The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  THUS, then, the average of human life has been shown in its entirety to every man of forty-five. The verdicts vary: but you may note, even so, that after forty-five the cynic and the pessimist turn unaccountably mellow. Life, it would seem, like a trip to the dentist, is not so very bad, after all, once you have put up with it. Life does not bid fair, to the tiring eyes of forty-five, ever to become a perfect business: and to preserve any especial altruism at forty-five is to present a happily rare case of arrested development. But the point is that when the performance has been witnessed, in its entirety, and with one’s own senses, then the average of human life does tend to seem well enough just as it stands. The lying and the mismanagement do not promise ever to be rectified: but that appears hardly an elegiac matter, after all; for middle age, I repeat, has mastered that invaluable gesture which is known as a shrug.

  Such is the discovery made by all men at forty-five or thereabouts: such, if you so prefer to phrase it, is the illusion to which middle age becomes a victim: such, in any case, is the eternal crux between middle age and youth. Youth is credulous in many matters, but upon one single issue youth stays as iron and granite: youth does not even believe that life serves well enough just as it stands. To believe that such is just possibly the case remains the attested hall-mark of middle life. . . . Thereafter optimism develops insidiously: and the most of us sink, cackling thinly, into an amiable senescence.

Chapter V. Which Chronicles an Offset

  BUT it is with the younger generation in letters, rather than in life, that I am here the more distinctly concerned, now that time dissevers me from both. . . . And in literary fields there exists at least one rather striking offset to that particular bit of knowledge to which I have just now referred as being acquired by most men at forty-five. It is that any writer who thus comes to forty-five has purchased his knowledge without—at best—improving upon his chances of communicating that knowledge.

  For, after forty-five or thereabouts, it is inevitable that a writer should cease to develop as a writer, just as he ceases to develop as a mammal. No one of his faculties, whatsoever else may happen to them, can improve after that all-arresting date. Some few—though not many authors, it more or less inexplicably appears,—begin to fail earlier. But the average writer has reached his peak at, to my finding, forty; and with favoring luck, with all that he has learned of technique to counterbalance a perhaps lessened exuberance in creative power, he may retain that peak for some years. Yet this retention profits him little. He has nothing new to give: and you may look henceforward to get from him no surprises.

  Ultimately this does not matter: and, where the writer is at all remembered, posterity selects, in a rough and ready and very often wrong-headed fashion, that which posterity esteems to be the best of this writer’s work, without any need to bother over the relative order of its composition. But during the remainder of the man’s career as a practising author this individuality which permeates the work of every writer worth his salt does matter a great deal, to the debit side of his ledger.

Chapter VI. Which Becomes Reasonable

  FOR we ask—not at all illogically—that a new book shall contain something new. We expect, in fine, some element of surprise: and after a writer’s style is fairly formed, after his talents have each been competently developed, that is precisely the one element which he cannot supply. There is, from his point of view, no reason why he should supply it. He is still—so does he think, perhaps rightly, perhaps in merciful illusion,—still at his best, such as that best is. Yet, even be he right, each book that he publishes is a disappointment, howsoever loyally concealed, to his readers; and his most excellent work no longer produces the same effect upon his readers, because that excellence is familiar.

  Every considerate person must respect, for example, the genius of Mr. Kipling and of Mr. Shaw, of Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett: yet the publication of a new book by any one of them is not, nowadays, an event in which it is possible to take real interest. It is an event which at bottom we deplore. And so is it with every writer whose manner has been admirable long enough to become familiar. He publishes perforce a book which in every essential we have already read, time and again. We purchase, in loyalty to old delight: but we labor through the text with a sort of unadmitted impatience, by which those braver persons who write book reviews are irritated far more candidly.