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