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 business men; they are no more
of the condition of things than we workingmen are; they did no more to
cause it or create it; but I would rather be in my place than in
theirs, and I wish that I could make all my fellow-artists realize that
economically they are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers. It
ought to be our glory that we produce something, that we bring into the
world something that was not choately there before; that at least we
fashion or shape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie that
binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling
chain, but as a mystic bond also uniting us to Him who works hitherto
and evermore.
I know very well that to the vast multitude of our fellow-workingmen we
artists are the shadows of names, or not even the shadows. I like to
look the facts in the face, for though their lineaments are often
terrible, yet there is light nowhere else; and I will not pretend, in
this light, that the masses care any more for us than we care for the
masses, or so much. Nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of
the classes. Except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and
then they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their spiritual
dulness with some artistic presence, the attempt is always a failure
that bruises and abashes. In so far as the artist is a man of the
world, he is the less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon
fashion, he deforms his art. We all know that ghastly type; it is more
absurd even than the figure which is really of the world, which was
born and bred in it, and conceives of nothing outside of it, or above
it. In the social world, as well as in the business world, the artist
is anomalous, in the actual conditions, and he is perhaps a little
ridiculous.
Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will do
well to regard himself as in a transition state. He is really of the
masses, but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know
him; as yet the common people do not hear him gladly or hear him at
all. He is apparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen
to him; he often amuses them very much; but he is not quite at ease
among them; whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not of
their kind. Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as
long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes
whom he cannot consort with. The prospect is not brilliant for any
artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the
flesh the accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct
has been divinely planted in the human soul.