Famous Single Poems
lieve 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
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