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 that Bulwer wrote “There Is No Death” and “There Is No Unbelief,” and few indeed who remember that English ever wrote anything except “Ben Bolt.”

Nothing is more devastating to a literary career than for a writer, early in it, to gain a reputation for a certain kind of work. He has started out, let it be supposed, to be a serious novelist; his aim is, of course, the novel of character; his ambition is to set upon paper a searching interpretation of life. But before one can interpret life one must understand it, and understanding requires experience and observation, which in their turn require time. Meanwhile he happens upon a plot, and, just to keep his hand in—or perhaps to keep the pot boiling—he casts it into the form of a detective story and sends it off. If it is a success, his fate is sealed. Ever afterwards, in the public mind, he will be labeled as a writer of detective stories, and his publishers will do all they can to persuade him to keep on writing them.

For the public is like a child—it insists on its stories being told “just-so,” and its authors must perform the same tricks over and over again. So Chesterton must keep on being witty and Shaw paradoxical and Barrie whimsical; nothing is wanted from Conan Doyle except Sherlock Holmes. When Mark Twain wrote a serious book, he was compelled to publish it