eparation for his calling, though he does not pay
store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, as the phrase
is. He alone among men of letters may look forward to that sort of
continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligence in
other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade,
and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world. It is
not a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the belief that
it does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of
business. Still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man who
gets a hundred dollars a thousand words. That is a fact appreciable to
business, and the man of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably
feel that his place in our civilization, though he may owe it to the
women who form the great mass of his readers, has something of the
character of a vested interest in the eyes of men. There is, indeed,
as yet no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to injure him in
his business. A critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may damage
him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has no recourse
but to write better books, or worse. The law will do nothing for him,
and a boycott of his books might be preached with immunity by any class
of men not liking his opinions on the question of industrial slavery or
antipaedobaptism. Still the market for his wares is steadier than the
market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better.
The historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like
the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are
much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be
compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the poet, the
traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition
for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady
call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars
a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without
crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it.
Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best writers of
fiction who are most in demand with the magazines, probably get nearly
as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them
by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable
multitude of the less educated and less cultiv