it was plain to me that my good friend was finding it a little difficult to combine the affability of a seller with the lofty disinclination of one who is requested to buy in a crowded market.
“I should have thought,” I remarked, with a diplomatic touch of annoyance, “that you would buy wherever you could get good stuff.”
“Oh yes,” he said, “of course we do. But—”
“Well,” I' continued, “I am writing a serial, and I can tell you it will be a good one. I merely mention it to you. If you don’t care for it, I fancy I can discover some one who will.”
Then, having caused to float between us, cloud-like, the significance of the indisputable fact that there were other syndicates in the world, I proceeded nonchalantly to the matter of his visit and gave him a good order. He was an able merchant, but I had not moved in legal circles for nothing. Business is business: and he as well as I knew that arbitrary rules to the exclusion of editors must give way before this great and sublime truth, the foundation of England’s glory.
The next thing was to concoct the serial. I had entered into a compact with myself that I would never “write down” to the public in a long fiction. I was almost bound to pander to the vulgar taste, or at any rate to a taste not refined, in my editing, in my articles, and in my short stories, but I had sworn solemnly that I would keep the novel-form unsullied for the pure exercise of the artist in me. What became of this high compact? I merely ignored it. I tore it up and it was forgotten, the instant I saw a chance of earning the money of shame. I devised excuses, of course. I said that my drawing-room wanted new furniture; I said that I might lift the sensational serial to a higher place, thus serving the cause of art; I said—I don’t know what I said, all to my conscience. But I began the serial.
As an editor, I knew the qualities that a serial ought to possess. And I knew specially that what most serials lacked was a large, central, unifying, vivifying idea. I was very fortunate in lighting upon such an idea for my first serial. There are no original themes; probably no writer ever did invent an original theme; but my theme was a brilliant imposture of originality. It had, too, grandeur and passion, and fantasy, and it was inimical to none of the prejudices of the serial reader. In truth it was a theme worthy of much better treatment than I accorded to it. Throughout the composition of the tale, until nearly the end, I had the uneasy feeling, familiar to all writers, that I was frittering away a really good thing. But as the climax approached, the situation took hold of me, and in spite of myself I wrote my best. The tale was divided into twelve instalments of five thousand words each, and I composed it in twenty-four half-days. Each morning, as I walked down the Thames Embankment, I contrived a chapter of two thousand five hundred words, and each afternoon I wrote the chapter. An instinctive sense of form helped me to plan the events into an imposing shape, and it needed no abnormal inventive faculty to provide a thrill for the conclusion of each section. Further, I was careful to begin the story on the first page, without preliminaries, and to finish it abruptly when it was finished. For the rest, I put in generous quantities of wealth, luxury, feminine beauty, surprise, catastrophe, and genial, incurable optimism. I was as satisfied with the result as I had been with the famous poem on Courage. I felt sure that the syndicate had never supplied me with a sensational serial half as good as mine, and I could conceive no plea upon which they would be justified in refusing mine.
They bought it. We had a difference concerning the price. They offered sixty pounds; I thought I might as well as not try to get a hundred, but when I had lifted them up to seventy-five, the force of bluff would no further go, and the bargain was closed. I saw that by writing serials I could earn three guineas per half-dayI saw myself embarking upon a life of what Ebenezer Jones called “sensation and event”; I saw my prices increasing, even to three hundred pounds for a sixty thousand word yarn—my imagination stopped there.
The lingering remains of an artistic conscience prompted me to sign this eye-smiting work with a pseudonym. The syndicate, since my name was quite unknown in their world, made no objection, and I invented several aliases, none of which they liked. Then a friend presented me with a gorgeous pseudonym—“Sampson Death.” Surely, I thought, the syndicate will appreciate the subtle power of that! But no! They averred that their readers would be depressed by Sampson Death at the head of every instalment.
“Why not sign your own name?” they suggested.
And I signed my own name. I, apprentice of Flaubert et Cie, stood forth to the universe as a sensation-monger.
The syndicate stated that they would like to have the refusal of another serial from my pen.
In correcting the proofs of the first one, I perceived all the opportunities I had missed in it, and I had visions of a sensational serial absolutely sublime in those qualities that should characterize a sensational serial. I knew all about Eugene Sue, and something about Wilkie Collins; but my ecstatic contemplation of an ideal serial soared far beyond these. I imagined a serial decked with the profuse ornament of an Eastern princess, a serial at once grandiose and witty, at once modern and transcendental, a serial of which the interest should gradually close on the reader like a vice until it became intolerable. I saw the whole of London preoccupied with this serial instead of with cricket and politics. I heard the dandiacal City youths discussing in first-class compartments on the Underground what would happen next in it. I witnessed a riot in Fleet Street because I had, accidentally on purpose, delayed my copy for twenty-four hours, and the editor of the Daily — had been compelled to come out with an apology. Lastly, I heard the sigh of relief exhaled to heaven by a whole people, when in the final instalment I solved the mystery, untied the knot, relieved the cruel suspense.
Such was my dream—a dream that I never realized, but which I believe to be capable of realization. It is decades since even a second-class imaginative genius devoted itself entirely to the cult of the literary frisson. Sue excited a nation by admirable sensationalism. The feat might be accomplished again, and in this era so prolific in Napoleons of the Press, it seems strange that no Napoleon has been able to organize the sensational serial on a Napoleonic scale.
I did not realize my dream, but I was inspired by it. Once more I received from the gods a plot scintillating with possibilities. It was less fine than the previous one; it was of the earth earthly; but it began with a scene quite unique in the annals of syndicates, and by this time I knew a little better how to keep the fire burning. I lavished wit and style on the thing, and there is no material splendour of modern life that I left out. I plunged into it with all my energy and enthusiasm, and wrote the fifteen instalments in fifteen days; I tried to feel as much like Dumas pere as I could. But when I had done I felt, physically, rather more like the fragile Shelley or some wan curate than Dumas. I was a wreck.
The syndicate were willing to buy this serial, but they offered me no increase of rates. I declined to accept the old terms, and then the syndicate invited me to lunch. I made one of the greatest financial mistakes of my life on that accursed day, and my only excuse is that I was unaccustomed to being invited out to lunch by syndicates. I ought to have known, with all my boasted knowledge of the world of business, that syndicates do not invite almost unknown authors to lunch without excellent reason. I had refused the syndicate’s offer, and the syndicate asked me to name a price for the entire rights of my tale. I named a price; it was a good price for me, then; but the words were scarcely out of my mouth before I saw that I had blundered. Too late! My terms were quietly accepted. Let me cast no slightest aspersion upon the methods of the syndicate: the bargain was completed before lunch had commenced.
The syndicate disposed of the whole first serial rights of my tale to a well-known London weekly. The proprietors of the paper engaged a first-class artist to illustrate it, they issued a special circular about it, they advertised it every week on 800 railway stations. The editor of the paper wrote me an extremely appreciative letter as to the effect of the serial from his point of view. The syndicate informed a friend of mine that it was the best serial they had ever had. After running in London
