan. '09_]
The people who live in the eye of the public have been asked, as usual, to
state what books during the past year have most interested them, and they
have stated. This year I think the lists are less funny than usual. But
some items give joy. Thus the Bishop of London has read Mr. A.E.W. Mason's
"The Broken Road" with interest and pleasure. Mr. Frederic Harrison, along
with two historical works, has read "Diana Mallory" with interest and
pleasure. What an unearthly light such confessions throw upon the
mentalities from which they emanate! As regards the Bishop of London I
should not have been surprised to hear that he had read "Holy Orders" with
interest and pleasure. But Mr. Frederic Harrison, one had na�vely
imagined, possessed some rudimentary knowledge of the art which he has
practised.
* * * * *
This confessing malady is infectious, if not contagious. I suppose that
few persons can resist the microbe. I cannot. I feel compelled to announce
to all whom it may not concern the books of the year which (at the moment
of writing) seem to have most interested me--apart from my own, _bien
entendu_: H.G. Wells's "New Worlds for Old." If it is not in its fiftieth
thousand the intelligent masses ought to go into a month's sackcloth.
"Nature Poems," by William H. Davies. This slim volume is quite
indubitably wondrous. I won't say that it contains some of the most
lyrical lyrics in English, but I will say that there are lyrics in it as
good as have been produced by anybody at all in the present century. "A
Poor Man's House," by Stephen Reynolds. Young Mr. Reynolds has already
been fully accepted by the aforesaid intelligent masses, and I have no
doubt that he is tolerably well satisfied with 1908. Nietzsche's "Ecce
Homo." When this book gets translated into English (I have been reading it
in Henri Albert's French translation) it will assuredly be laughed at. I
would hazard that it is the most conceited book ever written. Take our
four leading actor-managers; extract from them all their conceit; multiply
that conceit by the self-satisfaction of Mr. F.E. Smith, M.P., when he has
made a joke; and raise the result to the Kaiser-power, and you will have
something less than the cube-root of Nietzsche's conceit in this the last
book he wrote. But it is a great book, full of great things.
HENRY OSPOVAT
[_14 Jan. '09_]
The death of that distinguished draughtsman and painter, Henry Ospovat,
who was among the few who can illustrate a serious author without
insulting him, ought not to pass unnoticed. Because an exhibition of his
caricatures made a considerable stir last year it was generally understood
that he was destined exclusively for caricature. But he was a man who
could do several things very well indeed, and caricature was only one of
these things. In Paris he would certainly have made a name and a fortune
as a caricaturist. They have more liberty there. Witness Rouveyre's
admirable and appalling sketch of Sarah Bernhardt in the current _Mercure
de France_. I never met Ospovat, but I was intimate with some of his
friends while he was at South Kensington. In those days I used to hear
"what Ospovat thought" about everything. He must have been listened to
with great respect by his fellow-students. And sometimes one of them would
come to me, with the air of doing me a favour (as indeed he was) and say:
"Look here. Do you want to buy something good, at simply no price at all?"
And I became the possessor of a beautiful sketch by Ospovat, while the
intermediary went off with a look on his face as if saying: "Consider
yourself lucky, my boy!" I used even to get Ospovat's opinions on my
books, now and then very severe. I wanted to meet him. But I never could.
The youths used to murmur: "Oh! It's no use you _meeting_ him." They were
afraid he was not spectacular enough. Or they desired to keep him to
themselves, like a precious pearl. I pictured him as very frail, and very
positive in a quiet way. He was only about thirty when he died last week.
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