One
artist cannot get away from sentimental merchant-seamen and lovely
lady-passengers; another must always bring in an infant that is cast
on shore near a primitive village; another must have for characters a
roguish trainer of race-horses, an honest jockey, a dark villain who
tampers with race-horses, and a dashing young man who is saved from
ruin by betting on a race; another drags in a surprisingly
lofty-minded damsel who grows up pure and noble amid the most
repulsive surroundings; another can never forget the lost will;
another depends on a mock-modest braggart who kills scores of people
in a humorous way. The mould remains the same in each case, although
there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out
and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward the
written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. Like
the great painters who work for Manchester or New York millionaires,
these novelists produce stuff which is only shoddy; they lower their
high calling, and they prepare themselves to pass away into the ranks
of the nameless millions whose works are ranged along miles of
untouched shelves in the great public libraries.
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