Man of Letters in Business | Page 4

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