Man of Letters in Business | Page 6

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