How to Fail in Literature | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1890 Field and Tuer edition.

HOW TO FAIL IN LITERATURE: A LECTURE BY ANDREW
LANG

PREFACE

This Lecture was delivered at the South Kensington Museum, in aid of
the College for Working Men and Women. As the Publishers, perhaps
erroneously, believe that some of the few authors who were not present
may be glad to study the advice here proffered, the Lecture is now
printed. It has been practically re-written, and, like the kiss which the
Lady returned to Rodolphe, is revu, corrige, et considerablement
augmente.
A. L.

HOW TO FAIL IN LITERATURE

What should be a man's or a woman's reason for taking literature as a
vocation, what sort of success ought they to desire, what sort of
ambition should possess them? These are natural questions, now that so
many readers exist in the world, all asking for something new, now that
so many writers are making their pens "in running to devour the way"
over so many acres of foolscap. The legitimate reasons for enlisting
(too often without receiving the shilling) in this army of writers are not
far to seek. A man may be convinced that he has useful, or beautiful, or
entertaining ideas within him, he may hold that he can express them in
fresh and charming language. He may, in short, have a "vocation," or
feel conscious of a vocation, which is not exactly the same thing. There
are "many thyrsus bearers, few mystics," many are called, few chosen.
Still, to be sensible of a vocation is something, nay, is much, for most
of us drift without any particular aim or predominant purpose. Nobody
can justly censure people whose chief interest is in letters, whose chief
pleasure is in study or composition, who rejoice in a fine sentence as
others do in a well modelled limb, or a delicately touched landscape,
nobody can censure them for trying their fortunes in literature. Most of
them will fail, for, as the bookseller's young man told an author once,
they have the poetic temperament, without the poetic power. Still
among these whom Pendennis has tempted, in boyhood, to run away
from school to literature as Marryat has tempted others to run away to
sea, there must be some who will succeed. But an early and intense
ambition is not everything, any more than a capacity for taking pains is
everything in literature or in any art.
Some have the gift, the natural incommunicable power, without the
ambition, others have the ambition