a habit of buying new books.  I know a few souls who borrow books from Mudie’s and elsewhere, and I recognize that their subscriptions yield me a trifle.  But what a trifle!  Do you know anybody who really buys new books?  Have you ever heard tell of such a being?  Of course, there are Franklinish and self-improving young men (and conceivably women) who buy cheap editions of works which the world will not willingly let die:  the Temple Classics, Everyman’s Library, the World’s Classics, the Universal Library.  Such volumes are to be found in many refined and strenuous homes—­oftener unopened than opened—­but still there!  But does this estimable practice aid the living author to send his children to school in decent clothes?  He whom I am anxious to meet is the man who will not willingly let die the author who is not yet dead.  No society for the prevention of the death of corpses will help me to pay my butcher’s bill.

* * * * *

I know that people buy motor-cars, for the newspapers are full of the dust of them.  I know that they buy seats in railway carriages and theatres, and meals at restaurants, and cravats of the new colour, and shares in companies, for they talk about their purchases, and rise into ecstasies of praise or blame concerning them.  I want to learn about the people who buy new books—­modest band who never praise nor blame, nor get excited over their acquisitions, preferring to keep silence, preferring to do good in secret!  Let an enterprising inventor put a new tyre on the market, and every single purchaser will write to the Press and state that he has bought it and exactly what he thinks about it.  Yet, though the purchasers of a fairly popular new book must be as numerous as the purchasers of a new tyre, not one of them ever “lets on” that he has purchased.  I want some book-buyers to come forward and at any rate state that they have bought a book, with some account of the adventure.  I should then feel partly reassured.  I should know by demonstration that a book-buyer did exist; whereas at present all I can do is to assume the existence of a book-buyer whom I have never seen, and whom nobody has ever seen.  It seems to me that if a few book-buyers would kindly come forward and confess—­with proper statistics—­the result would be a few columns quite pleasant to read in the quietude of September.

JOSEPH CONRAD & THE ATHENAEUM

[19 Sep. ’08]

The Athenaeum is a serious journal, genuinely devoted to learning.  The mischief is that it will persist in talking about literature.  I do not wish to be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel, but the Athenaeum’s review of Mr. Joseph Conrad’s new book, “A Set of Six,” in its four thousand two hundred and eighteenth issue, really calls for protest.  At that age the Athenaeum ought, at any rate, to know better than to make itself ridiculous.  It owes an apology to Mr. Conrad.  Here we have a Pole who has taken the trouble to come from the ends of the earth to England, to learn to speak the English language, and to write it like a genius; and he is received in this grotesque fashion by the leading literary journal!  Truly, the Athenaeum’s review resembles nothing so much as the antics of a provincial mayor round a foreign monarch sojourning in his town.