The Man of Letters as a Man of Business

by William Dean Howells
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 grotesqueconfusion 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 inwardvision. 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.

II.
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 eternalfitness 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 sometimes be different; I do not
believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a

long way off.
III.

In the meantime I confidentlyappeal 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; and at least one

woman of letters who gets a hundred and fifty dollars a thousand
words. 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 continuousworker, 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 artisticconscience 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