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
contemptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the famousest of the
celebrities, and secretly have their horses and yachts and country
seats, while immodest merit is left to get about on foot and look up
summer board at the cheaper hotels. That is probably right, or it
would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like
millionairism and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether
the newspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their
actual generosity to literary men, can really help one much to fortune,
however much they help one to fame. Such a question is almost too
dreadful, and though I have asked it, I will not attempt to answer it.
I would much rather consider the question whether if the newspapers can
make an author they can also unmake him, and I feel pretty safe in
saying that I do not think they can. The Afreet once out of the bottle
can never be coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the
newspapers have made cannot be unmade by the newspapers. They consign
him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the land, and they keep
visiting him there with an uproar which attracts more and more notice
to him. An author who has long enjoyed their favor, suddenly and
rather mysteriously loses it, through his opinions on certain matters
of literary taste, say. For the space of five or six years he is
denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought to convince
him there is something wrong. If he thinks it is his censors, he
clings to his opinions with an abiding constance, while ridicule,
obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation and personal
detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for instance, of
his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of fiction, and
that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy,
Tourguenief, Zola, Hardy, and James, are unworthy a moment's comparison
with the school of Rider Haggard. All this ought certainly to unmake
the author in question, and strew his disjecta membra wide over the
realm of oblivion. But this is not really the effect. Slowly but
surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without relinquishing one
of his wicked opinions, or in anywise showing himself repentant,
remains apparently whole; and he even returns in a measure to the old
kindness: not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, but
certainly to as much of it as he merits.
I would not have the young author, from this imaginary case, believe
that it is well either to court or to defy the good opinion of the
press. In fact, it will not only be better taste, but it will be
better business for him to keep it altogether out of his mind. There
is only one whom he can safely try to please, and that is himself. If
he does this he will very probably please other people; but if he does
not please himself he may be sure that he will not please them; the
book which he has not enjoyed writing, no one will enjoy reading.
Still, I would not have him attach too little consequence to the
influence of the press. I should say, let him take the celebrity it
gives him gratefully but not too seriously; let him reflect that he is
often the necessity rather than the ideal of the paragrapher, and that
the notoriety the journalists bestow upon him is not the measure of
their acquaintance with his work, far less his meaning. They are good
fellows, those poor, hard-pushed fellows of the press, but the very
conditions of their censure, friendly or unfriendly, forbid it
thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal than knowledge in it.