OUR LEISURELY AUTHORS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 972, 12 November 1910, Page 9

OUR LEISURELY AUTHORS.

. Even allowing for the amazing liter- : ary facility which the Benson family claims for. its . own, it is impossible to open Mr. Edward Frederick Benson's ; • latest novel without being impressed by tho list qf. three dozen or so earlier that have flowed from the saine pen. AJjr. Benson is'a young man of fortyrthree', and he began writing about seventeen years ago. Since then his average has been nearly two and a quarter novels a year. His case is probably : the leading one among English" writers, but is by no means highly exceptional. All the younger men whose names are to the front are extremely busy writers. H. G. Wells, who began publishing in 1595, is credited, in "the last edition of "Who's Who," with 31;. titles; by this moment, the total is probably . thirty-two or three, which gives us an annual average almost as high as Mr. Benson's. Since 1904, 6. K. Chesterton has turned out a round dozen .volumes, which .makes, an output of two volumes a • year. Sir. Galworthy has come into prominence only during the last few years, but his record for. that time in drama, fiction, aiid general criticism is impressive. Mr. Charles Marriott, . a "novelist of notable achievement and greater promise, has written fifteen novels sinoo 1901. The .list could easily be. extended. •, . . A comparison with American literary productivity suggests itself. _ It is a oomparison that ■'counts., against us. Some Englishmen are fond qf. saying that the effectiveness of American hustle is out of proportion to the accompanying noise. At bottom, they say, the average, European business .man works harder and accomplishes more without landing himself in a sanatorium. In any case, our novelists are certainly less industrious that the Englishmen. We may put our two elder writers aside. Mr. Henry James, in our own "Who's Who," is . credited with nearly fortyfive book-titles for. a career of forty years and more, though it is to be noted that his record might have been a much longer one if he nad chosen to maintain the pace of his years; he published three volumes in 1878, four volumes in 1879, and three volumes in 1884. Mr. Howells is credited in "Who's Who" with about seventy titles, but that covers a literary career of half a century. Wo tiirn to the younger men.. Mr. Robert W. Chambers, the first man we probably think of among our ready writers, has written 26 volumes in the same time that Mr. Benson has produced nearly forty. •Jack London, in whom, if in anyone, we expect titanic energy ceasely manifesting itself,'has twenty volumes since 1900, a good showing, but not up to the English record. Ms - . David Graham Phillips has done seventeen volumes since 1901. Mr. Robert Herrick has done thirteen in fifteen years, but\ in Mr. Herrick's case it is only fair to" recall that he works at his trade, in addition to writing books. Mr. Winston Churchill makes it a rule to give two years to a book. Sinco 1898, he has produced seven volumes. Here is one field, therefore, in which the speed of life in the New World has not increased over that in the Old. And it might also bo shown that in this field the pace of modern life has not increased over that of fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago. What we have said of contemporary English writers will more than hold good for France, whose men of letters, ill their prodigious industriousness, entirely belie the Capuan reputation of presentday Paris. Not only in fiction, but in : tho fields of criticism and scholarship, . tho Frenchmen of to-day are true to the tradition of Voltaire and his hundreds of volumes, of Diderot, and'of Sainte-Beuve. Tho classic English novelists are less copious, but a Dickens novel'ever}' two years meant three or four novels of present-day longth. Thackeray, : Reade,' Trollope, filled an amount of shelf-space which it would take many scores of our modern thinchested novels to cover. That their successors are courageously trying to, is indicated by the figures we have cited.

The reasons for our lower literary productivity are two. One reason. is tho much " closer connection between literature and journalism in Europe; and tho other reason is the much smaller financial reward that attends upon literary success in Europe. Men like Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Belloc, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Mas 13eerbohm, are jourhalists as well as writers of original volumes, and they aro in tho habit of republishing their newspaper work in book form. In France, this is even

moro the practice. Political chroniques, literary and dramatic reviews, causeries and feuilletons of all kinds are regu.larly put into book form, among a nation whoso books aro inexpensively published in paper covers and whoso publishers call a thousand copies an edition. By such means tho journalistauthor in Eneland and France adds appreciably to his list of book titles. We need only recall how almost unknown the practice is ill this country to see what an advantage tho foreigner lias. It is, of course, a legitimate advantage. If a writer of books is at the sanio time a. newspaper man, it is lair that

the time taken from his books should show in the total. With us, again, book-writing and newspaper-writing do not go hand-in-hand. Even moderate success in the former field leads usually to the abandonment of tho latter.

As to our second reason, it is almost self-evident. If Mr. Chambers derives twenty times tho profit from one of his novels that Mr. Benson does, it stands to reason that in the long run he will be under tho necessity of writing fewer books than Mr. Benson. — Now York "Post."