[* Herbert Thring was the barrister employed by the Society of Authors.]
All we ask you to do is to answer Thring and let us get along with your work.
I doubt whether he had. Those chance sums he poured from time to time into Frances' lap were usually not what they should have been, an advance on a royalty. _Orthodoxy_ he sold outright for £100. No man ever worked so hard to earn so little.
When later Gilbert employed Messrs. A. P. Watt as his literary agents a letter to them (undated, of course, and written on the old notepaper of his first Battersea flat) shows a mingling of gratitude to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his publishers, which might be called essence of Chesterton:
The prices you have got me for books, compared with what I used weakly to demand, seem to me to come out of fairyland. It seems to me that there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent need for a literary agent. It consists in this--that our work, even when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some vague way a pleasure. And how can we put a fair price on what is at once a worry and a pleasure? Suppose someone comes to me and says, "I offer you sixpence for your _History of the Gnostic Heresy_." Why, after all, should I charge more than sixpence for a work it was so exuberant to write? You, on the other hand, seeing it from the outside, would say that it was worth--so and so. And you would get it.
Shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright. Two years after drafting the scenario, he writes:
I have promised to drive somebody to Beaconsfield on Sunday morning; and I shall be in that district more or less for the rest of the day. If you are spending Easter at Overroads, and have no visitors who couldn't stand us, we should like to call on you at any time that would be convenient.
The convenience of time depends on a design of my own which I wish to impart to you first. I want to read a play to Gilbert. It began by way of being a music-hall sketch; so it is not 3½ hours long as usual: I can get through it in an hour and a half. I want to insult and taunt and stimulate Gilbert with it. It is the sort of thing he could write and ought to write: a religious harlequinade.* In fact, he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into him. My proposal is that I read the play to him on Sunday (or at the next convenient date), and that you fall into transports of admiration of it; declare that you can never love a man who cannot write things like that; and definitely announce that if Gilbert has not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third week next ensuing, you will go out like the lady in A Doll's House, and live your own life--whatever that dark threat may mean.