he might have been.

Now this is the case with a great deal of scientific and artistic work,
and with nearly all literature at the present time, throughout the
English-speaking community. There are a few sciences slightly endowed,
there are a few arts patronized with some intelligence and generosity,
and for the rest there is nothing for it, for the man who wants to do
these most necessary and vital things, but to hammer some at least of
his precious gold into the semblance of a brass trumpet and to devote a
certain proportion of his time and energy to blowing that trumpet and
with that air of conscious modesty the public is pleased to consider
genuine, proclaiming the value of his wares. Some men seem able to do
this sort of thing without any deterioration in quality and some with
only a partial deterioration, but the way of self-advertisement is on a
slippery slope, and it has brought many a man of indisputable gifts to
absolute vulgarity and ineffectiveness of thought and work. At the best
it is a shameful business, this noise and display, for all that Scott
and Dickens were past masters in the art. And some men cannot do it at
all. Moreover, what the good man may do with an effort, the energetic
quack, whose only gift is simulation, can do infinitely better. It is
only in the unprofitable branches of intellectual work that the best
now holds the best positions unchallenged. In the really popular
branches of artistic work every honourable success draws a parasitic
swarm of imitators like fish round bread in a pool. In the world of
thought, far more than in the world of politics, the polling method,
the democratic method has broken down, the method that will only permit
an author to write--unless his subject is one that allows him to hold a
Professorial Chair--on condition that he can get a publisher to induce
the public to buy a certain minimum number of copies of each of his
works, a method that will give him no rest, once he is in the full