There is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the business
side, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and so far
from having been protected by our laws it was exposed for ninety years
after the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of
stolen goods. It is true that we now have the international copyright
law at last, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but
literary property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust
statutes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out
the aggressors and punish them, as it would seek out and punish the
trespassers upon any other kind of property; but it leaves the
aggrieved owner to bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he
can. This may be right enough in itself; but I think, then, that all
property should be defended by civil suit, and should become public
after forty-two years of private tenure. The Constitution guarantees
us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have
forgotten this in the case of our infant literary industry. So long as
this remains the case, we cannot expect the best business talent to go
into literature, and the man of letters must keep his present low grade
among business men.
As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing
at all. I may say that it is only since the was that literature has
become a business with us. Before that time we had authors, and very
good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember
any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and
we all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans. They were either
men of fortune, or they were editors, or professors, with salaries or
incomes apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped
out with public offices; one need not go over their names, or classify
them. Some of them must have made money by their books, but I question
whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his
books brought him. No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book
that we could not recognize as a work of literature. But many authors
live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial
publication of their writings to the magazines. They do not live so
nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other
professions when they begin to make themselves names; the high state of
brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of
the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and social
splendor. Perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the synagogue;
it is certain they do not get them. Still, they do very fairly well,
as things go; and several have incomes that would seem riches to the
great mass of worthy Americans who work with their hands for a
living--when they can get the work. Their incomes are mainly from
serial publication in the different magazines; and the prosperity of
the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a class, was
wholly unknown among us before the war. It is not only the famous or
fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the much larger
number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors,
and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of
acceptable work. These are the sort who do not get reprinted from the
periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted, and
then their serial work in its completed form appeals to the readers who
say they do not read serials. The multitude of these is not great, and
if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a much more
embittered man than he now generally is. But he understands perfectly
well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the return
from that he may count as so much money found in the road--a few
hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most.