DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51521#0089
(8i )
had collected a large number of passages from authors
whose names were known to the generality of readers
and she would be on safer ground if she left out Esther
Waters. It was difficult to decide whether her inclu-
sion would do more harm than good on the bookstalls.”
I could see that Gosse had come over to my way of
thinking when he admitted that it was easier to create
a prejudice than to remove one. Eventually he said, “Pre-
judice will die down, and people will wonder, as they
have often wondered before, how it was that they ever
could have thought, and thought sincerely, that Esther
Waters was not a book for the bookstalls.” So do our
lives end in indecisions. I cast no blame on the publisher
of the anthology or its compiler. I remember that Manet,
whose talent was only equalled by Velasquez and was
charming as Chardin in his still life, remained nearly all
his life without a buyer. Only one man believed in him,
the great picture dealer Durand Ruel, who bought two
thousand pounds’ worth of pictures of Manet’s, and that
was the beginning and end of Manet’s luck. Twenty
years passed without a customer, amid jeers of the press
and comic papers by writers who knew better but wished
to curry favour with theii- readers. Yet notwithstanding
my intimate knowledge of the cloud of injustice which
poisoned Manet’s life, though he put a bright face upon
it, I was surprised that I should meet the same injustice
in England over Esther Waters. Gosse began to see clearer,
had collected a large number of passages from authors
whose names were known to the generality of readers
and she would be on safer ground if she left out Esther
Waters. It was difficult to decide whether her inclu-
sion would do more harm than good on the bookstalls.”
I could see that Gosse had come over to my way of
thinking when he admitted that it was easier to create
a prejudice than to remove one. Eventually he said, “Pre-
judice will die down, and people will wonder, as they
have often wondered before, how it was that they ever
could have thought, and thought sincerely, that Esther
Waters was not a book for the bookstalls.” So do our
lives end in indecisions. I cast no blame on the publisher
of the anthology or its compiler. I remember that Manet,
whose talent was only equalled by Velasquez and was
charming as Chardin in his still life, remained nearly all
his life without a buyer. Only one man believed in him,
the great picture dealer Durand Ruel, who bought two
thousand pounds’ worth of pictures of Manet’s, and that
was the beginning and end of Manet’s luck. Twenty
years passed without a customer, amid jeers of the press
and comic papers by writers who knew better but wished
to curry favour with theii- readers. Yet notwithstanding
my intimate knowledge of the cloud of injustice which
poisoned Manet’s life, though he put a bright face upon
it, I was surprised that I should meet the same injustice
in England over Esther Waters. Gosse began to see clearer,