* * *

I know that people buy motor-cars, for the newspapers are full of the dust
of them. I know that they buy seats in railway carriages and theatres, and
meals at restaurants, and cravats of the new colour, and shares in
companies, for they talk about their purchases, and rise into ecstasies of
praise or blame concerning them. I want to learn about the people who buy
new books--modest band who never praise nor blame, nor get excited over
their acquisitions, preferring to keep silence, preferring to do good in
secret! Let an enterprising inventor put a new tyre on the market, and
every single purchaser will write to the Press and state that he has
bought it and exactly what he thinks about it. Yet, though the purchasers
of a fairly popular new book must be as numerous as the purchasers of a
new tyre, not one of them ever "lets on" that he has purchased. I want
some book-buyers to come forward and at any rate state that they have
bought a book, with some account of the adventure. I should then feel
partly reassured. I should know by demonstration that a book-buyer did
exist; whereas at present all I can do is to assume the existence of a
book-buyer whom I have never seen, and whom nobody has ever seen. It seems
to me that if a few book-buyers would kindly come forward and
confess--with proper statistics--the result would be a few columns quite
pleasant to read in the quietude of September.

JOSEPH CONRAD & THE ATHENAEUM

[_19 Sep. '08_]

The _Athenaeum_ is a serious journal, genuinely devoted to learning. The
mischief is that it will persist in talking about literature. I do not
wish to be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel, but the
_Athenaeum's_ review of Mr. Joseph Conrad's new book, "A Set of Six," in
its four thousand two hundred and eighteenth issue, really calls for
protest. At that age the _Athenaeum_ ought, at any rate, to know better
than to make itself ridiculous. It owes an apology to Mr. Conrad. Here we
have a Pole who has taken the trouble to come from the ends of the earth
to England, to learn to speak the English language, and to write it like a
genius; and he is received in this grotesque fashion by the leading
literary journal! Truly, the _Athenaeum's_ review resembles nothing so much
as the antics of a provincial mayor round a foreign monarch sojourning in
his town.

* * * * *

For, of course, the _Athenaeum_ is obsequious. In common