The author who thinks that he has written a rather inferior novel for the sake of huge royalties has actually written the best he has in him, namely, a piece of cheese. The author who has actually written beneath his best has not done it for money, but to avoid making money. He thinks it is his best; he thinks it is something utterly artistic, æsthetically wonderful, highbrowedly pure, lofty and serene; he scorns money; to make money by it would be to soil it. What he cannot see is that it is not his best; that it is very likely quite his worst; that when he has done his best he will unavoidably make money unless, like the misguided mortal we have just mentioned, deep insincerity vitiates his work. We are therefore ready, before going further, to formulate certain paradoxical principles governing all literary work. 6 To understand why authors go wrong we must first understand how authors may go right. The paradoxical rules which if observed will hold the author to the path of virtue and rectitude may be formulated briefly as follows: 1. An author must write to make money first of all, and every other purpose must be secondary to this purpose of money making. The paradoxy inherent in this principle is that while writing the author must never for a single moment think of the money he may make. 2. Every writer must have a stern and insistent moral purpose in his writing, and especially must he be animated by this purpose if he is writing fiction. The paradoxy here is that never, under any circumstances, may the writer exhibit his moral purpose in his work. 3. A writer must not write too much nor must he write too little. He is writing too much if his successive books sell better and better; he is writing too little if each book shows declining sales. This may appear paradoxical, but consider: If the writer’s work is selling with accelerated speed the market for his wares will very quickly be over-supplied. This happened to Mr. Kipling one day. He had the wisdom to stop writing almost entirely, to let his production fall to an attenuated trickle; with the result that saturation was avoided, and there is now and will long continue to be a good, brisk, steady demand for his product. On the other hand, consider the case of Mrs. Blank (the reader will not expect us to be either so ungallant or so professionally unethical or so commercially unfair as to give her name). Mrs. Blank wrote a book every two or three years, and each was more of a plug than its predecessor. She began writing a book a year, and the third volume under her altered schedule was a best seller. It was also her best novel. 7