Transcribed from the 1890 Field & Tuer edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
HOW TO FAIL IN LITERATURE: A LECTURE BY ANDREW LANG
PREFACE
This Lecture was delivered at the South Kensington Museum, inaid of the College for Working Men and Women. As the Publishers,perhaps erroneously, believe that some of the few authors who were notpresent may be glad to study the advice here proffered, the Lectureis now printed. It has been practically re-written, and, likethe kiss which the Lady returned to Rodolphe, is revu, corrigé,et considerablement augmenté.
A. L.
HOW TO FAIL IN LITERATURE
What should be a man’s or a woman’s reason for takingliterature 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 somethingnew, now that so many writers are making their pens “in runningto devour the way” over so many acres of foolscap. The legitimatereasons for enlisting (too often without receiving the shilling) inthis army of writers are not far to seek. A man may be convincedthat 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 ofa vocation, which is not exactly the same thing. There are “manythyrsus bearers, few mystics,” many are called, few chosen. Still, to be sensible of a vocation is something, nay, is much, formost 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 finesentence as others do in a well modelled limb, or a delicately touchedlandscape, nobody can censure them for trying their fortunes in literature. Most of them will fail, for, as the bookseller’s young man toldan author once, they have the poetic temperament, without the poeticpower. Still among these whom Pendennis has tempted, inboyhood, to run away from school to literature as Marryat has temptedothers to run away to sea, there must be some who will succeed. But an early and intense ambition is not everything, any more than acapacity for taking pains is everything in literature or in any art.
Some have the gift, the natural incommunicable power, without theambition, others have the ambition but no other gift from any Muse. This class is the more numerous, but the smallest class of all has boththe power and the will to excel in letters. The desire to write,the love of letters may shew itself in childhood, in boyhood, or youth,and mean nothing at all, a mere harvest of barren blossom without fragranceor fruit. Or, again, the concern about letters may come suddenly,when a youth that cared for none of those things is waning, it may comewhen a man suddenly finds that he has something which he really musttell. Then he probably fumbles about for a style, and his firstfresh impulses are more or less marred by his inexperience of an artwhich beguiles and fascinates others even in their school-days.
It is impossible to prophesy the success of a man of letters fromhis early promise, his early tastes; as impossible as it is to predict,from her childish grace, the beauty of a woman.
But the following remarks on How to fail in Literature are certainlymeant to discourage nobody who loves books, and has an impulse to tella story, or to try a song or a sermon. Discouragements enoughexist in the pursuit of this, as of all arts, crafts, and professions,without my adding to them. Famine and Fear crouch by the portalsof literature as they crouch at the gates of the Virgilian Hades. There is no more frequent cause of failure than d