worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a book into
acceptance. Advertising will not avail, and reviewing is

notoriously futile. If the book does not strike the popular
fancy, or deal with some universal interest, which need by no

means be a profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals
shall be beaten in vain. The book may be one of the best and

wisest books in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal
in it, the readers of it, and worse yet, the purchasers, will

remain few, though fit. The secret of this, like most other
secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the awful keeping of

fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some lucky chance.
To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor, is

the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the
unworthiest; and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man

of business, counsel the young author to do it. The best that
you can do is to write the book that it gives you the most

pleasure to write, to put as much heart and soul as you have
about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to reach the

heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That,
and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.

The failures in literature are no less mystifying than the
successes, though they are upon the whole not so mortifying. I

have seen a good many of these failures, and I know of one case
so signal that I must speak of it, even to the discredit of the

public. It is the case of a novelist whose work seems to me of
the best that we have done in that sort, whose books represent

our life with singular force and singularinsight, and whose
equipment for his art, through study, travel, and the world, is

of the rarest. He has a strong, robust, manly style; his stories
are well knit, and his characters are of the flesh and blood

complexion which we know in our daily experience; and yet he has
failed to achieve one of the first places in our literature; if I

named his name here, I am afraid that it would be quite unknown
to the greatest part of my readers. I have never been able to

account for his want of success, except through the fact that his
stories did not please women, though why they did not, I cannot

guess. They did not like them for the same reason that they did
not like Dr. Fell; and that reason was quite enough for them. It

must be enough for him, I am afraid; but I believe that if this
author had been writing in a country where men decided the fate

of books, the fate of his books would have been different.
The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United

States the fate of a book is in the hands of the women. It is
the women with us who have the most leisure, and they read the

most books. They are far better educated, for the most part,
than our men, and their tastes, if not their minds, are more

cultivated. Our men read the newspapers, but our women read the
books; the more refined among them read the magazines. If they

do not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them,
and it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is

no appeal from them. To go from them to the men would be going
from a higher to a lower court, which would be honestly surprised

and bewildered, if the thing were possible. As I say, the author
of light literature, and often the author of solid literature,

must resign himself to obscurity unless the ladies choose to
recognize him. Yet it would be impossible to forecast their

favor for this kind or that. Who could prophesy it for another,
who guess it for himself? We must striveblindly for it, and

hope somehow that our best will also be our prettiest; but we
must remember at the same time that it is not the ladies' man who

is the favorite of the ladies.
There are of course a few, a very few, of our greatest authors,

who have striven forward to the first place in our Valhalla
without the help of the largest reading-class among us; but I

should say that these were chiefly the humorists, for whom women
are said nowhere to have any warm liking, and who have generally

with us come up through the newspapers, and have never lost the
favor of the newspaper readers. They have become literary men,

as it were, without the newspapers' readers knowing it; but those
who have approached literature from another direction, have won

fame in it chiefly by grace of the women, who first read them,
and then made their husbands and fathers read them. Perhaps,

then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for a serious
author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and

probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim
at the countenance of the men. Except as a humorist he certainly

never will get it, for your American, when he is not making
money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it.

IX.
I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who

approaches literature through journalism is not as fine and high
a literary man as the author who comes directly to it, or through

some other avenue; I have not the least notion of condemning
myself by any such judgment. But I think it is pretty certain

that fewer and fewer authors are turning from journalism to
literature, though the entente cordiale between the two

professions seems as great as ever. I fancy, though I may be as
mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most

journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the
beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young

authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own
thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the

saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is
different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no

longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would
willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise

brought to grief and shame. They are apt to gird at him for his
unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this if they

proposed any way for him to live without them; as I have allowed
at the outset, the gains ARE unhallowed. Apparently it is

unseemly for an author or two to be making half as much by their
pens as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is

used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at
least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always

get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the
ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel, and the five

pounds Milton got for his epic. I have always thought Milton was
paid too little, but I will own that he ought not to have been

paid at all, if it comes to that. Again, I say that no man ought
to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the

artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist's living
otherwise, and continuing an artist.

The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the
newspaper man, generally speaking. I have often thought with

amazement of the kindness shown by the press to our whole
unworthy craft, and of the help so lavishly and freely given to

rising and even risen authors. To put it coarsely, brutally, I
do not suppose that any other business receives so much

gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It is enormous, the
space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary

announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs,
biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and

incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors
for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism,

socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have sometimes
doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the

editors gave them, but I have always said this under my breath,
and I have thankfully taken my share of the common bounty. A

curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity
seems to have very little to do with an author's popularity,

though ever so much with his notoriety. Those strange
subterranean fellows who never come to the surface in the

newspapers, except for a contemptuousparagraph at long
intervals, outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly