vocation. On another day he said also to Eckermann that a writer could not hope to be really understood. The busy commentators have pointed out that there is a contradiction. There is none at all. No one ever understands all that a great writer meant by his creation; perhaps there are few great writers who understand it all themselves. But the writer who flinches in the effort to convey his meaning, or all that he knows of it, in words and characters so clear and compulsive that the last of a million readers must respond is less of a writer than he should be. And that is why a great book, or even a book, contains something for really good every one who will approach it. THE READER'S DUTY IT is an article of modern literary faith that all great writers were incomprehensible in their day. It is a legend. Comparatively few great writers have not become popular in their lives, and if from them we take away those who died before forty, there are few indeed. What is true is that it often takes a new and original writer longer to reach his public than a facile and familiar one. But not because of his obscurity. It is his clarity which stands in the way. It is a shock for us to be compelled to see life in an unfamiliar light and we fight shy of the experience. But those who risk it return and bring others with them. The popularity of a great writer may be slowit is not always-but it is certain. But the writer who elects to be ambiguous remains unpopular for ever. As soon as a writer ceases to be governed by the desire to enforce his thought and feelings upon us, he becomes something other than a writer, something interesting for the connoisseur of psychology, something far less important for the world at large. When Henry James began to devote his energies to the solution of subtle problems of form which when they were solved could not increase but only weaken the compulsion he exerted on the reader's mind, he was by so much less a writer. He may have been more of an artist. It does not matter if he was. At least it matters only in a private way. It matters only if another writer should arise who, without ever confusing the means with the end, will take advantage of some of Henry James's explorations and use them in order to increase his own unmistakability. This esoteric significance of certain writers is utterly different from absolute significance. A good teacher in the arts, like a good trainer in boxing, may be an indifferent performer himself. He is so occupied with his method that he forgets his business is to knock out his man. Some writers are always forgetting that. And it is unreasonable for their admirers to denounce the stupidity of a public which does not admire them also. The public expects a writer to be able to knock it out, so soon as it ventures within reach of the blow. That is what it respects him for, and if he fails in that, he fails in everything. What does the public care, why should it care, if it was he champion his punch? who taught the next That is family history. So it is idle to proclaim that Mallarmé was a great poet. He began by being a true poet and ended by being an incomprehensible one. Other poets may learn from him, and they may be great poets. But that will only be if, unlike him, they do not mistake the means for the end. What the writer may reasonably ask from the public is more curiosity, more readiness to come within his reach and see whether he can shock them into a new way of looking at life. He has a right to ask that they should approach a new book with the definite expectation of being disturbed, and with the knowledge that the finest pleasure |