' I fancy we should apply neither epithet
now. Indeed, I have always suspected that Pen's maiden effort may have
been on a plane with `The Great Hoggarty Diamond.' Yet I vow would I
not skip a line of it.
WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor
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.
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