often we have only that one book
in us, which we did not know how to write, and having expressed that
which we have felt, we are driven in our second, our third, our fourth,
to warm up variations, like those dressed remains of last night's dinner
which are served for lunch; or to spin from our usually commonplace
imaginations thin extravagances which those who do not try to think for
themselves are ever ready to accept as full of inspiration and vitality.
Anything for a book, we say--anything for a book!

From time immemorial we have acted in this immoral manner, till we have
accustomed the Press and Public to expect it. From time immemorial we
have allowed ourselves to be driven by those powerful drivers, Bread, and
Praise, and cared little for the quality of either. Sensibly, or
insensibly, we tune our songs to earn the nuts of our twilight forest.
We tune them, not to the key of: "Is it good?" but to the key of: "Will
it pay?" and at each tuning the nuts fall fast! It is all so natural.
How can we help it, seeing that we are undisciplined and standardless,
seeing that we started without the backbone that schooling gives? Here
and there among us is a genius, here and there a man of exceptional
stability who trains himself in spite of all the forces working for his
destruction. But those who do not publish until they can express, and do
not express until they have something worth expressing, are so rare that
they can be counted on the fingers of three or perhaps four hands;
mercifully, we all--or nearly all believe ourselves of that company.

It is the fashion to say that the public will have what it wants.
Certainly the Public will have what it wants if what it wants is given to
the Public. If what it now wants were suddenly withdrawn, the Public,
the big Public, would by an obvious natural law take the lowest of what
remained; if that again were withdrawn, it would take the next lowest,
until by degrees it took a relatively good article. The Public, the big
Public, is a mechanical and helpless consumer at the mercy of what is
supplied to it, and this must ever be so. The Public then is not to
blame for the supply of bad, false fiction. The Press is not to blame,
for the Press, like the Public, must take what is set before it; their
Critics, for the most part, like ourselves have been to no school, passed
no test of fitness, received no certificate; they cannot lead us, it is
we who lead them, for without the