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. And since the average novelist lives always in a dream that one
of his works will somehow `catch on' as no other work ever has caught
on yet, it is very natural that he should fondly try meanwhile to get
this dream realised for him, vicariously, by this or that creature of
his fancy. True, he is usually too self-conscious to let this creature
achieve his sudden fame and endless fortune through a novel. Usually
it is a play that does the trick. In the Victorian time it was almost
always a book of poems. Oh for the spacious days of Tennyson and
Swinburne! In how many a three-volume novel is mentioned some `slim
octavo' which seems, from the account given, to have been as arresting
as `Poems and Ballads' without being less acceptable than `Idylls of
the King'! These verses were always the anonymous work of some very
young, very poor man, who supposed they had fallen still-born from the
press until, one day, a week or so after publication, as he walked
`moodily' and `in a brown study' along the Strand, having given up all
hope now that he would ever be in a position to ask Hilda to be his
wife, a friend accosted him--`Seen "The Thunderer" this morning? By
George, there's a column review of a new book of poems,' etc. In some
three-volume novel that I once read at a seaside place, having
borrowed it from the little circulating library, there was a young
poet whose sudden leap into the front rank has always laid a special
hold on my imagination. The name of the novel itself I cannot recall;
but I remember the name of the young poet--Aylmer Deane; and the
forever unforgettable title of his book of verse was POMENTS: BEING
POEMS OF THE MOOD AND THE MOMENT. What would I not give to possess a
copy of that work?