In the meantime 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; 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 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
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 transcend them, shall have the income, say, of
a rising young physician, known to a few people in a subordinate city.
In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence of a
nation of business men like ours, I do not know that I can establish
the man of letters in the popular esteem as very much of a business man
after all. He must still have a low rank among practical people; and
he will be regarded by the great mass of Americans as perhaps a little
off, a little funny, a little soft!
Perhaps not; and yet I would rather not have a consensus of public
opinion on the question; I think I am more comfortable without it.