wns 7000 acres
of land, is still drawing a pension of L5000 a year, earned by his
august ancestor, but the daughter of Leigh Hunt must be content with
L50. We are unknown. We are nobody. Rouget de l'Isle, author of _La
Marseillaise_, gave wings to the revolutionary chariot, but tiny,
bilious, tyrannic Robespierre rode in it, and rides in it to-day through
the pages of history, while men go to their death singing the words of
Rouget de l'Isle and know him not.

Even in our own profession of authorship the novelist is an object of
disdain. We are less than the economists, the historians, the political
writers: we amuse while they teach; they bore, and as they bore it is
assumed that they educate, dullness always having been the sorry
companion of education. Evidence is easily found; there exists a useful,
short encyclopaedia called _Books That Count_. It contains the names of
about 4000 authors, out of whom only sixty-three are novelists. Divines
whose sermons do not fetch a penny at the second-hand bookseller's,
promoters of economic theories long disproved, partisan historians,
mendacious travellers ... they crowd out of the 'books that count' the
pale sixty-three novelists, all that is left of the large assembly that
gave us _Tom Jones_ and _The Way of All Flesh_. This attitude we observe
in most reference books. We observe it, for instance, in the well-known
_Who's Who Year Book_, which, amazing as it seems, contains no list of
authors. The book contains a list of professors, including those of
dental surgery, a list of past Presidents of the Oxford Union, a list of
owners of Derby winners, but not a list of authors. The editors of this
popular reference book know what the public wants; apparently the public
wants to know that Mr Arthur H. King is General Manager of the
Commercial Bank of London Ltd. ... but the public does not want to know
that Mr Anatole France is a great man. The only evidence of notice is a
list of our pseudonyms. It matters that Mr Richard Le Gallienne should
write under the name of 'Logroller,' for that is odd. Mr Le Gallienne,
being an author, is a curiosity; it matters to nobody that he is a man.

II

What is the area of a novelist's reputation? How far do the ripples
extend when he casts a novel into the whirlpool of life? It is difficult
to say, but few novelists were ever so well known to the people as were
in their time such minor figures as Bradlaugh and Dr Grace, nor is there
a nove