Complete William Dean Howells Literature Essays Part 23

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Absolute devotion to the day of her death, Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts Act officiously, not officially Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness Always sumptuously providing out of his dest.i.tution Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence Amuse him, even when they wronged him Amusingly realized the situation to their friends Anglo-American genius for ugliness Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive Appeared to have no grudge left Backed their credulity with their credit Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust Became gratefully strange Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month"

Candle burning on the table for the cigars Celia Thaxter Charles Reade Charles F. Browne Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions Church: "Oh yes, I go It 'most kills me, but I go,"

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature Cold-slaw Collective opacity Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong Could make us feel that our faults were other people's Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces Death of the joy that ought to come from work Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life Despair broke in laughter Despised the avoidance of repet.i.tions out of fear of tautology Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced Dinner was at the old-fas.h.i.+oned Boston hour of two Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise Dollars were of so much farther flight than now Edmund Quincy Edward Everett Hale Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it Emerson Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself Espoused the theory of Bacon's authors.h.i.+p of Shakespeare Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly Expectation of those who will come no more Express the appreciation of another's fit word Feigned the grat.i.tude which I could see that he expected Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault Few men last over from one reform to another First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand Found life was not all poetry Francis Parkman Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature George William Curtis Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life Give him your best wine Got out of it all the fun there was in it Greeting of great impersonal cordiality Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love He was not bored because he would not be He did not care much for fiction He was not constructive; he was essentially observant He had no time to make money He was a youth to the end of his days He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection Heine Heroic lies His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event His readers trusted and loved him His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life Honest men are few when it comes to themselves I find this young man worthy I believe neither in heroes nor in saints I did not know, and I hated to ask If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal Incredible in their insipidity Industrial slavery Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there Intellectual poseurs It is well to hold one's country to her promises It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say Jane Austen Julia Ward Howe Left him to do what the cat might Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave Liked to find out good things and great things for himself Lincoln Literary dislikes or contempts Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel Longfellow Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it Love of freedom and the hope of justice Love and grat.i.tude are only semi-articulate at the best Lowell Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave Man who had so much of the boy in him Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other Memory will not be ruled Men who took themselves so seriously as that need Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women Met with kindness, if not honor Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Motley Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Nearly nothing as chaos could be Never saw a man more regardful of negroes Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never paid in anything but hopes of paying No man ever yet told the truth about himself No time to make money No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else Now death has come to join its vague conjectures NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague Old man's tendency to revert to the past Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned Ought not to call coa.r.s.e without calling one's self prudish Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities Person who wished to talk when he could listen Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking Pointed the moral in all they did Polite learning hesitated his praise Praised it enough to satisfy the author Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous Remember the dinner-bell Reparation due from every white to every black man Secret of the man who is universally interesting Seen through the wrong end of the telescope Shackles of belief worn so long Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be So refined, after the gigantic coa.r.s.eness of California Some superst.i.tion, usually of a hygienic sort Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon Sought the things that he could agree with you upon Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your ident.i.ty Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them Stoddard Study in a corner by the porch Stupidly truthful The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it Things common to all, however peculiar in each Th.o.r.eau Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best Times when a man's city was a man's country Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself Truthful Turn of the talk toward the mystical Used to ingrat.i.tude from those he helped Vacuous vulgarity of its texts Visited one of the great mills Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast Whether every human motive was not selfish Whitman's public use of his privately written praise Wit that tries its teeth upon everything Women's rights Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so d.a.m.ned humiliating!"

Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity Wrote them first and last in the spirit of d.i.c.kens

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Friends, Entire by William Dean Howells

LITERATURE AND LIFE, Entire

by William Dean Howells

CONTENTS: Man of Letters in Business Confessions of a Summer Colonist The Young Contributor Last Days in a Dutch Hotel Anomalies of the Short Story Spanish Prisoners of War American Literary Centers Standard Household Effect Co.

Notes of a Vanished Summer Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage "Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"

LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Man of Letters as a Man of Business

by William Dean Howells

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance.

For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did not find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. Unless the thing seen reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. Instantly I love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as many ones else as I can get to look or listen. If the thing is something read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. There can be no offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.

Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which is which. But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I have found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope will last till I forget my letters.

"So was it when my life began; So is it, now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old."

It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with gla.s.ses which would at least have helped their vision.

As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine; "Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of 1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement, long before motors and almost before private carriages; "American Literary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism in American Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three or four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago, and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete actuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from an extinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper's Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth century. Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel," which was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England, are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer- memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's Monthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever- delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; "The Editor's Relations with the Young Contributor" was my endeavor in Youth's Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.

So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well- meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and s.p.a.ce. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running brooks outside.

W. D. HOWELLS.

LITERATURE AND LIFE

THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS

I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception, and that, when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society should provide him with work and warrant him a living. I do not think any man ought to live by an art. A man's art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue.

Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows very well that there is something false and vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money.

He can, of course, say that the priest takes money for reading the marriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and for saying the last office for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that is and must be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true. He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares. Without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues.

All the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with its inward vision. Many will make believe otherwise, but I would rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write of Literature as Business I am tempted to begin by saying that Business is the opprobrium of Literature.

I.

Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the arts. It cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves as the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is the mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all. It cannot awaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to express precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it says nothing, and is nothing. So that when a poet has put his heart, much or little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor has modelled a statue to order. These are artists less articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the d.i.c.ker.

It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of hucksters because they are imposed upon poets. If it will serve to make my meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like the loss of a wife or child. He pours out his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of sacred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundred dollars for the right of bringing his verse to their notice. It is perfectly true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it is perfectly true that it was sold for them. The poet must use his emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no other means; society does not propose to pay his bills for him. Yet, and at the end of the ends, the unsophisticated witness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, finds it shabby. Somehow he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness of things, the poet's song would have been given to the world, and the poet would have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man should be who does the duty that every man owes it.

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a n.o.ble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a n.o.ble conscience.

But Byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach his readers; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her husband foregoes; so that these two eminent instances of protest against business in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis.

I know of no others; but there may be many that I am culpably ignorant of. Still, I doubt if there are enough to affect the fact that Literature is Business as well as Art, and almost as soon. At present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us, and I feel quite sure that in writing of the Man of Letters as a Man of Business I shall attract far more readers than I should in writing of him as an Artist. Besides, as an artist he has been done a great deal already; and a commercial state like ours has really more concern in him as a business man. Perhaps it may sometime be different; I do not believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long way off.

II.

In the mean time 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. 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 ma.s.s 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.

III.

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 compet.i.tion 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 trespa.s.sers upon any other kind of property; 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 Const.i.tution guarantees us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our 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 Civil War that literature has become a business with us. Before that time we had authors, and very good ones; it is astonis.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.sify 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.s existence which, as a cla.s.s, was wholly unknown among us before the Civil 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 mult.i.tude of these is not great, and if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a much more imbittered 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, unless he is the author of an historical romance.

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