t ungallant
editor would be constrained to call fair!

I forget that I am asked to sit as adviser to you in a question of great
moment. But be assured neither you nor your perplexing query has really
slipped from my memory. Often while I sit at my desk in this dingy room
with the sodden uproar of Printing House Square besieging my one
barricadoed window, I recall the eagerness of your appeal to me as to one
experienced in these matters: "Can you encourage me to give my life to
literature?" Indeed, my brave votaress, there is something that disturbs
me in the directness of that question, something ominous in those words,
_give my life_. Literature is a despised goddess in these days to receive
such devotion.

Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy,

as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whether
it will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writing
reviews and sketches and stories,--why, certainly, do so by all means. I
have no fear of your ultimate success in money and in the laughing honours
of society. But if you mean literature in any sober sense of the word, God
forbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such a
consuming passion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal can
only come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think a
people that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as a
great critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or any
sympathy for the follower?

It has been my business to know many writers and readers of books. I have
in all my experience met just four men who have given themselves to
literature. One of these four lives in Cambridge, one is a hermit in the
mountains, one teaches school in Nebraska, and one is an impecunious clerk
in New York. They are each as isolated in the world as was ever an
anchorite of the Thebaid; they have accomplished nothing, and are utterly
unrecognised; they are, apart from the lonely solace of study, the
unhappiest men of my acquaintance. The love of literature is a jealous
passion, a self-abnegation as distinct from the mere pleasure of clever
reading and clever writing as the religion of Pascal was distinct from the
decorous worship of Versailles. The solitude of self-acknowledged failure
is the sure penalty for pursuing an ideal out of harmony with the life
about us. I speak bitterly; I feel as if an apology were due