understand this
genius at all, but isn't he great?' Do you see the point? You must do this
AFTER you have won your market, not before, and you can only win your
market in the first place by writing what folks want to buy.--Sincerely
yours--"

* * * * *

The writer is American. But the attitude of the average pushing English
publisher could not have been more accurately expressed than in this
letter sent by one New Yorker to another. The only thing that puzzles me
is why the man originally chose books instead of calico. He would have
sold more bales and made more money in calico. He would have understood
calico better. In my opinion many publishers would have understood calico
better than books. There are two things which a publisher ought to know
about novel-producers--things which do not, curiously enough, apply to
calico-producers, and which few publishers have ever grasped. I have known
publishers go into the bankruptcy court and come out again safely and yet
never grasp the significance of those two things. The first is that it is
intensely stupid to ask a novelist to study the market with a view to
obtaining large circulations. If he does not write to please himself--if
his own taste does not naturally coincide with the taste of the
million--he will never reach the million by taking thought. The Hall
Caines, the Miss Corellis, and the Mrs. Humphry Wards are born, not made.
It may seem odd, even to a publisher, that they write as they do write--by
sheer glad instinct. But it is so. The second thing is that when a
novelist has made "his name and his market" by doing one kind of thing he
can't successfully go off at a tangent and do another kind of thing. To
make the largest possible amount of money out of an artist the only way is
to leave him alone. When will publishers grasp this? To make the largest
possible amount of money out of an imitative hack, the only way is to
leave him alone. When will publishers grasp that an imitative hack knows
by the grace of God forty times more about the public taste than a
publisher knows?

TOURGENIEV AND DOSTOIEVSKY

[_31 Mar. '10_]

I have read with very great interest Mr. Maurice Baring's new volume about
Russia, "Landmarks in Russian Literature" (Methuen, 6s. net). It deals
with Gogol, Tourgeniev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, and Tchehkoff. It is
unpretentious. It is not "literary." I wish it had been more literary. Mr.
Baring seems to have