this is what you can hardly
ever get leave to do. Literary men require to see something of the
world; they can hardly be hermits, and the world cannot be seen without
a constant running expenditure, which at the end of the year represents
an income. Men of culture and refinement really _cannot_ live like very
poor people without deteriorating in refinement, and falling behind in
knowledge of the world. When they are married, and have families, they
can hardly let their families live differently from themselves; so that
there are the usual expenses of the English professional classes to be
met, and these are heavy when they have to be got out of the profits of
literature. The consequence is, that if a book is to be written
prudently it must be written quickly, and with the least amount of
preparatory labor that can possibly be made to serve. This is very
different from the "_douce incubation_" of Michelet. Goldsmith said of
hack-writing, that it was difficult to imagine a combination more
prejudicial to taste than that of the author whose interest it is to
write as much as possible, and the bookseller, whose interest it is to
pay as little as possible. The condition of authors has no doubt greatly
improved since Goldsmith's time, but still the fact remains that the
most careful and finished writing, requiring extensive preparatory
study, is a luxury in which the professional writer can only indulge
himself at great risk. Careful writing does, no doubt, occasionally pay
for the time it costs; but such writing is more commonly done by men who
are either independent by fortune, or who make themselves, as authors,
independent by the pursuit of some other profession, than by regular men
of letters whose whole income is derived from their inkstands. And when,
by way of exception, the hack-writer does produce very highly-finished
and concentrated work, based upon an elaborate foundation of hard study,
that work is seldom professional in the strictest sense, but is a labor
of love, outside the hasty journalism or magazine-writing that wins his
daily bread. In cases of this kind it is clear that the best work is not
done as a regular part of professional duty, and that the author might
as well earn his bread in some other calling, if he still had the same
amount of leisure for the composition of real literature.

The fault I find with writing as a profession is that _it does not pay
to do your best_. I don't mean to insinuate that