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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Man of Letters in Business***
+#35 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Man of Letters in Business
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+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3388]
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+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity
+which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer
+wishes to offer a word of explanation.  He owns, as he must, that they
+have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays,
+without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to
+any central motive.  Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes
+his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like
+this relation and this allegiance.
+
+For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here
+on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between
+what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life.  If I did not
+find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession,
+and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite
+sure of life unless I find literature in it.  Unless the thing seen
+reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it
+pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will
+do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first
+glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy.  Instantly I
+love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as
+many ones else as I can get to look or listen.  If the thing is something
+read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like
+life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart.  There can be no
+offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.
+
+Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things,
+about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which
+is which.  But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I have
+found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope will
+last till I forget my letters.
+
+               So was it when my life began;
+               So is it, now I am a man;
+               So be it when I shall grow old."
+
+It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without
+some bit of rainbow in it.  Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes
+not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of
+them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with
+glasses which would at least have helped their vision.
+
+As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose
+their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact.  "The Man of
+Letters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the
+May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine;
+"Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of
+1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant
+resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement,
+long before motors and almost before private carriages; "American
+Literary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism in
+American Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three or
+four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the
+London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British
+understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago,
+and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete
+actuality in the year 1899.  Most of the studies and sketches are from an
+extinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper's
+Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth
+century.  Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel," which
+was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps
+because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally
+recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England,
+are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer-
+memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's
+Monthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever-
+delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; "The Editor's
+Relations with the Young Contributor" was my endeavor in Youth's
+Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon
+the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.
+
+So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may
+persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well-
+meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it.  The group at least
+attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary
+production in time and space.  From the beginning the journalist's
+independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with
+me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried
+volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library
+table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer
+hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a
+dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running
+brooks outside.
+                                             W. D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          LITERATURE AND LIFE
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS
+
+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.
+
+
+I.
+
+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 sometime be different; I do not
+believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long way
+off.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In the mean time 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.  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.
+
+
+III.
+
+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; 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 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 Civil War 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 Civil 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 imbittered 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, unless he is the author of
+an historical romance.
+
+
+IV
+
+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 then had at
+least the purchasing power of sixty thousand now.  Moore had three
+thousand guineas for 'Lalla Rookh,' but what publisher would be rash
+enough to pay fifteen 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 few
+leading 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.
+
+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 often have
+wider acceptance as a book from having been a magazine serial.
+
+
+V.
+
+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 contemporanics.  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 dry goods,
+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.
+
+
+VI.
+
+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 young 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 any thing 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 not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred
+copies.  Whether the author has as much reason to be pleased 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 at 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
+ninepence.  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 every one 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; 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 now 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.
+
+
+VII.
+
+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.
+
+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
+and 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 the entire stock, that will be his
+fault, and not the fault of the customer.
+
+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 the 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 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 newspaper 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.
+
+
+VIII
+
+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 two or three authors 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.
+Some of 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.  Perhaps he could if they would
+let him alone; but the art of letting alone the creature of your favor,
+when he has forfeited your favor, is yet in its infancy with 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 constancy, 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, Tourgunief, Zola, Hardy, and James is unworthy a moment's
+comparison with the school of Rider Haggard.  All this ought certainly to
+unmake the author in question, 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 any wise 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 hard-pushed, poor 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.
+
+
+IX.
+
+There are some sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but now
+apparently no longer desired by magazine 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, Warner, Ik Marvell,
+Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Hay, 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 that 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 any one were now to write
+essays such as 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 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 a sculptor is only the gainer by all
+the school he can give himself.
+
+
+X.
+
+In view of this fact it becomes 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 towards forty, he will
+hardly have assimilated the materials of a great novel, although he may
+have amassed 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 or whose book sells five hundred
+thousand copies or less.  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 in literature 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 tomorrow 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?
+
+
+XI.
+
+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
+am 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 working-man, and is
+under the rule that governs the working-man'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 mean time, I have no blame for business men; they are no more of the
+condition of things than we working-men 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-working-men 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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Artist has seasons, as trees,  when he cannot blossom. . . . . . . . . .
+Book that they are content to know at second hand. . . . . . . . . . . .
+Business to take advantage of his necessity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Competition has deformed human nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Fate of a book is in the hands of the women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity . . . . . . . . .
+Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+I do not think any man ought to live by an art . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. . . . . . . . .
+Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success . . . . . . . . .
+Literature beautiful only through the intelligence . . . . . . . . . . .
+Literature has no objective value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Literature is Business as well as Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Man is strange to himself as long as he lives. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books. . . . . . . . . .
+More zeal than knowledge in it.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Most journalists would have been literary men if they could. . . . . . .
+Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. . . . . . . . .
+No man ought to live by any art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+No rose blooms right along . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Our huckstering civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best . . . . .
+Results of art should be free to all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reviewers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century. . . . . . . .
+Rogues in every walk of life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+There is small love of pure literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian . . . . . .
+Warner's Backlog Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Man of Letters in Business,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Man of Letters in Business, by Howells
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+Title: Man of Letters in Business
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3388]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 03/29/01]
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+Edition: 11
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+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity
+which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer
+wishes to offer a word of explanation.  He owns, as he must, that they
+have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays,
+without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to
+any central motive.  Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes
+his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like
+this relation and this allegiance.
+
+For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here
+on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between
+what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life.  If I did not
+find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession,
+and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite
+sure of life unless I find literature in it.  Unless the thing seen
+reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it
+pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will
+do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first
+glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy.  Instantly I
+love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as
+many ones else as I can get to look or listen.  If the thing is something
+read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like
+life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart.  There can be no
+offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.
+
+Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things,
+about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which
+is which.  But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I have
+found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope will
+last till I forget my letters.
+
+              "So was it when my life began;
+               So is it, now I am a man;
+               So be it when I shall grow old."
+
+It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without
+some bit of rainbow in it.  Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes
+not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of
+them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with
+glasses which would at least have helped their vision.
+
+As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose
+their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact.  "The Man of
+Letters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the
+May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine;
+"Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of
+1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant
+resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement,
+long before motors and almost before private carriages; "American
+Literary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism in
+American Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three or
+four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the
+London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British
+understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago,
+and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete
+actuality in the year 1899.  Most of the studies and sketches are from an
+extinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper's
+Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth
+century.  Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel," which
+was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps
+because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally
+recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England,
+are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer-
+memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's
+Monthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever-
+delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; "The Editor's
+Relations with the Young Contributor" was my endeavor in Youth's
+Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon
+the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.
+
+So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may
+persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well-
+meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it.  The group at least
+attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary
+production in time and space.  From the beginning the journalist's
+independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with
+me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried
+volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library
+table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer
+hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a
+dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running
+brooks outside.
+                                             W. D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          LITERATURE AND LIFE
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS
+
+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.
+
+
+I.
+
+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 sometime be different; I do not
+believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long way
+off.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In the mean time 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.  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.
+
+
+III.
+
+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; 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 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 Civil War 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 Civil 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 imbittered 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, unless he is the author of
+an historical romance.
+
+
+IV
+
+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 then had at
+least the purchasing power of sixty thousand now.  Moore had three
+thousand guineas for 'Lalla Rookh,' but what publisher would be rash
+enough to pay fifteen 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 few
+leading 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.
+
+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 often have
+wider acceptance as a book from having been a magazine serial.
+
+
+V.
+
+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 contemporanics.  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 dry goods,
+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.
+
+
+VI.
+
+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 young 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 any thing 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 not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred
+copies.  Whether the author has as much reason to be pleased 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 at 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
+ninepence.  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 every one 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; 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 now 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.
+
+
+VII.
+
+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.
+
+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
+and 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 the entire stock, that will be his
+fault, and not the fault of the customer.
+
+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 the 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 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 newspaper 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.
+
+
+VIII
+
+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 two or three authors 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.
+Some of 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.  Perhaps he could if they would
+let him alone; but the art of letting alone the creature of your favor,
+when he has forfeited your favor, is yet in its infancy with 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 constancy, 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, Tourgunief, Zola, Hardy, and James is unworthy a moment's
+comparison with the school of Rider Haggard.  All this ought certainly to
+unmake the author in question, 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 any wise 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 hard-pushed, poor 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.
+
+
+IX.
+
+There are some sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but now
+apparently no longer desired by magazine 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, Warner, Ik Marvell,
+Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Hay, 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 that 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 any one were now to write
+essays such as 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 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 a sculptor is only the gainer by all
+the school he can give himself.
+
+
+X.
+
+In view of this fact it becomes 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 towards forty, he will
+hardly have assimilated the materials of a great novel, although he may
+have amassed 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 or whose book sells five hundred
+thousand copies or less.  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 in literature 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 tomorrow 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?
+
+
+XI.
+
+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
+am 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 working-man, and is
+under the rule that governs the working-man'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 mean time, I have no blame for business men; they are no more of the
+condition of things than we working-men 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-working-men 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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Artist has seasons, as trees,  when he cannot blossom
+Book that they are content to know at second hand
+Business to take advantage of his necessity
+Competition has deformed human nature
+Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets
+Fate of a book is in the hands of the women
+God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity
+Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist
+I do not think any man ought to live by an art
+If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading
+Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success
+Literature beautiful only through the intelligence
+Literature has no objective value
+Literature is Business as well as Art
+Man is strange to himself as long as he lives
+Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books
+More zeal than knowledge in it
+Most journalists would have been literary men if they could
+Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it
+No man ought to live by any art
+No rose blooms right along
+Our huckstering civilization
+Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best
+Results of art should be free to all
+Reviewers
+Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century
+Rogues in every walk of life
+There is small love of pure literature
+Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian
+Warner's Backlog Studies
+Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Man of Letters in Business
+by William Dean Howells
+
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