“The public in the next generation will be what you and one or two others like you choose to make it. Good work in any style gives that style vogue.... It’s ever when you are most serious you are at your best. Work, work and live.”
Well, I worked and lived like the devil for strenuousness. Then _The Rubicon_ made its appearance, and the same friend took a blistering pen instead:
“If anything could possibly give a more serious blow to your chances of future and legitimate success than the publication of _The Rubicon_, it would be to bring out within three or four years another novel.... It does not seem to me that you have formed the slightest conception of the true situation. It is this. Your first book, from accidental and even parasitic causes--things that were not in the book at all--enjoyed an entirely abnormal and baseless success. You have now to begin again, and for several years the public will certainly not listen to you as a novelist.”
For the life of me, I cannot now, reading these explosive records over again, determine whether I could have gained anything by paying the smallest attention to them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for they clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this wretched old _Rubicon_, but against the person who had dared to capture success with _Dodo_. Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that vituperation so violent could not be regarded as other than comic. If I was a nursery-governess and a man-milliner, and a gentleman’s gentleman it was all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I was already terribly interested in the _Babe, B.A._ and not at all interested in the _St. James’s Budget_, except as a humorous publication, which the _Babe, B.A._ tried to be, too. And then there were delightful plans ahead; this autumn Maggie was to come out to Athens with me, and we were to go on to Egypt together, and have a Tremendous Time....
So there was Athens again, with its bugles and its Royal Babies, and its eternal Acropolis, which custom never staled. Maggie jumped into the Hellenic attitude at once, adoring the adorable, filling with the laughter of her serious appreciation the comedy of the life there, enjoying it all enormously, and finding ecstatic human interest in Oriental situations. One day the M.P. for Megalopolis appeared in Athens, and so, of course, I asked him to tea in the Grand Hotel, and Maggie put in some extra lessons in modern Greek with the English vice-consul, in order that a tongue-tied female should not mar the entertainment. The M.P.’s remarks were mostly unintelligible to her, and these I translated back for her benefit, and if she could find a phrase that fitted she slowly enunciated it, and if not she said to him, syllable by syllable, “I should like to see your wife and children, but we are going to Egypt.” All the “circles” in Athens embraced at once her cordial and eager humanity. She sketched all morning, and when I came to the rendezvous, there would be a dozen young Greek urchins round her canvas, to whom, as she washed in a lucent sky, she made careful and grammatical remarks.... She captivated the heart of the archæologists, and Dr. Dörpfeld who had proved himself so fatal to the theories of the British School at Megalopolis, addressed his most abstruse arguments to her as he announced that “die Enneakrounos, ich habe gewiss gefunden” when he gave his out-of-door lectures. The English Minister, Sir Edwin Egerton, used to wrap her shawl round her, as she left the Legation after dinner, saying, “Now you look like a Tanagra figure,” and the Queen asked her in strict confidence, whether the English aristocracy really behaved as her brother said they behaved in that odd book called _Dŏdō_. The answer to that was given in a performance we got up, ostensibly for the amusement of the English governesses in Athens at Christmas, of the _Duchess of Bayswater_. Of course we got it up primarily because we wanted to act, and then it grew to awful proportions. The English Mediterranean Fleet happened to come into the Piræus about then, and Admiral Markham asked if a contingent of two hundred blue-jackets or so might stand at the back of the English governesses. On which, the style of the entertainment had to be recast altogether, and we bargained that, if they came the performance should consist of two parts. The first part should be supplied by sailors, who would dance hornpipes, and sing songs, and the second part should consist of _The Duchess of Bayswater_. That was agreed, and we engaged a large public hall.