Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/343

Rh to fame. Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost or history? Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or Shakespeare! Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review only survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius of Keats and Tennyson. Two or three journals of our own time, by the same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is denied them in the present.

This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as organised a tradesman as the literary agent. Like the literary agent, he naturally does his best to secure the biggest men. No doubt the time will come when the literary cut-throat—shall we call him?—will publish dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned into fame. "Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen" may then become a familiar legend over literary shop-fronts:

Ah! did you stab at Shelley's heart With silly sneer and cruel lie? And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats, To murder did you nobly try?

You failed, 'tis true; but what of that? The world remembers still your name— 'Tis fame, for you, to be the cur That barks behind the heels of Fame.

Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this is far from being fanciful. If one's enemies have any other raison d'être beyond the fact of their being our enemies—what is it? They are neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous,