Literature and Life | Page 4

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