Literature and Life | Page 2

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