He was also a clerk in the Foreign Office. I am sure this did not distress Carruthers. For the intelligentsia, notwithstanding their sensitiveness to beauty, prefer to go to the theatre on the nod and to get a book from the library. The plays that are of too fine a quality to attract the patrons of the commercial theatre can count on an audience of ten thousand, and the books that demand from their readers more comprehension than can be expected from the common herd sell twelve hundred copies. One can never tell how large the intelligentsia is, but one can tell fairly well how many of its members are prepared to pay money to patronize the arts they cherish. For a moment, such was the stir he created, it looked as though he might himself be faced with that ignominy, but it soon appeared that his exquisite work was above the heads of the public. The popularity I enjoyed was sufficient to persuade him that there was no occasion for him to give me any of his attention. I am convinced that he had never read a word I had written. For I was perfectly conscious that Humphrey Carruthers looked upon me as a writer of no account.
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But it may be that I could not see the merit of Humphrey Carruthers on account of defects in myself, and if I have described his two most successful stories without enthusiasm the cause perhaps lies in my own wounded vanity. I have a weakness for a point I think atmosphere is all very well, but atmosphere without anything else is like a frame without a picture it has not much significance. I like a story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I am very willing to learn and I thought I might discover in them something that would be useful to me.
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I think it part of the writer’s business to make himself aware of what is being written by his contemporaries. It was all seen through the eyes of the German governess and everyone agreed that Carruthers had conveyed her outlook on the situation with quite delicious humour. There were a good many descriptions of flowers in the garden and a sensitive picture of the Thames under the rain.
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A young man, parliamentary secretary to a Cabinet Minister, very nearly proposed to a baronet’s daughter, but didn’t Two or three others went on the river in a punt They all talked a great deal in an allusive way, but none of them ever finished a sentence and what they meant was very subtly indicated by dots and dashes. It was so delicate that it was a little difficult to know exactly what happened. It narrated the adventures of a number of people who left Paddington Station on Saturday afternoon to stay with friends at Taplow and on Monday morning returned to London. The story that attracted most commendation was called The Shaving Mop and all the best critics pointed out with what beauty the author in three or four pages had laid bare the tragic soul of a barber’s assistantīut his best-known story, which was also his longest, was called Week End. Here was no hack prostituting his talent for money! The praise it received was perhaps a little cooler than that which welcomed his first volume, the critics had had time to collect themselves, but it was enthusiastic enough to have delighted any common writer who earns his living by his pen and there was no doubt that his position in the world of letters was secure and honourable. Three years later Humphrey Carruthers brought out his second book and the critics commented on the interval with satisfaction.