oor
Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in
the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped that
perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that the
novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion and
found by discerning critics to be not at all bad.

"He had never acknowledged it, or only to some intimate friends while
it was still in proof; after its appearance and alarming failure, the
modesty of the author had become more pressing, and the secret was now
likely to be better kept than that of the authorship of 'Waverley.'"

Such an humiliation as Gideon's is the more poignant to me because it
is so rare in English fiction. In nine cases out of ten, a book within a
book is an immediate, an immense success.

On the whole, our novelists have always tended to optimism--especially
they who have written mainly to please their public. It pleases the
public to read about any sort of success. The greater, the more sudden
and violent the success, the more valuable is it as ingredient in a
novel. And since the average novelist lives always in a dream that one
of his works will somehow 'catch on' as no other work ever has caught on
yet, it is very natural that he should fondly try meanwhile to get this
dream realised for him, vicariously, by this or that creature of his
fancy. True, he is usually too self-conscious to let this creature
achieve his sudden fame and endless fortune through a novel. Usually
it is a play that does the trick. In the Victorian time it was almost
always a book of poems. Oh for the spacious days of Tennyson and
Swinburne! In how many a three-volume novel is mentioned some 'slim
octavo' which seems, from the account given, to have been as arresting
as 'Poems and Ballads' without being less acceptable than 'Idylls of the
King'! These verses were always the anonymous work of some very young,
very poor man, who supposed they had fallen still-born from the press
until, one day, a week or so after publication, as he walked 'moodily'
and 'in a brown study' along the Strand, having given up all hope now
that he would ever be in a position to ask Hilda to be his wife, a
friend accosted him--'Seen "The Thunderer" this morning? By George,
there's a column review of a new book of poems,' etc. In some
three-volume novel that I once read at a seaside place, having borrowed
it from the little circulating library, there was a young poet w