Books Should Be Free Loyal Books Free Public Domain Audiobooks & eBook Downloads |
|
The Man of Letters as a Man of Business By: William Dean Howells (1837-1920) |
---|
![]()
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 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... Continue reading book >>
|
Genres for this book |
---|
History |
Literature |
eBook links |
---|
Wikipedia – William Dean Howells |
Wikipedia – The Man of Letters as a Man of Business |
eBook Downloads | |
---|---|
ePUB eBook • iBooks for iPhone and iPad • Nook • Sony Reader |
Kindle eBook • Mobi file format for Kindle |
Read eBook • Load eBook in browser |
Text File eBook • Computers • Windows • Mac |
Review this book |
---|