ABSTRACT
It is the popular belief that a popular writer can go on writing for ever. It would, of course, be conceded that old age, or illness, or great mental distress would render a favourite author incapable of doing again as he has done before. But it is taken for granted that, unless there is some special reason to prevent it, there is a power of composition in a man of genius and of practised skill which he can tap at pleasure. In reality, this belief, although it assures a popular writer fortune and fame, often causes a very severe drain on him, and tortures him into writing what, without this popular pressure, he would much rather have left unwritten. A writer may have great natural and acquired gifts, and yet have nothing more to say than he has said already. He may feel acutely that he has no call, except an artificial one, to say any more. But imploring publishers, and an expecting public, and the certainty of a splendid reward, impel him with a force he cannot resist. In return for his compliance, the public, it must be acknowledged, accepts with an admirable thankfulness and readiness whatever he is pleased to write. Mr. Dickens, when it was remarked that Little Dorrit, or Bleak House, was hardly up to his level, replied, with real or affected innocence, that none of his books had sold so well. The public does not play fast and
loose with its favourites. If it goads them into writing when they do not want, it at least takes care that their publications shall be pecuniarily successful. People always find something to like and wonder at-some jokes that remind them of other days, some touches that none but their favourite could have added. And, in some degree, they are right. The composition of a good writer is never wholly bad. It may be poor, as compared with other things he has written, or it may be substantially a repetition of what he has said before, but skill and lively thought and observation are never asleep in a man who possesses them, and he is sure to betray, in some respect or other, a casual superiority which shows that even his bad books are the bad books of a good writer.
