The Supreme of the Supreme

RUPERT HUGHES

Melancholy Incidents and Misadventures in the Career of a Once Popular Author

THERE was once a man whose name was John Bone, and he tried to write something. He wrote— something—a story.

He read his little story aloud to his mother. She loved her son, but she did not like his story. She told him that he was too good to be a popular writer.

He read his work aloud to a girl who was blinded with love for him. But she could not conceal her intense indifference to his story.

He handed it to the man who was his fondest friend, and his friend said:

"My boy, burn it!"

Being a born writer, John Bone thrived on neglect, and he cont inued to try the story on everybody he could detain. Nobody cared for it, or got anything out of it.

Failing to interest anybody who knew him, he sent it to a magazine of infamously large circulation. It came back with a promptitude that spoke volumes for the efficiency of the postal service.

He sent it to the next largest magazine. It came back with the next best speed. He went down the line of all the periodicals in the country not ignoring the trade journals. The speed of its restoration was in exact inverse ratio to the circulation of the magazine.

Even the editor of his home-town paper would not print it. Perforce John Bone laid the story away.

He resolved to be a writer in spite of the world. He wrote another story.

It met with a trifle less disfavor. Nobody cared for it, but the dislike did not quite amount to detestation. He started it up the line, beginning with a poultry magazine and coming out at the Atlantic Monthly. Everybody returned it, except the editor of the hometown paper, who published it as a favor to the author one dull week.

And it made the week duller.

He wrote another story. He was suffering from the writer's passion for self expression.

He wrote, wrote, wrote; mailed, mailed, mailed; re-mailed and re-mailed.

Editors first endured, then pitied, then embraced. People began to grow used to him; to read him when there was nothing else to read. He became a habit—like tobacco or gin, unpleasant at first, but finally a necessity, a seeming delight.

Editors voluntarily increased the prices they paid him. They actually asked him for contributions. They began to compete for him. When his stories were published readers wrote in: "Please give us more Bone. He's simply lovely."

By and by a public grew up about him. He had acquired facility and prosperity and, as always happens, he grew less reckless. He felt a responsibility to his public, to himself, even to what he began to call his art.

At last the critics discovered him. They praised him as a new spirit, a personality. This brought him more readers, more editors.

He wrote with more and more care; more and more people flocked to his following.

Then the critics began to suspect him of being (if the obscene word will be pardoned)— "popular"! They said he knew what the public wanted and wrote down to it.

Of course, nobody could know what the public wants, because there is no such thing as a public, any more than there is an equator, or an average man, or an ideal state.

But it hurt Bone to be accused of truckling even to imaginary customers like a cheap tradesman. He wanted to be an artist (whatever that is).

Instead of rejoicing in the glorious fact that he had somehow managed to interest a large number of assorted human beings, he began to be embarrassed by their interest. Pie took shame to himself for his normal human feelings. He wished himself peculiar, abnormal, eccentric—and he gradually got his wish. He began to write things he did not believe in, things he did not feel. He began to mock the primeval emotions, the ancient forces, the eternal springs of human action. He learned to despise the standard authors, to speak lightly of the classics.

He struck poses, affected cynicism, was contemptuous of everything that was general or universal. He began to write a strange and fantastic type of realism, about an unheard-of state called "life". Actual life and actual people no longer inspired him. He made no secret of his contempt for everything that sways nearly everybody. Real people bored him.

So, he bored real people.

The readers who had looked to him for light and warmth and for the vivid expression of their own mute selves fell away from him.

But gradually he redeemed himself with the perverse little coteries of the precious, the cynics, the self-styled intellectuals. They forgave him his recent success and said he had reformed: that he was now Different.

The grand old contemptibles of the successful magazines rejected his manuscripts with a polite regret that reassured him. He sent them to the next most successful who published them for a short while. Then they, too, returned them.

He backed down the line, growing more artistic at every step; winning a new critic for every hundred thousand readers he lost..

His public grew smaller by degrees and beautifully less. Finally he was proud to realize that he no longer had a public. His name appeared oftener and oftener in the most exclusive reviews. He was hailed with more and more acclaim as one of the few genuine artists that had somehow managed to breathe in this miserably inartistic nation.

The haters of the uncultured; the contemners of the Great Unwashed; all the forward-lookers found a strange Something in his work.

He was published in quaint and beautiful types by editors whose circulation was hardly more than a flutter. He was illustrated by illustrators who were superior to anatomy, perspective, draughtmanship, and composition.

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Bone realized that he was triumphing at last. Then the critics who praised him grew fewer and fewer, more and more select. He was our noblest example of the rule that he who interests the least number is the loftiest artist. The higher, the fewer.

At length he was praised by only one critic, and that one the terrible William Krex to whom all the highest browed critics seemed lowbrows.

Finally Bone wrote something that was published in the first and final number of a magazine that came out only once and then went back into darkness. It was never soiled by a paid advertisement or profaned by an ordinary eye.

This opus overpowered even the great Krex himself, who wrote of it: "The latest Bonian masterpiece is quite beyond my comprehension. I confess I don't know whether I like it or not. I can't get near enough to the author's meaning to form an opinion."

This tribute rejoiced Bone immeasurably. He was at last as solitarily exaltedas Saint Simeon Stylites. He was an artist all by himself.

His standards were so high that he could not find anything good enough to write about at all. He sat as idle as a Hindu thinker, contemplating his own unimpeachable umbilicus in a divine reverie that would have been thought a stupor in an ordinary mortal.

Through the mauve haze of his meditations came eventually a recollection of that first story he wrote. He remembered that everybody was unanimous in not caring for it. That stirred him. Perhaps it was great. Perhaps it was too good for the vulgar public. Perhaps he had struck the sacred fire from the flint at his first blow.

His opus primus must have had implicit in it some exquisite, all-excluding grace. Only one person in the world had liked it —its author.

He hunted for it. Found it. Read it. Read it again with a unique thrill of awe.

He didn't like it himself! At first this was a shock to his self-esteem. Then he recovered with a gush of rapture. Its own author couldn't like it. Nobody in the whole wide world liked it. Great Heavens! how great it must be! It must be the greatest work ever achieved.

He cried aloud: "It was given to me just once to speak the ultimate word, to utter the absolutely incomprehensible, unendurable thought. This is the Supreme of the Supreme!"

And then, to ensure its immortality, he burned it. The smoke seemed like incense to his Olympian nostrils.