his business. A critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may
damage him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has

no recourse but to write better books, or worse. The law will do
nothing for him, and a boycott of his books might be preached

with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on the
question of industrialslavery or antipaedobaptism. Still the

market for his wares is steadier than the market for any other
kind of literary wares, and the prices are better. The

historian, who is a kind of inferiorrealist, has something like
the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command

are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are
not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the

poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in
the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed,

has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers
who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon

the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should
rather like to see them doing it. Another gratifying fact of the

situation is that the best writers of fiction who are most in
demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as much money for

their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them by tens of
thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerablemultitude

of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in
book-form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not think

all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they
get, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach

those who did not.
The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that

literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective
value, if I may so express it. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a

paper on political economy, may be worth gold untold to one
reader, and worth nothing whatever to another. It may be

precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood
of the same reader. How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it

to be fairly marketed? All people must be fed, and all people
must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat,

raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious
necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them.

But there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry
to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. The

sort of fiction which corresponds to the circus and the variety
theatre in the show-business seems essential to the spiritual

health of the masses, but the most cultivated of the classes can
get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel. This is a

great pity, and I should be very willing that readers might feel
something like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of

their finer fiction; but apparently they never do. Their dumb
and passive need is apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in

the form of weariness of this author or that. The publisher of
books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales of a

writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of
the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate

touch. Sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself
that his readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for Jones;

even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is
by no means safe in cutting down Smith's price and putting up

Jones's. With the best will in the world to pay justly, he
cannot. Smith, who has been boring his readers to death for a

year, may write to- morrow a thing that will please them so much
that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and Jones, whom

they have been asking for, may do something so uncharacteristic
and alien that it will be a flat failure in the magazine. The

only thing that gives either writerpositive value is his
acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to

month whollyuncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion,
like this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown. Last spring

the dresses were all made with lace berthas, and Smith was read;
this year the butterfly capes are worn, and Jones is the favorite

author. Who shall forecast the fall and winter modes?
XII.

In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the
publisher, always the contributor rather than the editor, whom I

am concerned for. I study the difficulties of the publisher and
editor only because they involve the author and the contributor;

if they did not, I will not say with how hard a heart I should
turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizing the business

conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, not the
purveyors of it.

After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of
letters ever a business man? I suppose that, strictly speaking,

he never is, except in those rare instances where, through need
or choice, he is the publisher as well as the author of his

books. Then he puts something on the market and tries to sell it
there, and is a man of business. But otherwise he is an artist

merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage-workers who are
paid for the labor they have put into the thing done or the thing

made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a
thing after some other man has done it or made it. The quality

of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the
case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a workingman,

and is under the rule that governs the workingman's life. If he
is sick or sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy and will

not, then he earns nothing. He cannot delegate his business to a
clerk or a manager; it will not go on while he is sleeping. The

wage he can command depends strictly upon his skill and
diligence.

I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; I am glad and
proud to be of those who eat their bread in the sweat of their

own brows, and not the sweat of other men's brows; I think my
bread is the sweeter for it. In the meantime I have no blame for