been, in the main, honest if unbalanced and ill-regulated minds.
Whatever their errors, they paid the price of them in poverty, in
neglect, in death. With those who pretend to be their descendants to-day
the case is different; they are not paying for their eccentricity or
their madness, they are making it pay.

The enormous engine of modern publicity has been discovered by these
men. They have learned to advertise, and they have found that morbidity,
eccentricity, indecency, extremes of every kind and of any degree are
capital advertisement. If one cannot create a sound and living art, one
can at least make something odd enough to be talked about; if one cannot
achieve enduring fame, one may make sure of a flaming notoriety. And, as
a money-maker, present notoriety is worth more than future fame, for the
speculative dealer is at hand. His interest is in "quick returns" and
he has no wish to wait until you are famous--or dead--before he can sell
anything you do. His process is to buy anything he thinks he can "boom,"
to "boom" it as furiously as possible, and to sell it before the "boom"
collapses. Then he will exploit something else, and there's the rub.
Once you have entered this mad race for notoriety, there is no drawing
out of it. The same sensation will not attract attention a second time;
you must be novel at any cost. You must exaggerate your exaggerations
and out-Herod Herod, for others have learned how easy the game is to
play, and are at your heels. It is no longer a matter of
misunderstanding and being misunderstood by the public; it is a matter
of deliberately flouting and outraging the public--of assuming
incomprehensibility and antagonism to popular feeling as signs of
greatness. And so is founded what Frederic Harrison has called the
"shock-your-grandmother school."

It is with profound regret that one must name as one of the founders of