ike war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you
cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is! You can do
something with it, but not much. And what you do not do with it, it must
do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the
artistic function. This contact may be closened and completed by the
artist's cleverness--the mere cleverness of adaptability which most
first-class artists have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the
day. You can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money out of
him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in which to force him
to accept later on something that he would prefer to refuse. You can use
a thousand devices on the excellent simpleton.... And in the process you
may degrade yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as
you may become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if you
have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't succumb to this
danger. If you have anything to say worth saying, you usually manage
somehow to get it said, and read. The artist of genuine vocation is apt
to be a wily person. He knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he
may retain essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
potboiler. _Clarissa Harlowe_, which influenced fiction throughout
Europe, was the direct result of potboiling. If the artist has not the
wit and the strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, and
ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil Service.

III

When the author has finished the composition of a work, when he has put
into the trappings of the time as much of his eternal self as they will
safely hold, having regard to the best welfare of his creative career as
a whole, when, in short, he has done all that he can to ensure the
fullest public appreciation of the essential in him--there still remains
to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the entire
affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to see that the work
is placed before the public as advantageously as possible. In other
words, he has to dispose of the work as advantageously as possible. In
other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant,
for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more
skilfull