August 1
When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to give up. But I know. Though if I say what I know no one is compelled to believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am prone to go extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest zoologists in the place—but my ability was always muffled by the inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever issued from the institution—I do not say the most important. It was trivial—my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts then vacant—one, work on the Coelenterates and another on Vermes, both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training. Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own. Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.
So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R⸺ in the American Naturalist was a rare jeu d’esprit, and my most important scientific work.
In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article appeared at the age of 15 over my father’s name, my motive being not so much modesty as cunning—if the literary world (!) ragged it unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.
My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a story in the Academy after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer’s errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But—screams of silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.
A more recent affair I had with the American Forum, which delighted me by publishing my article, but did not pay—though the Editor went out of his way to write that “payment was on publication.” I did not venture to remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary ambition has never flagged. I have for years past received my rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from Punch to the Hibbert Journal. At one time I used to file their rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me—the half-crown Reviews and the sixpenny Weeklies—to seek out at a library some obscure publication—a Parish Magazine or the local paper—anything was grabbed as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the Westminster Review and immediately plied them with a manuscript and the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it was not the custom to disclose the editor’s name, the following address would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd’s Bush. I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and the booksellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again to the address—this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes’ walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until one evening as I was casually reading the Star coming home in the bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable Westminster Review.
Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in Public Opinion, which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come too late.
If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else. A⸺ regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told him of “P.O.’s” eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I am secretly very nettled too because E⸺ treated the whole matter very indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper’s critique, and though she volunteered to buy several copies to send to friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed out of her mind.
Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his photo into the picture papers—a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully refused. (And so did I.)
But what a queer woman! … [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with wormwood and gall.]