



Produced by Anthony J. Adam.  HTML version by Al Haines.









"THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS"

by

William Dean Howells


I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception,
and that when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society
should provide him with work and warrant him a living.  I do not think
any man ought to live by an art.  A man's art should be his privilege,
when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned
his daily bread; and its results should be free to all.  There is an
instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion
of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane,
something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a
statue.  Most of all, the artist himself feels this.  He puts on a bold
front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but
he knows very well that there is something false and vulgar in it; and
that the work which cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly
paid in money.  He can, of course, say that the priest takes money for
reading the marriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and
for saying the last office for the dead; that the physician sells
healing; that justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party
to the thing that is and must be.  He can say that, as the thing is,
unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to
starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a
statue; and all this is bitterly true.  He is, and he must be, only too
glad if there is a market for his wares.  Without a market for his
wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will sell better
than pictures, or poems, or statues.  All the same, the sin and the
shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with its inward
vision.  Many will make believe otherwise, but I would rather not make
believe otherwise; and in trying to write of Literature as Business I
am tempted to begin by saying that Business is the opprobrium of
Literature.



II.

Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the
arts.  It cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves as
the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it
is the mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute
terms, of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all.  It
cannot awaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to
express precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say HIM, it
says nothing, and is nothing.  So that when a poet has put his heart,
much or little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is
greater than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a
sculptor has modelled a statue to order.  These are artists less
articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to
their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of
themselves in the dicker.  It does not change the nature of the case to
say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which
they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to
bear mankind.  They submitted to the conditions which none can escape;
but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the
conditions of hucksters because they are imposed upon poets.  If it
will serve to make my meaning a little clearer we will suppose that a
poet has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like
the loss of a wife or child.  He pours out his broken heart in verse
that shall bring tears of sacred sympathy from his readers, and an
editor pays him a hundred dollars for the right of bringing his verse
to their notice.  It is perfectly true that the poem was not written
for these dollars, but it is perfectly true that it was sold for them.
The poet must use his emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no
other means; society does not propose to pay his bills for him.  Yet,
and at the end of the ends, the unsophisticated witness finds the
transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, finds it shabby.  Somehow
he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at every moment
violate the eternal fitness of things, the poet's song would have been
given to the world, and the poet would have been cared for by the whole
human brotherhood, as any man should be who does the duty that every
man owes it.

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art
is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way
otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while,
from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble
conscience.  But Byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did
not reach his readers; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright
which her husband foregoes; so that these two eminent instances of
protest against business in literature may be said not to have shaken
its money basis.  I know of no others; but there may be many that I am
culpably ignorant of.  Still, I doubt if there are enough to affect the
fact that Literature is Business as well as Art, and almost as soon.
At present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound
together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles
separate us, and I feel quite sure that in writing of the  Man of
Letters as a Man of Business, I shall attract far more readers than I
should in writing of him as an Artist.  Besides, as an artist he has
been done a great deal already; and a commercial state like ours has
really more concern in him as a business man.  Perhaps it may sometimes
be different; I do not believe it will till the conditions are
different, and that is a long way off.



III.

In the meantime I confidently appeal to the reader's imagination with
the fact that there are several men of letters among us who are such
good men of business that they can command a hundred dollars a thousand
words for all they write; and at least one woman of letters who gets a
hundred and fifty dollars a thousand words.  It is easy to write a
thousand words a day, and supposing one of these authors to work
steadily, it can be seen that his net earnings during the year would
come to some such sum as the President of the United States gets for
doing far less work of a much more perishable sort.  If the man of
letters were wholly a business man this is what would happen; he would
make his forty or fifty thousand dollars a year, and be able to consort
with bank presidents, and railroad officials, and rich tradesmen, and
other flowers of our plutocracy on equal terms.  But, unfortunately,
from a business point of view, he is also an artist, and the very
qualities that enable him to delight the public disable him from
delighting it uninterruptedly.  "No rose blooms right along," as the
English boys at Oxford made an American collegian say in a theme which
they imagined for him in his national parlance; and the man of letters,
as an artist, is apt to have times and seasons when he cannot blossom.
Very often it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow between novels
or stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when the suggestions of
the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays or articles
desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold herself, or shall
respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which he might sell indeed,
but which it would not be good business for him to put on the market.
But supposing him to be a very diligent and continuous worker, and so
happy as to have fallen on a theme that delights him and bears him
along, he may please himself so ill with the result of his labors that
he can do nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a day's
work, a week's work, a month's work.  I know one man of letters who
wrote to-day, and tore up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer.  But even
if part of the mistaken work may be saved, because it is good work out
of place, and not intrinsically bad, the task of reconstruction wants
almost as much time as the production; and then, when all seems done,
comes the anxious and endless process of revision.  These drawbacks
reduce the earning capacity of what I may call the high-cost man of
letters in such measure that an author whose name is known everywhere,
and whose reputation is commensurate with the boundaries of his
country, if it does not transcend them, shall have the income, say, of
a rising young physician, known to a few people in a subordinate city.

In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence of a
nation of business men like ours, I do not know that I can establish
the man of letters in the popular esteem as very much of a business man
after all.  He must still have a low rank among practical people; and
he will be regarded by the great mass of Americans as perhaps a little
off, a little funny, a little soft!

Perhaps not; and yet I would rather not have a consensus of public
opinion on the question; I think I am more comfortable without it.



IV.

There is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the business
side, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and so far
from having been protected by our laws it was exposed for ninety years
after the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of
stolen goods.  It is true that we now have the international copyright
law at last, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but
literary property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust
statutes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out
the aggressors and punish them, as it would seek out and punish the
trespassers upon any other kind of property; but it leaves the
aggrieved owner to bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he
can.  This may be right enough in itself; but I think, then, that all
property should be defended by civil suit, and should become public
after forty-two years of private tenure.  The Constitution guarantees
us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have
forgotten this in the case of our infant literary industry.  So long as
this remains the case, we cannot expect the best business talent to go
into literature, and the man of letters must keep his present low grade
among business men.

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing
at all.  I may say that it is only since the was that literature has
become a business with us.  Before that time we had authors, and very
good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember
any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and
we all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans.  They were either
men of fortune, or they were editors, or professors, with salaries or
incomes apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped
out with public offices; one need not go over their names, or classify
them.  Some of them must have made money by their books, but I question
whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his
books brought him.  No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book
that we could not recognize as a work of literature.  But many authors
live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial
publication of their writings to the magazines.  They do not live so
nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other
professions when they begin to make themselves names; the high state of
brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of
the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and social
splendor.  Perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the synagogue;
it is certain they do not get them.  Still, they do very fairly well,
as things go; and several have incomes that would seem riches to the
great mass of worthy Americans who work with their hands for a
living--when they can get the work.  Their incomes are mainly from
serial publication in the different magazines; and the prosperity of
the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a class, was
wholly unknown among us before the war.  It is not only the famous or
fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the much larger
number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors,
and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of
acceptable work.  These are the sort who do not get reprinted from the
periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted, and
then their serial work in its completed form appeals to the readers who
say they do not read serials.  The multitude of these is not great, and
if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a much more
embittered man than he now generally is.  But he understands perfectly
well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the return
from that he may count as so much money found in the road--a few
hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most.



V.

I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are absolutely as
great as they were earlier in the century, in any of the
English-speaking countries; relatively they are nothing like as great.
Scott had forty thousand dollars for "Woodstock," which was not a very
large novel, and was by no means one of his best; and forty thousand
dollars had at least the purchasing powers of sixty thousand then.
Moore had three thousand guineas for "Lalla Rookh," but what publisher
would be rash enough to pay twenty-five thousand dollars for the
masterpiece of a minor poet now?  The book, except in very rare
instances, makes nothing like the return to the author that the
magazine makes, and there are but two or three authors who find their
account in that form of publication.  Those who do, those who sell the
most widely in book form, are often not at all desired by editors; with
difficulty they get a serial accepted by any principal magazine.  On
the other hand, there are authors whose books, compared with those of
the popular favorites, do not sell, and yet they are eagerly sought for
by editors; they are paid the highest prices, and nothing that they
offer is refused.  These are literary artists; and it ought to be plain
from what I am saying that in belles-lettres, at least, most of the
best literature now first sees the light in the magazines, and most of
the second best appears first in book form.  The old-fashioned people
who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not reading magazine
fiction, or magazine poetry, make a great mistake, and simply class
themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they cannot
enjoy the best.  Of course this is true mainly, if not merely, of
belles-lettres; history, science, politics, metaphysics, in spite of
the many excellent articles and papers in these sorts upon what used to
be called various emergent occasions, are still to be found at their
best in books.  The most monumental example of literature, at once
light and good, which has first reached the public in book form is in
the different publications of Mark Twain; but Mr. Clemens has of late
turned to the magazines too, and now takes their mint mark before he
passes into general circulation.  All this may change again, but at
present the magazines--we have no longer any reviews--form the most
direct approach to that part of our reading public which likes the
highest things in literary art.  Their readers, if we may judge from
the quality of the literature they get, are more refined than the book
readers in our community; and their taste has no doubt been cultivated
by that of the disciplined and experienced editors.  So far as I have
known these they are men of aesthetic conscience, and of generous
sympathy.  They have their preferences in the different kinds, and they
have their theory of what kind will be most acceptable to their
readers; but they exercise their selective function with the wish to
give them the best things they can.  I do not know one of them--and it
has been my good fortune to know them nearly all--who would print a
wholly inferior thing for the sake of an inferior class of readers,
though they may sometimes decline a good thing because for one reason
or another they believe it would not be liked.  Still, even this does
not often happen; they would rather chance the good thing they doubted
of than underrate their readers' judgment.

New writers often suppose themselves rejected because they are unknown;
but the unknown man of force and quality is of all others the man whom
the editor welcomes to his page. He knows that there is always a danger
that the reigning favorite may fail to please; that at any rate, in the
order of things, he is passing away, and that if the magazine is not to
pass away with the men who have made it, there must be a constant
infusion of fresh life.  Few editors are such fools and knaves as to
let their personal feeling disable their judgment; and the young writer
who gets his manuscript back may be sure that it is not because the
editor dislikes him, for some reason or no reason.  Above all, he can
trust me that his contribution has not been passed unread, or has
failed of the examination it merits.  Editors are not men of infallible
judgment, but they do use their judgment, and it is usually good.

The young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine has
achieved a double success, first, with the editor, and then with the
best reading public.  Many factitious and fallacious literary
reputations have been made through books, but very few have been made
through the magazines, which are not only the best means of living, but
of outliving, with the author; they are both bread and fame to him.  If
I insist a little upon the high office which this modern form of
publication fulfils in the literary world, it is because I am impatient
of the antiquated and ignorant prejudice which classes the magazines as
ephemeral.  They are ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not
ephemeral, and what is best in them awaits its resurrection in the
book, which, as the first form, is so often a lasting death.  An
interesting proof of the value of the magazine to literature is the
fact that a good novel will have wider acceptance as a book from having
been a magazine serial.

I am not sure that the decay of the book is not owing somewhat to the
decay of reviewing.  This does not now seem to me so thorough, or even
so general as it was some years ago,  and I think the book oftener
comes to the buyer without the warrant of a critical estimate than it
once did.  That is never the case with material printed in a magazine
of high class.  A well-trained critic, who is bound by the strongest
ties of honor and interest not to betray either his employer or his
public, has judged it, and his practical approval is a warrant of
quality.



VI.

Under the regime of the great literary periodicals the prosperity of
literary men would be much greater than it actually is, if the
magazines were altogether literary.  But they are not, and this is one
reason why literature is still the hungriest of the professions.
Two-thirds of the magazines are made up of material which, however
excellent, is without literary quality.  Very probably this is because
even the highest class of readers, who are the magazine readers, have
small love of pure literature, which seems to have been growing less
and less in all classes.  I say seems, because there are really no
means of ascertaining the fact, and it may be that the editors are
mistaken in making their periodicals two-thirds popular science,
politics, economics, and the timely topics which I will call
contemporaries; I have sometimes thought they were.  But however that
may be, their efforts in this direction have narrowed the field of
literary industry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity kindled
by the unexampled prosperity of their periodicals.  They pay very well
indeed for literature; they pay from five or six dollars a thousand
words for the work of the unknown writer, to a hundred and fifty
dollars a thousand words for that of the most famous, or the most
popular, if there is a difference between fame and popularity; but they
do not, altogether, want enough literature to justify the best business
talent in devoting itself to belles-lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or
humorous sketches of travel, or light essays; business talent can do
far better in drygoods, groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate,
railroads, and the like.  I do not think there is any danger of a
ruinous competition from it in the field which, though narrow, seems so
rich to us poor fellows, whose business talent is small, at the best.

The most of the material contributed to the magazines is the subject of
agreement between the editor and the author; it is either suggested by
the author, or is the fruit of some suggestion from the editor; in any
case the price is stipulated beforehand, and it is no longer the custom
for a well-known contributor to leave the payment to the justice or the
generosity of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, nor
ever a wise thing.  Usually, the price is so much a thousand words, a
truly odious method of computing literary value, and one well
calculated to make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling
his art at all.  It is as if a painter sold his picture at so much a
square inch, or a sculptor bargained away a group of statuary by the
pound.  But it is a custom that you cannot always successfully quarrel
with, and most writers gladly consent to it, if only the price a
thousand words is large enough.  The sale to the editor means the sale
of the serial rights only, but if the publisher of the magazine is also
a publisher of books, the republication of the material is supposed to
be his right, unless there is an understanding to the contrary; the
terms for this are another affair.  Formerly something more could be
got for the author by the simultaneous appearance of his work in an
English magazine, but now the great American magazines, which pay far
higher prices than any others in the world, have a circulation in
England so much exceeding that of any English periodical, that the
simultaneous publication can no longer be arranged for from this side,
though I believe it is still done here from the other side.



VII.

I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to
the magazines.  I am not sure that the case is in every way improved
for young authors.  The magazines all maintain a staff for the careful
examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has
been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use
is very small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty
in the course of a year.  The new writer, then, must be very good to be
accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed.  The
pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one,
two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay.  If the writer has
not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in the
courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the book
is his immediate hope.  How slight a hope the book is I have tried to
hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude
enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse
still, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not
indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean
success with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which
does not personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by
it.  I will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book
which the young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an
untainted mind, such as most young men and women write; and I will
suppose that it has found a publisher.  It is human nature, as
competition has deformed human nature, for the publisher to wish the
author to take all the risks, and he possibly proposes that the author
shall publish it at his own expense, and let him have a percentage of
the retail price for managing it.  If not that, he proposes that the
author shall pay for the stereotype plates, and take fifteen per cent.
of the price of the book; or if this will not go, if the author cannot,
rather than will not do it (he is commonly only too glad to do anything
he can), then the publisher offers him ten per cent. of the retail
price after the first thousand copies have been sold.  But if he fully
believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from the first copy
sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself.  The book is to be
retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher is very well
pleased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred copies.  Whether the
author has as much reason to be so is a question, but if the book does
not sell more he has only himself to blame, and had better pocket in
silence the two hundred and twenty-five dollars he gets for it, and
bless his publisher, and try to find work somewhere at five dollars a
week.  The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the
author, and until a book has sold two thousand copies the division is
fair enough.  After that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have
been defrayed, and the book goes on advertising itself; there is merely
the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be met, and the
arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher.  The author
has no right to complain of this, in the case of his first book, which
he is only too grateful to get accepted at all.  If it succeeds, he has
himself to blame for making the same arrangement for his second or
third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which is
practically the same thing.  It will be business for the publisher to
take advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault;
but I do not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very
often not do so.

At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the
author's gains by subscription publication, and one very well-known
American author prospered fabulously in that way.  The percentage
offered by the subscription houses was only about half as much as that
paid by the trade, but the sales were so much greater that the author
could very well afford to take it. Where the book-dealer sold ten, the
book-agent sold a hundred; or at least he did so in the case of Mark
Twain's books; and we all thought it reasonable he could do so with
ours.  Such of us as made experiment of him, however, found the facts
illogical.  No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription
except Mr. Clemens's books, and I think these went because the
subscription public never knew what good literature they were.  This
sort of readers, or buyers, were so used to getting something worthless
for their money, that they would not spend it for artistic fiction, or
indeed for any fiction all, except Mr. Clemens's, which they probably
supposed bad.  Some good books of travel had a measurable success
through the book agents, but not at all the success that had been hoped
for; and I believe now the subscription trade again publishes only
compilations, or such works as owe more to the skill of the editor than
the art of the writer.  Mr. Clemens himself no longer offers his books
to the public in that way.

It is not common, I think, in this country, to publish on the
half-profits system, but it is very common in England, where, owing
probably to the moisture in the air, which lends a fairy outline to
every prospect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring.  One of my own
early books was published there on these terms, which I accepted with
the insensate joy of the young author in getting any terms from a
publisher.  The book sold, sold every copy of the small first edition,
and in due time the publisher's statement came.  I did not think my
half of the profits was very great, but it seemed a fair division after
every imaginable cost had been charged up against my poor book, and
that frail venture had been made to pay the expenses of composition,
corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial
copies.  The wonder ought to have been that there was anything at all
coming to me, but I was young and greedy then, and I really thought
there ought to have been more.  I was disappointed, but I made the best
of it, of course, and took the account to the junior partner of the
house which employed me, and said that I should like to draw on him for
the sum due me from the London publishers.  He said, Certainly; but
after a glance at the account he smiled and said he supposed I knew how
much the sum was?  I answered, Yes; it was eleven pounds nine
shillings, was not it?  But I owned at the same time that I never was
good at figures, and that I found English money peculiarly baffling.
He laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings and nine pence.  In
fact, after all those charges for composition, corrections, paper,
printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies, there was a most
ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent. commission on
sales, which reduced my half from pounds to shillings, and handsomely
increased the publisher's half in proportion.  I do not now dispute the
justice of the charge.  It was not the fault of the half-profits
system, it was the fault of the glad young author who did not
distinctly inform himself of its mysterious nature in agreeing to it,
and had only to reproach himself if he was finally disappointed.

But there is always something disappointing in the accounts of
publishers, which I fancy is because authors are strangely constituted,
rather than because publishers are so.  I will confess that I have such
inordinate expectations of the sale of my books which I hope I think
modestly of, that the sales reported to me never seem great enough.
The copyright due me, no matter how handsome it is, appears deplorably
mean, and I feel impoverished for several days after I get it.  But
then, I ought to add that my balance in the bank is always much less
than I have supposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come back
to me, have the air of having been in a conspiracy to betray me.

No, we literary men must learn, no matter how we boast ourselves in
business, that the distress we feel from our publisher's accounts is
simply idiopathic; and I for one wish to bear my witness to the
constant good faith and uprightness of publishers.

It is supposed that because they have the affair altogether in their
hands they are apt to take advantage in it; but this does not follow,
and as a matter of fact they have the affair no more in their own hands
than any other business man you have an open account with.  There is
nothing to prevent you from looking at their books, except your own
innermost belief and fear that their books are correct, and that your
literature has brought you so little because it has sold so little.

The author is not to blame for his superficial delusion to the
contrary, especially if he has written a book that has set everyone
talking, because it is of a vital interest.  It may be of a vital
interest, without being at all the kind of book people want to buy; it
may be the kind of book that they are content to know at second hand;
there are such fatal books; but hearing so much, and reading so much
about it, the author cannot help hoping that it has sold much more than
the publisher says.  The publisher is undoubtedly honest, however, and
the author had better put away the comforting question of his integrity.

The English writers seem largely to suspect their publishers (I cannot
say with how much reason, for my English publisher is Scotch, and I
should be glad to be so true a man as I think him); but I believe that
American authors, when not flown with flattering reviews, as largely
trust theirs.  Of course there are rogues in every walk of life.  I
will not say that I ever personally met them in the flowery paths of
literature, but I have heard of other people meeting them there, just
as I have heard of people seeing ghosts, and I have to believe in both
the rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses.  I
suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked publishers,
but in the case of our books that do not sell, I am afraid that it is
the graceless and inappreciative public which is far more to blame than
the wickedest of the publishers.  It is true that publishers will drive
a hard bargain when they can, or when they must; but there is nothing
to hinder an author from driving a hard bargain, too, when he can, or
when he must; and it is to be said of the publisher that he is always
more willing to abide by the bargain when it is made than the author
is; perhaps because he has the best of it.  But he has not always the
best of it; I have known publishers too generous to take advantage of
the innocence of authors; and I fancy that if publishers had to do with
any race less diffident than authors, they would have won a repute for
unselfishness that they do not now enjoy.  It is certain that in the
long period when we flew the black flag of piracy there were many among
our corsairs on the high seas of literature who paid a fair price for
the stranger craft they seized; still oftener they removed the cargo,
and released their capture with several weeks' provision; and although
there was undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat-cutting and
scuttling, still I feel sure that there was less of it than there would
have been in any other line of business released to the unrestricted
plunder of the neighbor.  There was for a long time even a comity among
these amiable buccaneers, who agreed not to interfere with each other,
and so were enabled to pay over to their victims some portion of the
profit from their stolen goods.  Of all business men publishers are
probably the most faithful and honorable, and are only surpassed in
virtue when men of letters turn business men.

Publishers have their little theories, their little superstitions, and
their blind faith in the great god Chance, which we all worship.  These
things lead them into temptation and adversity, but they seem to do
fairly well as business men, even in their own behalf.  They do not
make above the usual ninety-five per cent. of failures, and more
publishers than authors get rich.  I have known several publishers who
kept their carriages, but I have never known even one author to keep
his carriage on the profits of his literature, unless it was in some
modest country place where one could take care of one's own horse.  But
this is simply because the authors are so many, and the publishers are
so few.  If we wish to reverse their positions, we must study how to
reduce the number of authors and increase the number of publishers;
then prosperity will smile our way.



VIII.

Some theories or superstitions publishers and authors share together.
One of these is that it is best to keep your books all in the hands of
one publisher if you can, because then he can give them more attention
ad sell more of them.  But my own experience is that when my books were
in the hands of three publishers they sold quite as well as when one
had them; and a fellow author whom I approached in question of this
venerable belief, laughed at it.  This bold heretic held that it was
best to give each new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man
put all his energies into pushing it; but if you had them all together,
the publisher rested in a vain security that one book would sell
another, and that the fresh venture would revive the public interest in
the stale ones.  I never knew this to happen, and I must class it with
the superstitions of the trade.  It may be so in other and more
constant countries, but in our fickle republic, each last book has to
fight its own way to public favor, much as if it had no sort of
literary lineage.  Of course this is stating it rather largely, and the
truth will be found inside rather than outside of my statement; but
there is at least truth enough in it to give the young author pause.
While one is preparing to sell his basket of glass, he may as well ask
himself whether it is better to part with all to one dealer or not; and
if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginary customer who asks the
favor of taking entire stock, that will be his fault, and not the fault
of the question.

However, the most important question of all with the man of letters as
a man of business, is what kind of book will sell the best of itself,
because, at the end of the ends, a book sells itself or does not sell
at all; kissing, after long ages of reasoning and a great deal of
culture, still goes by favor, and though innumerable generations of
horses have been led to water, not one horse has yet been made to
drink.  With the best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher
can force a book into acceptance.  Advertising will not avail, and
reviewing is notoriously futile.  If the book does not strike the
popular fancy, or deal with some universal interest, which need by no
means be a profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals shall
be beaten in vain.  The book may be one of the best and wisest books in
the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it, the readers of
it, and worse yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit.  The
secret of this, like most other secrets of a rather ridiculous world,
is in the awful keeping of fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by
some lucky chance.  To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the
public favor, is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of
the unworthiest; and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man of
business, counsel the young author to do it.  The best that you can do
is to write the book that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to
put as much heart and soul as you have about you into it, and then hope
as hard as you can to reach the heart and soul of the great multitude
of your fellow-men.  That, and that alone, is good business for a man
of letters.

The failures in literature are no less mystifying than the successes,
though they are upon the whole not so mortifying.  I have seen a good
many of these failures, and I know of one case so signal that I must
speak of it, even to the discredit of the public.  It is the case of a
novelist whose work seems to me of the best that we have done in that
sort, whose books represent our life with singular force and singular
insight, and whose equipment for his art, through study, travel, and
the world, is of the rarest.  He has a strong, robust, manly style; his
stories are well knit, and his characters are of the flesh and blood
complexion which we know in our daily experience; and yet he has failed
to achieve one of the first places in our literature; if I named his
name here, I am afraid that it would be quite unknown to the greatest
part of my readers.  I have never been able to account for his want of
success, except through the fact that his stories did not please women,
though why they did not, I cannot guess.  They did not like them for
the same reason that they did not like Dr. Fell; and that reason was
quite enough for them.  It must be enough for him, I am afraid; but I
believe that if this author had been writing in a country where men
decided the fate of books, the fate of his books would have been
different.

The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United States the
fate of a book is in the hands of the women.  It is the women with us
who have the most leisure, and they read the most books.  They are far
better educated, for the most part, than our men, and their tastes, if
not their minds, are more cultivated.  Our men read the newspapers, but
our women read the books; the more refined among them read the
magazines.  If they do not always know what is good, they do know what
pleases them, and it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for
there is no appeal from them.  To go from them to the men would be
going from a higher to a lower court, which would be honestly surprised
and bewildered, if the thing were possible.  As I say, the author of
light literature, and often the author of solid literature, must resign
himself to obscurity unless the ladies choose to recognize him.  Yet it
would be impossible to forecast their favor for this kind or that.  Who
could prophesy it for another, who guess it for himself?  We must
strive blindly for it, and hope somehow that our best will also be our
prettiest; but we must remember at the same time that it is not the
ladies' man who is the favorite of the ladies.

There are of course a few, a very few, of our greatest authors, who
have striven forward to the first place in our Valhalla without the
help of the largest reading-class among us; but I should say that these
were chiefly the humorists, for whom women are said nowhere to have any
warm liking, and who have generally with us come up through the
newspapers, and have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers.
They have become literary men, as it were, without the newspapers'
readers knowing it; but those who have approached literature from
another direction, have won fame in it chiefly by grace of the women,
who first read them, and then made their husbands and fathers read
them.  Perhaps, then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for
a serious author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and
probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim at
the countenance of the men.  Except as a humorist he certainly never
will get it, for your American, when he is not making money, or trying
to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it.



IX.

I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who approaches
literature through journalism is not as fine and high a literary man as
the author who comes directly to it, or through some other avenue; I
have not the least notion of condemning myself by any such judgment.
But I think it is pretty certain that fewer and fewer authors are
turning from journalism to literature, though the entente cordiale
between the two professions seems as great as ever.  I fancy, though I
may be as mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that
most journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the
beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young
authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted
wish to be authors.  When an author is once warm in the saddle, and is
riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they have then
often no sentiment about him; he is no longer the image of their own
young aspiration, and they would willingly see Pegasus buck under him,
or have him otherwise brought to grief and shame.  They are apt to gird
at him for his unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this
if they proposed any way for him to live without them; as I have
allowed at the outset, the gains ARE unhallowed.  Apparently it is
unseemly for an author or two to be making half as much by their pens
as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is used to the
pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at least sees nothing
droll in it; but the paragrapher can always get a smile out of his
readers at the gross disparity between the ten thousand dollars Jones
gets for his novel, and the five pounds Milton got for his epic.  I
have always thought Milton was paid too little, but I will own that he
ought not to have been paid at all, if it comes to that.  Again, I say
that no man ought to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not
to the artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist's living
otherwise, and continuing an artist.

The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the newspaper
man, generally speaking.  I have often thought with amazement of the
kindness shown by the press to our whole unworthy craft, and of the
help so lavishly and freely given to rising and even risen authors.  To
put it coarsely, brutally, I do not suppose that any other business
receives so much gratuitous advertising, except the theatre.  It is
enormous, the space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary
announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies,
and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made
from time to time upon different authors for their opinions of
romanticism, realism, capitalism, socialism, Catholicism, and
Sandemanianism.  I have sometimes doubted whether the public cared for
so much of it all as the editors gave them, but I have always said this
under my breath, and I have thankfully taken my share of the common
bounty.  A curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity
seems to have very little to do with an author's popularity, though
ever so much with his notoriety.  Those strange subterranean fellows
who never come to the surface in the newspapers, except for a
contemptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the famousest of the
celebrities, and secretly have their horses and yachts and country
seats, while immodest merit is left to get about on foot and look up
summer board at the cheaper hotels.  That is probably right, or it
would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like
millionairism and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether
the newspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their
actual generosity to literary men, can really help one much to fortune,
however much they help one to fame.  Such a question is almost too
dreadful, and though I have asked it, I will not attempt to answer it.
I would much rather consider the question whether if the newspapers can
make an author they can also unmake him, and I feel pretty safe in
saying that I do not think they can.  The Afreet once out of the bottle
can never be coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the
newspapers have made cannot be unmade by the newspapers.  They consign
him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the land, and they keep
visiting him there with an uproar which attracts more and more notice
to him.  An author who has long enjoyed their favor, suddenly and
rather mysteriously loses it, through his opinions on certain matters
of literary taste, say.  For the space of five or six years he is
denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought to convince
him there is something wrong.  If he thinks it is his censors, he
clings to his opinions with an abiding constance, while ridicule,
obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation and personal
detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for instance, of
his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of fiction, and
that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy,
Tourguenief, Zola, Hardy, and James, are unworthy a moment's comparison
with the school of Rider Haggard.  All this ought certainly to unmake
the author in question, and strew his disjecta membra wide over the
realm of oblivion.  But this is not really the effect.  Slowly but
surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without relinquishing one
of his wicked opinions, or in anywise showing himself repentant,
remains apparently whole; and he even returns in a measure to the old
kindness: not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, but
certainly to as much of it as he merits.

I would not have the young author, from this imaginary case, believe
that it is well either to court or to defy the good opinion of the
press.  In fact, it will not only be better taste, but it will be
better business for him to keep it altogether out of his mind.  There
is only one whom he can safely try to please, and that is himself.  If
he does this he will very probably please other people; but if he does
not please himself he may be sure that he will not please them; the
book which he has not enjoyed writing, no one will enjoy reading.
Still, I would not have him attach too little consequence to the
influence of the press.  I should say, let him take the celebrity it
gives him gratefully but not too seriously; let him reflect that he is
often the necessity rather than the ideal of the paragrapher, and that
the notoriety the journalists bestow upon him is not the measure of
their acquaintance with his work, far less his meaning.  They are good
fellows, those poor, hard-pushed fellows of the press, but the very
conditions of their censure, friendly or unfriendly, forbid it
thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal than knowledge in it.



X.

Whether the newspapers will become the rivals of the magazines as the
vehicle of literature is a matter that still remains in doubt with the
careful observer, after a decade of the newspaper syndicate.  Our daily
papers never had the habit of the feuilleton as those of the European
continent have it; they followed the English tradition in this, though
they departed from it in so many other things; and it was not till the
Sunday editions of the great dailies arose that there was any real hope
for the serial in the papers.  I suspect that it was the vast demand
for material in their pages--twelve, eighteen, twenty-four,
thirty-six--that created the syndicate, for it was the necessity of the
Sunday edition not only to have material in abundance, but, with all
possible regard for quality, to have it cheap; and the syndicate, when
it came into being, imagined a means of meeting this want.  It sold the
same material to as many newspapers as it could for simultaneous
publication in their Sunday editions, which had each its special field,
and did not compete with another.

I do not think the syndicate began with serials, and I do not think it
is likely to end with them.  It has rather worked the vein of
interviews, personal adventure, popular science, useful information,
travel, sketches, and short stories.  Still it has placed a good many
serial stories, and at pretty good prices, but not generally so good as
those the magazines pay the better sort of writers; for the worse sort
it has offered perhaps the best market they have had out of book form.
By the newspapers, the syndicate conceives, and perhaps justly, that
something sensational is desired; yet all the serial stories it has
placed cannot be called sensational.  It has enlarged the field of
belles-lettres, certainly, but not permanently, I think, in the case of
the artistic novel.  As yet the women, who form the largest, if not the
only cultivated class among us, have not taken very cordially to the
Sunday edition, except for its social gossip; they certainly do not go
to it for their fiction, and its fiction is mainly of the inferior sort
with which boys and men beguile their leisure.

In fact the newspapers prefer to remain newspapers, at least in quality
if not in form; and I heard a story the other day from a charming young
writer of his experience with them, which may have some instruction for
the magazines that less wisely aim to become newspapers.  He said that
when he carried his work to the editors they struck out what he thought
the best of it, because it was what they called magaziny; not
contemptuously, but with an instinctive sense of what their readers
wanted of them, and did not want.  It was apparent that they did not
want literary art, or even the appearance of it; they wanted their
effects primary; they wanted their emotions raw, or at least saignantes
from the joint of fact, and not prepared by the fancy or the taste.

The syndicate has no doubt advanced the prosperity of the short story
by increasing the demand for it.  We Americans had already done pretty
well in that kind, for there was already a great demand for the short
story in the magazines; but the syndicate of Sunday editions
particularly cultivated it, and made it very paying.  I have heard that
some short-story writers made the syndicate pay more for their wares
than they got from the magazines for them, considering that the
magazine publication could enhance their reputation, but the Sunday
edition could do nothing for it.  They may have been right or not in
this; I will not undertake to say, but that was the business view of
the case with them.

In spite of the fact that short stories when gathered into a volume and
republished would not sell so well as a novel, the short story
flourished, and its success in the periodicals began to be felt in the
book trade: volumes of short stories suddenly began to sell.  But now
again, it is said the bottom has dropped out, and they do not sell, and
their adversity in book form threatens to affect them in the magazines;
an editor told me the other day that he had more short stories than he
knew what to do with; and I was not offering him a short story of my
own, either.

A permanent decline in the market for a kind of literary art which we
have excelled in, or if we have not excelled, have done some of our
most exquisite work, would be a pity.

There are other sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but
now apparently no longer desired by editors, who ought to know what
their readers desire.  Among these is the travel sketch, to me a very
agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline.  There are
some reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and
a possible surfeit.  Travel itself has become so universal that
everybody, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has
no longer the charm of strangeness.  We do not think the Old World
either so romantic or so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an
instinctive perception of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to
our sentiment or our humor with sketches of outlandish people and
places.  Of course this can hold true only in a general way; the thing
is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly.  When one
thinks of the long line of American writers who have greatly pleased in
this sort, and who even got their first fame in it, one must grieve to
see it obsolescent.  Irving, Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville,
Ross Browne, Ik Marvell, Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr.
Aldrich, Colonel Hay, Mr. Warner, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C.W. Stoddard, Mark
Twain, and many others whose names will not come to me at the moment,
have in their several ways richly contributed to our pleasure in it;
but I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with an editor in a
sketch of travel, or a study of foreign manners and customs; his work
would have to be of the most signal importance and brilliancy to
overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had been done already; and
I believe that a publisher if offered a book of such things, would look
at it askance, and plead the well-known quiet of the trade.  Still, I
may be mistaken.

I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary
species, namely, the light essay.  We have essays enough and to spare,
of certain soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and
deal with conditions; but the kind I mean, the slightly humorous,
gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once
did.  I do not know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his
readers' frame, or whether they do not offer themselves, but I seldom
find them in the magazines.  I certainly do not believe that if anyone
were now to write essays such as Mr. Warner's "Backlog Studies," an
editor would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them.
Nobody seems to write the sort that Colonel Higginson formerly
contributed to the periodicals, or such as Emerson wrote.  Without a
great name behind it, I am afraid that a volume of essays would find
few buyers, even after the essays had made a public in the magazines.
There are, of course, instances to the contrary, but they are not so
many or so striking as to make me think that the essay could not be
offered as a good opening for business talent.

I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better paid in
the magazines than it is now.  I must say, too, that I think the
quality of the minor poetry of our day is better than that of
twenty-five or thirty years ago. I could name half a score of young
poets whose work from time to time gives me great pleasure, by the
reality of its feeling, and the delicate perfection of its art, but I
will not name them, for fear of passing over half a score of others
equally meritorious. We have certainly no reason to be discouraged,
whatever reason the poets themselves have to be so, and I do not think
that even in the short story our younger writers are doing better work
than they are doing in the slighter forms of verse.  Yet the notion of
inviting business talent into this field would be as preposterous as
that of asking it to devote itself to the essay.  What book of verse by
a recent poet, if we except some such peculiarly gifted poet as Mr.
Whitcomb Riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak of any profit to
the author?  Of course, it would be rather more offensive and
ridiculous that it should do so than that any other form of literary
art should do so; and yet there is no more provision in our economic
system for the support of the poet apart from his poems, than there is
for the support of the novelist apart from his novel.  One could not
make any more money by writing poetry than by writing history, but it
is a curious fact that while the historians have usually been rich men,
and able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have
usually been poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their
devotion to a calling which is so seldom an election.

To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set up
poet than to set up historian.  There is no outlay for copying
documents, or visiting libraries, or buying books.  In fact, except as
historian, the man of letters, in whatever walk, has not only none of
the expenses of other men of business, but none of the expenses of
other artists.  He has no such outlay to make for materials, or models,
or studio rent as the painter or the sculptor has, and his income, such
as it is, is immediate.  If he strikes the fancy of the editor with the
first thing he offers, as he very well may, it is as well with him as
with other men after long years of apprenticeship. Although he will
always be the better for an apprenticeship, and the longer
apprenticeship the better, he may practically need none at all.  Such
are the strange conditions of his acceptance with the public, that he
may please better without it than with it.  An author's first book is
too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a
brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but a
painter or sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can give
himself.



XI.

In view of this fact it become again very hard to establish the
author's status in the business world, and at moments I have grave
question whether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist.  There
is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any
other sort of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some
measure of preparation.  A young writer may produce a brilliant and
very perfect romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very
perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used
to call the novel of manners, a writer can only produce an inferior
book at the outset.  For this work he needs experience and observation,
not so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters will
all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and character
with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire only through his
own heart.  A man remains in a measure strange to himself as long as he
lives, and the very sources of novelty in his work will be within
himself; he can continue to give it freshness in no other way than by
knowing himself better and better.  But a young writer and an untrained
writer has not yet begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other
men.  The world around him remains a secret as well as the world within
him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience of
joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time.  Until he is
well on toward forty, he will hardly have assimilated the materials of
a great novel, although he may have accumulated them.  The novelist,
then, is a man of letters who is like a man of business in the
necessity of preparation for his calling, though he does not pay
store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, as the phrase
is.  He alone among men of letters may look forward to that sort of
continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligence in
other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade,
and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world.  It is
not a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the belief that
it does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of
business.  Still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man who
gets a hundred dollars a thousand words.  That is a fact appreciable to
business, and the man of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably
feel that his place in our civilization, though he may owe it to the
women who form the great mass of his readers, has something of the
character of a vested interest in the eyes of men.  There is, indeed,
as yet no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to injure him in
his business.  A critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may damage
him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has no recourse
but to write better books, or worse.  The law will do nothing for him,
and a boycott of his books might be preached with immunity by any class
of men not liking his opinions on the question of industrial slavery or
antipaedobaptism.  Still the market for his wares is steadier than the
market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better.
The historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like
the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are
much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be
compared in a business way.  As for the essayist, the poet, the
traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition
for the favor of readers.  The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady
call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars
a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without
crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it.
Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best writers of
fiction who are most in demand with the magazines, probably get nearly
as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them
by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable
multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in
book-form.  I think they earn their money, but if I did not think all
of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they get, I
should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who did
not.

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has
no objective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so
express it.  A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political
economy, may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing
whatever to another.  It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and
worthless to another mood of the same reader.  How, then, is it to be
priced, and how is it to be fairly marketed?  All people must be fed,
and all people must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so
meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious
necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them.  But
there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry to say, for
fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction.  The sort of fiction
which corresponds to the circus and the variety theatre in the
show-business seems essential to the spiritual health of the masses,
but the most cultivated of the classes can get on, from time to time,
without an artistic novel.  This is a great pity, and I should be very
willing that readers might feel something like the pangs of hunger and
cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but apparently they never
do.  Their dumb and passive need is apt only to manifest itself
negatively, or in the form of weariness of this author or that.  The
publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales
of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of
the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate touch.
Sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself that his
readers are sick of Smith,  and are pining for Jones; even then he
cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is by no means safe
in cutting down Smith's price and putting up Jones's.  With the best
will in the world to pay justly, he cannot.  Smith, who has been boring
his readers to death for a year, may write to-morrow a thing that will
please them so much that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and
Jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something so
uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in the
magazine.  The only thing that gives either writer positive value is
his acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to
month wholly uncertain.  Authors are largely matters of fashion, like
this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown.  Last spring the dresses
were all made with lace berthas, and Smith was read; this year the
butterfly capes are worn, and Jones is the favorite author.  Who shall
forecast the fall and winter modes?



XII.

In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the publisher,
always the contributor rather than the editor, whom I am concerned for.
I study the difficulties of the publisher and editor only because they
involve the author and the contributor; if they did not, I will not say
with how hard a heart I should turn from them; my only pang now in
scrutinizing the business conditions of literature is for the makers of
literature, not the purveyors of it.

After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of letters
ever a business man?  I suppose that, strictly speaking, he never is,
except in those rare instances where, through need or choice, he is the
publisher as well as the author of his books.  Then he puts something
on the market and tries to sell it there, and is a man of business.
But otherwise he is an artist merely, and is allied to the great mass
of wage-workers who are paid for the labor they have put into the thing
done or the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by
marketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it.  The
quality of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the
case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a workingman, and is
under the rule that governs the workingman's life.  If he is sick or
sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy and will not, then he
earns nothing.  He cannot delegate his business to a clerk or a
manager; it will not go on while he is sleeping.  The wage he can
command depends strictly upon his skill and diligence.

I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; I am glad and proud to
be of those who eat their bread in the sweat of their own brows, and
not the sweat of other men's brows; I think my bread is the sweeter for
it.  In the meantime I have no blame for business men; they are no more
of the condition of things than we workingmen are; they did no more to
cause it or create it; but I would rather be in my place than in
theirs, and I wish that I could make all my fellow-artists realize that
economically they are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers.  It
ought to be our glory that we produce something, that we bring into the
world something that was not choately there before; that at least we
fashion or shape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie that
binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling
chain, but as a mystic bond also uniting us to Him who works hitherto
and evermore.

I know very well that to the vast multitude of our fellow-workingmen we
artists are the shadows of names, or not even the shadows.  I like to
look the facts in the face, for though their lineaments are often
terrible, yet there is light nowhere else; and I will not pretend, in
this light, that the masses care any more for us than we care for the
masses, or so much.  Nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of
the classes.  Except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and
then they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their spiritual
dulness with some artistic presence, the attempt is always a failure
that bruises and abashes.  In so far as the artist is a man of the
world, he is the less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon
fashion, he deforms his art.  We all know that ghastly type; it is more
absurd even than the figure which is really of the world, which was
born and bred in it, and conceives of nothing outside of it, or above
it.  In the social world, as well as in the business world, the artist
is anomalous, in the actual conditions, and he is perhaps a little
ridiculous.

Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will do
well to regard himself as in a transition state.  He is really of the
masses,  but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know
him; as yet the common people do not hear him gladly or hear him at
all.  He is apparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen
to him; he often amuses them very much; but he is not quite at ease
among them; whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not of
their kind.  Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as
long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes
whom he cannot consort with.  The prospect is not brilliant for any
artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the
flesh the accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct
has been divinely planted in the human soul.









End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man of Letters as a Man of Business, by 
William Dean Howells

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