III. The Critic Errant
There are some emotions so intimate that the most intrepid writer
hesitates to chronicle them lest it should be inferred that he
himself is in the confessional. We have endeavoured to show our
author as a level-headed English-man with his nerves well under
control and an honest contempt for emotionalism in the stronger sex;
but his feelings in the face of the first little bundle of reviews
sent him by the press-cutting agency would prove this portrait
incomplete. He noticed with a vague astonishment that the flimsy
scraps of paper were trembling in his fingers like banknotes in the
hands of a gambler, and he laid them down on the breakfast-table in
disgust of the feminine weakness. This unmistakable proof that he had
written a book, a real book, made him at once happy and uneasy. These
fragments of smudged prints were his passport into a new and
delightful world; they were, it might be said, the name of his
destination in the great republic of letters, and yet he hesitated to
look at them. He heard of the curious blindness of authors that made
it impossible for them to detect the most egregious failings in their
own work, and it occurred to him that this might be his malady. Why:
had he published his book? He felt at that moment that he had taken
too great a risk. It would have been so easy to have had it privately
printed and contented himself with distributing it among his friends.
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