Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise
unhurriedly, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go
downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly reading,
all day long? Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler of so many a
long year?
I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-stained
world. It would make me miserable, and to what purpose? Yet, having
once looked that way, think of them I must. Oh, you heavy-laden, who at
this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen; writing, not because
there is something in your mind, in your heart, which must needs be
uttered, but because the pen is the only tool you can handle, your only
means of earning bread! Year after year the number of you is multiplied;
you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling,
exchanging maledictions. Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque and
heart-breaking!
Innumerable are the men and women now writing for bread, who have not the
least chance of finding in such work a permanent livelihood. They took
to writing because they knew not what else to do, or because the literary
calling tempted them by its independence and its dazzling prizes. They
will hang on to the squalid profession, their earnings eked out by
begging and borrowing, until it is too late for them to do anything
else--and then? With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say
that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to
"literature," commits no less than a crime. If my voice had any
authority, I would cry this truth aloud wherever men could hear. Hateful
as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the
literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others. Oh,
your prices per thousand words! Oh, your paragraphings and your
interviewings! And oh, the black despair that awaits those down-trodden
in the fray.
Last midsummer I received a circular from a typewriting person,
soliciting my custom; some one who had somehow got hold of my name, and
fancied me to be still in purgatory. This person wrote: "If you should
be in need of any extra assistance in the pressure of your Christmas
work, I hope," etc.
How otherwise could one write if addressing a shopkeeper? "The pressure
of your Christmas work"! Nay, I am too sick to laugh.