He
had known that this achievement of his would take a long time, that he must
meet with many rebuffs, that he must starve and despair and be born again,
but, never at any moment, until now, had he, in his heart of hearts,
doubted that that great book was in front of him.
He had seen his work, in his dreams, derided, flouted, misunderstood. That
was the way with most good work, but what he had never seen was its
acceptance amongst the ranks of the "Pretty Good," its place given it
beside that rising and falling tide of fiction that covered every year the
greedy rocks of the circulating libraries and ebbed out again leaving no
trace behind it.
Now, after the failure of "Mortimer Stant" for the first time, this awful
question--"What if, after all, you should be an Ordinary Creature? What if
you are no better than that army who fights happily, contentedly, with
mediocrity for its daily bread and butter? That army, upon whose serried
ranks you have perhaps, unconsciously, but nevertheless with pity, looked
down?... What if you are never to write a word that will be remembered,
never even to cause a decent attention, amongst your own generation?"
What if after all this stir and fluster, this pain and agony and striving,
there should be nothing exceptional about Peter? What rock to stand on
then?
He had never, perhaps, analysed his feelings about it all.
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