UGC NET Paper1 Previous Year Solved Papers - 21th June 2019 Morning

Read the passage and answer the following question.
Unquestionably a literary life is for the most part an unhappy life, because if you have a genius, you must suffer the penalty of genius, and if you have only talent, there are so many cares and worries incidental to the circumstances of men of letters, as to make life exceedingly miserable. Besides the pangs of composition, and the continuous disappointment which a true artist feels at his inability to reveal himself, there is the ever-recurring difficulty of gaining the public ear. Young writers are buoyed up by the hope and the belief that they have only to throw that poem at the world’s feet to get back in return the laurel-crown; that they have only to push as a new light in literature. You can never convince a young author that the editors of magazines and the publishers of books are a practical body of men, who are by no means frantically anxious about placing the best literature before the public. Nay, that for the most part they are mere brokers, who conduct their business on the hardest lines of a profit and loss account. But supposing your book fairly launches, its perils are only beginning. You have to run the gauntlet of the critics. When you are a little older, you feel find that criticism is not much more serious than the bye-play of clowns in a circus, when they best around the ring, the victim with bladders stung at the end of long poles. A time comes in the life of every author when he regards critics as comical rather than formidable, and goes his way unheeding. But there are sensitive souls that yield under the chastisement and, perhaps after suffering much silent torture, abandon the profession of the pen forever.