“You get things from your father, don’t you?” she enquired of me.
“You do,” I admitted; “but you ought not to take them without asking. I am always telling you of it. That pencil is the only one I can write with.”
“I didn’t mean the pencil,” explained Veronica. “I was wondering if I had got your literary temper.”
It is puzzling, when you come to think of it, this estimate accorded by the general public to the _littérateur_. It stands to reason that the man who writes books, explaining everything and putting everybody right, must be himself an exceptionally clever man; else how could he do it! The thing is pure logic. Yet to listen to Robina and her like you might think we had not sense enough to run ourselves, as the saying is—let alone running the universe. If I would let her, Robina would sit and give me information by the hour.
“The ordinary girl . . . ” Robina will begin, with the air of a University Extension Lecturer.
It is so exasperating. As if I did not know all there is to be known about girls! Why, it is my business. I point this out to Robina.
“Yes, I know,” Robina will answer sweetly. “But I was meaning the real girl.”
It would make not the slightest difference were I even quite a high-class literary man—Robina thinks I am: she is a dear child. Were I Shakespeare himself, and could I in consequence say to her: “Methinks, child, the creator of Ophelia and Juliet, and Rosamund and Beatrice, must surely know something about girls,” Robina would still make answer:
“Of course, Pa dear. Everybody knows how clever you are. But I was thinking for the moment of real girls.”
I wonder to myself sometimes, Is literature to the general reader ever anything more than a fairy-tale? We write with our heart’s blood, as we put it. We ask our conscience, Is it right thus to lay bare the secrets of our souls? The general reader does not grasp that we are writing with our heart’s blood: to him it is just ink. He does not believe we are laying bare the secrets of our souls: he takes it we are just pretending. “Once upon a time there lived a girl named Angelina who loved a party by the name of Edwin.” He imagines—he, the general reader—when we tell him all the wonderful thoughts that were inside Angelina, that it was we who put them there. He does not know, he will not try to understand, that Angelina is in reality more real than is Miss Jones, who rides up every morning in the ’bus with him, and has a pretty knack of rendering conversation about the weather novel and suggestive. As a boy I won some popularity among my schoolmates as a teller of stories. One afternoon, to a small collection with whom I was homing across Regent’s Park, I told the story of a beautiful Princess. But she was not the ordinary Princess. She would not behave as a Princess should. I could not help it. The others heard only my voice, but I was listening to the wind. She thought she loved the Prince—until he had wounded the Dragon unto death and had carried her away into the wood. Then, while the Prince lay sleeping, she heard the Dragon calling to her in its pain, and crept back to where it lay bleeding, and put her arms about its scaly neck and kissed it; and that healed it. I was hoping myself that at this point it would turn into a prince itself, but it didn’t; it just remained a dragon—so the wind said. Yet the Princess loved it: it wasn’t half a bad dragon, when you knew it. I could not tell them what became of the Prince: the wind didn’t seem to care a hang about the Prince.