IF you who read this have one or two favourite authors among the living, take care that you do not meet them; above all, do not seek them out. If you think Mr. Horace Tendency’s Bones and Bottles the greatest novel of the age, if you have concluded that Mr. Gadfly, essayist and critic, has more wit and wisdom than any man now living, write and tell them so if you like, but do not go any further. Be satisfied with exchanging a letter of admiration for a badly executed autograph, or you will court disaster. If you should want more, remember that we have a literary press that makes a business of publishing photographs or paragraphs or both. Do not imagine that you have heard the last of your favourites; I know for a fact that Mr. Tendency has a novel in the press that is even greater than Bones and Bottles, and I have heard that Mr. Gadfly has just signed an agreement to combine wit and wisdom in a perfectly astonishing manner.

There are several gentlemen now earning a fair living by feeding public curiosity and battening on the fame of its darlings. They do it by seeking out a celebrity and retailing his unconsidered trifles of talk at a good market price. When they do it maliciously, as some do by making merry with the great man’s moustache or sneering at his wife, they are really doing the literary public a service, for they act as a warning and, indeed, point a moral. They and their works say to the enthusiast: If you would be happy, avoid the company of your favourite authors or you will be speedily disillusioned, and either preserve a cynical silence for the rest of your time or make capital out of your misery by falling into our unsavoury practices. It is possible, of course, to meet a few authors without wishing to do so. A good many of them go out a great deal nowadays, and some move in very decent society, so that there is no knowing when and where one may meet an author or two. At any moment, one or other of us may be faced with what appears to be a pair of overfed, pompous merchants or manufacturers, only to learn, on being introduced, that while one of them, Mr. Dash of Dot & Dash, Leadenhall Street, is the real thing, his companion is no other than Mr. Blank, the mystical poet. But to encounter authors in this way is no great matter; there is no need to reveal the fact that one knows anything about them. If they happen to be men whose work is good, some disappointment may attend the encounter, but it will only be slight, for we can afford to be amused when the meeting is accidental and we have not deliberately asked to be disillusioned. But if we are decoyed by a naive enthusiasm into seeking out our men, it is almost certain that we shall be grievously disappointed, and it is more than likely that our admiration for their work will soon be on the wane. Knowing the men, we may pretend to admire them more than ever; most of us do; but it hardly deceives anybody, and certainly not ourselves, who are left with the unpleasant thought that we have thus cut down our own pleasures.

But why, some innocent may ask, should there be any disillusionment; surely a man must be better than his books? He may be in the sight of a god, but not necessarily in the sight of a fellow mortal. A man—any man, let alone an author—is not so tractable as a book; we are rarely in a position to choose him so that he can minister to a mood; he will not wait upon our convenience like our patient volumes. A book may be a vain thing, but it knows nothing of that swelling vanity which belongs to us alone, and to creators more than most. This apart, we must discriminate between good and bad authors. A writer who has been unsuccessful in his art, one who is not master of his craft, a bad author in fact, may be, and very often is, better than his books. An encounter with such a one will not be sought after, except by the wise few, but it may very well bring surprise and delight in its train. It is far otherwise with the great craftsmen, those fine fellows that you and I admire and sometimes long to meet. A good author is his own worst book. We go to him in the hope of catching again that rounded utterance which moved us in this volume or persuaded us in the other; we go—to put the matter shortly—expecting fine talk, and completely overlook the fact that we have already had the best of the man to wait upon us. Our hopes running so high, small wonder that we discover such a falling-off; the best of our author’s talk is but a slovenly paraphrase of his most successful things, or a rehash of his rejected manuscripts; and the worst is probably far below what we have to endure in the smoke-room or the railway carriage. Moreover, along with this decline in matter and style, we have to put up with unexpected and totally unwelcome mannerisms, irritating tricks of voice and gesture, and we know not what fumbling and mouthing, all of them acquired during the making of books but all kept outside the covers. And nowadays, very few writers cultivate the picturesque in their appearance or try to look the part, so that our favourites never resemble our private images of them, and inevitably they always look worse, being dingier or shorter or fatter. Can this squat, fussy nonentity be our great novelist, we cry, when we see him for the first time. Probably all of us read and admire the exquisite lyrics of W., who seems to live all his days among lovely unsubstantial things, fleeting shadows and strangely significant silences; but whereas you think of him as a tall, rather fragile man with dreamy eyes and a silky beard, I who have actually met him can only call up a very different image, that of a solid, blue-chinned fellow with an arrogant, almost sinister profile, suggesting an unscrupulous lawyer or money-lender rather than a singer of exquisite songs. Count D’Orsay, you will remember, discovered Byron in a faded nankeen jacket and green spectacles—a notable anti-climax!

We could perhaps overlook appearance and manners if only we got what we principally looked for—fine talk. We are disappointed, of course, and it is our own fault. Even if we had never reasoned the matter out, we ought to have had the sense to put away such expectations, or take care that they were never tested by reality. History shows us great writers and great talkers, but we rarely find the two combined in one figure. It is true that there was nobody more celebrated in his day as a talker than Coleridge, but he did his best literary work before he had this reputation, and the more he talked, the less he wrote. His contemporary, Mackintosh, was a great talker, but who reads Mackintosh now! Do not let us deceive ourselves by thinking that memoirs and biographies of literary men will help us; do not let us imagine that reading them is the same thing as actually meeting authors. Memoirs and biographies are books, with all the virtues of books; they can be put aside, skipped, or disbelieved, if necessary; they are art, and very good art too, some of them. Johnson as he appears in Boswell is good enough for me, for there I can enjoy that very unpleasantness which must have made an actual encounter such a risky business. As for those enthusiasts who are always telling us what they would give to spend an evening with this or the other demi-god of letters, most of them do not realise what they are saying. They would barter we know not what for one evening with Shakespeare at the Mermaid, as if they expected to find him mouthing over his liquor alternately in the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff. I, for one, would not be surprised if all Shakespeare’s talk at the Mermaid was not worth a rush; he probably never did more than exchange a few commonplaces and listen smilingly to the others before he emptied his flagon and went home. The epithets that contemporaries bestowed so grudgingly upon him, ‘gentle’ and ‘civil’ and the like, suggest a quiet man and good listener. I warrant that Jonson was the better talker. Even with Lamb, who is usually the next to be singled out, an encounter might not be entirely successful. Among his intimates, he could stammer out some wonderful things, but he was apt to prove an odd, sometimes unpleasant companion for others. The hapless Distributor of Stamps who called on Wordsworth at Haydon’s, whom Lamb baited so unmercifully, would be very unwilling to subscribe to the popular opinion of ‘gentle Elia.’ As for Milton and Wordsworth, I have no doubt that they were insufferable. And if any man argues the charm of Shelley’s society from his verse, let him go into the first fanatical group he can find, single out the young man who has the greatest number of half-digested notions and talks incessantly in a high-pitched voice, and by listening to such a one for a few hours, let him test the truth of his idea that a day with Shelley would be unmixed delight. But enough—reason and experience both tell us to avoid meeting good authors, though they say nothing of bad ones. It only remains for us to decide which are good and which are bad, and we cannot begin too soon.