The Man of Letters as a Man of Business | Page 3

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"THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS"
by William Dean Howells
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.
II.
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 dicker. 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