I could
never have carried it through, even if I had tried, and instinctively
declined to try. A man cannot be said to have failed, because he did
not get what he did not try for. What I did try for I believe I have
got as fully as any reasonable man can expect, and I have every hope
that I shall get it still more both so long as I live and after I am
dead.
If, however, people mean that I am to explain how it is I have not
made more noise in spite of my own indolence in matter, the answer is
that those who do not either push the themselves into noise, or give
some one else a substantial interest in pushing them, never do get
made a noise about. How can they? I was too lazy to go about from
publisher to publisher and to decline to publish a book myself if I
could not find some one to speculate in it. I could take any amount
of trouble about writing a book but, so long as I could lay my hand
on the money to bring it out with, I found publishers' antechambers
so little to my taste that I soon tired and fell back on the short
and easy method of publishing my book myself. Of course, therefore,
it failed to sell. I know more about these things now, and will
never publish a book at my own risk again, or at any rate I will send
somebody else round the antechambers with it for a good while before
I pay for publishing it.
I should have liked notoriety and financial success well enough if
they could have been had for the asking, but I was not going to take
any trouble about them and, as a natural consequence, I did not get
them.
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