The Trade of Author (1889)

Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 261-274. Unsigned.

The question must doubtless often have obtruded itself upon every reflective and philosophic mind -- which is but a gracefully oblique periphrasis for describing the readers of this present article -- ''How does it happen that the trade of author -- a most innocent craft -- is so much worse paid and so much more hardly worked than any other respectable calling?'' I don't mean, of course, gravely to inquire, in this age of enlightenment, how it comes to pass that the journeyman writer fails to receive the princely remuneration accorded to great commercial chiefs or financial operators. Naturally, we couldn't expect to be paid on the same proud scale as a sugar-broker or a stock-jobber. We have not so learned political economy in these latter times as not to be well aware of the profound gulf that separates nature's noblemen -- the capitalist and the landowner -- from the common ruck of mere wage-earning humanity. No; the point I wish to raise here is simply this: How does it arrive that the wage of the average author, usually a person of some little education and some modest intelligence, falls so infinitely below the average wage of the other learned professions to which in like manner men bring but their brains and the skill of their fingers -- so infinitely below the wage of a successful barrister, for example, or of the successful doctor, or of the successful parson, or of the successful artist? Envisaged merely as a problem of social economics, this question surely may give us pause for a few minutes in a world which still, after a non-committing fashion, honours literature almost up to the point of regarding its labourers as worthy of their hire -- market price, two guineas per thousand.

Nor am I speaking now of the literary failures. In every profession there are, of course, dullards, idlers, and still more unfortunates, to whom luck never brings the chance of success; and the profession of letters is fuller of these, I imagine, than any other existing profession. Half the ablest writers in England are wasting their energies daily, I do not doubt, on very ill-paid and laborious journalistic handicraft! They are writing paragraphs. But then similar accidents happen elsewhere. Perhaps many a mute inglorious Eldon lingers among the briefless barristers in the classic recesses of Old Square, as able as any of those that wear silk; many a Sydenham loiters late in remote villages, as clever as any of those that draw their thousand guineas a day for inspecting royal and imperial larynxes. Many an actor struts provincial boards as gifted as those who draw down the plaudits of cultivated London at the Savoy or the Lyceum. It is not of these, however, that I now speak, but of the comparatively successful and well-known authors, the mass of the recognised trade of writers, who still toil on, year after year, on a smaller pittance than the country lawyer, with less prospects of success than the country curate, and with far harder hours than the country surgeon.

See, first, how incongruous is this disproportion. If you want to employ a barrister in your case, whose name is known as a special authority only to your solicitor, you will be surprised to find when you come to inquire that his brief is marked a hundred guineas. If you go to the specialist recommended for your complaint by your medical director, you will see that he reckons the value of his casual conversation at something like twenty-five shillings the minute. If you desire to buy a water-colour picture by an obscure member of the Institute or a young exhibitor at the New Gallery, you will have to pay some thirty pounds down for a square of paper twelve inches by twenty. But when you begin to inquire into the income of writers whose works we read, to borrow the famous phrase of a sister in the craft, 'from Tobolsk to Tangier,' or whose books may be bought in paper covers (probably pirated) at Valparaiso and Petropaulovsky, you discover to your astonishment the strange and seemingly inconsistent anomaly, that the man known to half the world in a dozen countries is earning about one-twentieth of the income earned by the man known only to the skilled in a particular profession in the city of London. The American enthusiast, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of his most admired and worshipped English author, has been heard to express his keen surprise when he lighted at last on the object of his ardent devotion in an eight-roomed cottage among the remotest recesses of suburban Middlesex, or ran him to earth in a dingy stucco-fronted family residence of the eligible order of architecture, lost among the monotonous and dreary desert of a London back street. How does it come, then, that these things are so? Why in this one particular trade should comparative fame and considerable reputation bring with it so very, very little in the way of substantial and solid reward as pounds sterling?

In the net, viewed as a mere abstract problem of political economy (for I wish to be impartial), the question is this: Why should authors earn so much less than the average wages of like intelligent labour? Why is literature the very worst market now known to humanity into which any man can bring for sale a given finite quantity of brains and industry?

To these questions, familiar at least to the trade itself, authors as a rule have given a large number of assorted and equally foolish answers. The rapacity of the publisher -- the harmless, necessary publisher, that most indispensable of go-betweens, that most justifiable of middlemen -- has oftenest been made the innocent scapegoat of literary economics. American copyright laws, Mr. Mudie, and the penny newspapers, have also borne their fair share of literary objurgation. To me, however, it seems quite evident that the real reason for the low rate of literary wages is a very different one. Authorship is, in fact, the only trade in which men suffer from the Competition of the Dead. And what is more, and more fatal in its effect, the dead are always at the head of the profession.

This fact implies at once a broad and very painful difference between the position of the author and the position of any other member of an educated profession. The author can hardly, by any possibility, hope to reach the top of the tree or anything like it in his own calling, during his own lifetime. The dead for ever block the way against him. If you want to entrust a difficult probate case to competent hands, you can no longer call in the aid of Lord St. Leonards. If you want the best advice on the state of your health, you must consult, not the recently deceased authority, but some living Gull or Jenner. As the elders drop off in each other profession, the younger men necessarily and naturally come to the front and take their places -- everywhere but in literature. It doesn't much matter that the public often doesn't know the new men's names: the members of the profession and the people most interested in securing their services know them very well, or get to know them. People must needs rely upon the best of its kind then and there actually forthcoming. In all trades, in short, except literature, a living dog is better than a dead lion.

But in literature alone, owing to the peculiarly permanent and special nature of the work done, and the ease with which it can be copied and diffused ad infinitum, the living dog -- nay, even for the most part the living lion -- is hardly in it. To be sure, there are fortunes made in literature, by a lucky few, especially towards the end of their life; but these fortunes are in most cases comparatively small, and they are confined in almost every instance (save those of charlatans) to the very princes and leaders of the profession. I could name if I chose, did not the modesty of English prose forbid, barristers, doctors, architects, painters, hardly known at all outside a narrow professional or critical circle, who are earning three and four times the incomes earned by distinguished men of letters of world-wide reputation. Were a comparative list made of three or four such classes, and reputation pitted against reputation, outsiders would indeed be surprised to learn for what beggarly wages well-known thinkers, poets, or romancers were pouring forth essays, verses, and novels. I know one case, indeed, of a writer almost universally praised and admired over two hemispheres, who told me, long after his best work was done, that he had never yet made in a single year more than L300, all told, by all his writings.

The key to this seeming paradox is not far to seek. By the very nature of the case, the men who write books -- books which the printing-press scatters broadcast at once over land and sea; books which are read by hundreds of thousands who never see the author's face -- get widely known over every continent. Nobody at San Francisco, probably, is acquainted with the name of a single leading London barrister or architect. But thousands of people, I will venture to lay a modest bet, in the remotest parts of Montana or South Africa, know fairly well the name of almost every literary contributor to the last twelve numbers of this Review. Yet even so, the diffusion is not necessarily very effective, from the author's point of view, at least. It means nothing. A surprisingly small number of copies of a book -- in the case of a serious or scientific work how surprisingly few would be almost incredible -- suffices to bring it well within the reach of pretty nearly everybody who cares to read it. Circulating libraries, the British Museum, Tauchnitz editions, American piracy, do the rest, and the author, poor soul, laudator et alget.

With law, medicine, practical arts, it is all the other way. The names, to be sure, are not known; there is little to diffuse them; but when the particular piece of work wants doing, they get hunted up, and the purchaser must pay the market price for the very best workman then and there in the market obtainable.

In literature, however, in spite of all this wide diffusibility, effective reputations grow very slowly; and there is no special incentive of private interest to make the general public seek out and employ rising talent. Men read and buy for the most part the books of the people whose names they know, and have long known best; and they know best the names of those who have been the longest before the public. Hence it very rarely happens that an author earns a decent income during his own lifetime; and when he begins to earn after his death, it is the publisher -- that far-sighted mortgagee of his brains -- who reaps in the long-run all the benefit.

III

Art, you say, is in the same category, surely; for there, too, are not the dead always at the head of the profession?

Not quite; the cases are by no means exactly parallel.

It is true that Raphaels, Michelangelos, Leonardos sell to-day at higher prices (though not at very much higher prices) than Leightons, Watts, or Alma Tademas. But there is not anywhere any large stock of Raphaels and Michelangelos now on sale; and the demand for such things far exceeds the effective supply at any given moment. Once more, there's nothing in art which answers at all to the power possessed by the printing-press of indefinitely multiplying in exact fac-simile the masterpieces of literature. ''How about engraving?'' asks the cheap objector. But engraving doesn't go in the least on all fours with the case of printing. If you buy a Hamlet, a Paradise Lost, a Vanity Fair, a Pickwick, you buy the very identical play, or poem or novel which Shakespeare, or Milton, or Thackeray, or Dickens originally composed. If you buy an engraving of any of the pictures in the Tribuna at the Uffizi, you buy, not a Raphael or a Fra Angelico, but merely a colourless and inferior copy.

The fact is, the artist has two strings to his bow; the author only one. The artist has both original and copyright; while the author has copyright itself alone. And in the artist's case the original is far the more important of the two, while in the author's case the original manuscript is for all practical purposes mere waste paper.

And here again the difference is fundamental. Art always commands a high price in the market because the artist plays (unwittingly and unwillingly, but still perforce plays) upon one of the meanest and smallest of all human feelings. (I'm not blaming him for it: I merely note the fact as a fact of nature.) He appeals to the hateful monopolist instinct of humanity, especially of rich and ostentatious humanity. He indirectly and unconsciously pampers the vulgar tastes of such people as dukes, and brewers, and cotton-spinners. What these men mainly want when they buy a picture is a means of displaying their own wealth and their own munificence to the remainder of their species. If they could buy the monopoly of a play of Shakespeare's or a novel of Scott's, frame it and glaze it in a handsome style, and hang it up as a decoration in their own drawing-rooms -- with the right to say to all their acquaintances, in a pompous whisper, ''This is the masterpiece of the great So-and-so; I picked it up, dirt cheap, for a hundred thousand pounds in Fleet Street'' -- then literature, too, would profit by their odious foible. But unfortunately the manuscript of a new novel by Besant is not decorative; and nobody would care to read the book (however neatly written) in the author's handwriting. A picture, on the other hand, has immediate interest; and when you buy it and hang it on your wall, you know you have got what nobody else on earth can duplicate. The stock of old masters being necessarily limited, new masters also have their chance of favour. But who will care to buy a new book by a rising author when he can get the pick of Thackeray, and Dickens, and Carlyle, and Macaulay any day for a shilling?

Hence the first great disadvantage under which the trade of writer lies is simply this, that the competition of the dead, here and here only, is overwhelming.

I might add if I liked that this natural tendency to feed the mind mainly upon the literary work of past ages is as bad for the reader as it is fatal for the writer; that the best literature for any generation to nourish itself upon is the living, breathing, actual literature of its own contemporaries; that the cheapening of old books helps not only to stifle new ones, but to retard the intellectual development of the whole community; that men read old and worn-out thought, thought that has had its day and done its work in the world, when they ought to be taking in the fresh, new ideas, the living leaven of future progress and future evolution. But I refrain from such folly. The wise man never utters one-half of what he really thinks. Most of us who scribble have suffered severely enough already in all conscience for expressing a far more modest fraction of our true opinion. So I say no more. Let us not cast our pearls any longer before the faces of the gentlemen who review Reviews in the weekly papers.

IV.

The first great reason, then, why the author should be so badly paid for his toil is the competition of the dead, and the consequent comparatively small demand for living literature. The second, which operates even where a specific piece of work is wanted to order at a fixed price, depends upon the fact that literature is least of all trades a closed profession.

The lawyer, be he barrister or solicitor, has to pass many years, and many examinations, in preparation for his future work in life. The physician, the surgeon, the parson, the engineer, all require a special training and special credentials for their particular functions. But any man (or woman) who can hold a pen and spell decently (I am credibly informed even the latter qualification is politely waived in the case of ladies) can become an author at his (or her) own sweet will. It must be so, of course; a competitive examination for the post of novelist would be too grotesque; but the inevitable result of this open career upon the wages of the trade, viewed as a trade, is simply that the price of literary labour goes down on the average to the minimum price of unskilled labour of the clerkly kind in the general market.

A trade so open to all the world as this is naturally exposed to the incursions of the amateur; and what is oddest, the amateur in this trade alone stands at no possible disadvantage. Quite the contrary: he carries into the trade his outside reputation. Nobody would entrust the management of his case in the Queen's Bench to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But if a great doctor, a well-known soldier, a popular painter, a familiar singer or actor or beauty writes a book, it sells, not only as well as the average book of the professional author, but a great deal better. The name of a lord, or a Cabinet Minister, or a fashionable preacher, or a momentary lion, the comet of a season, or the cover of this Review itself, draws far more, I venture to guess, than the name of the ablest essayist or the deepest thinker now working regularly on English letters. And apart even from these occasional intrusions of the outside public into the professional preserves, there is the further fact that a vast deal of journeyman literary work is turned out by unprofessional hands, or by people who eke out small incomes, fixed or otherwise, by writing for pleasure in their leisure moments. Such writers can naturally afford to take a smaller price for their occasional services than the professional author; and their competition tends still further to depress the wages of a trade already more than sufficiently depressed by the unique and abnormal competition of the dead.

Under these circumstances it is easy to understand why no man outside the walls of Colney Hatch ever voluntarily and deliberately devotes himself to the trade of authorship. Of course there are people who write books for the love of it -- that is quite another thing. Most authors, if they came into ten thousand a year, would doubtless go on writing books themselves -- the books they want to write, not the books the public asks of them. But no man, probably, ever became by choice a professional writer, a ''bookseller's hack,'' as our ancestors bluntly but forcibly phrased it. A trade so ill-paid and so overworked would gain no recruits, except for dire necessity. Men are driven into literature, as they are driven into crime, by hunger alone. The most hateful of professions (as a profession, I mean), it becomes tolerable only from a sense of duty to wife and family, or the primary instinct of self-preservation. The wages are low; the prizes few and often fallacious; the work is so hard that it kills or disables most men who undertake it before they arrive at middle life; while above all, to the sensitive mind -- and most authors are constitutionally sensitive -- there is the annoying liability to censure and criticism which meets your most honest and careful work at every street corner with blunt obtrusiveness.

In most other walks of life men only hear what is said for good about them. People are polite, or at least are reticent. In literature, as in politics, the most modest and thinking of men must perpetually submit to hear his intelligence, his taste, and his personality discussed in public with charming frankness, in plain print, and in every journal. If men think him a fool, they don't disguise the fact; they tell him so plainly. If they think him a snob, they inform him to his face of that pleasing belief with brutal sincerity. Probably most professional men of letters, if they told the truth, would admit at once they would give their right hands never to be compelled any longer to submit themselves to this painful ordeal of public quizzing.

Why, then, do men write for pay at all? Well, because they must live somehow. The profession is recruited almost entirely, I believe, from the actual or potential failures of other callings. The man who has knocked in vain at all other doors, or the man who has not capital enough even to approach any other door with the silver key which alone admits to the outer vestibule, takes as a last resource to literature. Some of us are schoolmasters or college tutors; some of us are doctors who failed to draw patients; some of us are ''stickit ministers'' or disfrocked parsons; a vast proportion are briefless barristers. When a man who knows how to put an English sentence grammatically together has no other resource left in life, he sells himself, body and soul, in the last resort to the public press, and produces the fabric they call literature.

Novelists in particular are probably always made, not born; being in this respect the antipodes of the poet. Divine bards sing because they must; but I suppose no man ever took by choice to the pursuit of fiction. Fellows drift into it under stress of circumstances, because that is the particular ware most specially required by the market at the moment. Women, it is true, often ardently desire to write a novel; but that is because they mainly read little else, and literary aspiration in their case, therefore, naturally betakes itself in that particular direction. To be an author and to be a novelist are them identical. But the literary aspirations of an educated man generally lead quite elsewhere. It is only the stern laws of supply and demand that compel him in the end to turn aside from the Lord's work to serve tables for his daily sustenance.

And this brings me to a further deplorable result of these economic conditions governing the unfortunate trade of authorship -- the only trade pursued by educated men which requires neither capital, nor credentials, nor special training -- the result, I mean, that the author himself, viewed as an economic unit, must aim, above all things, at suiting his market. This is a truth as clear, from the economic point of view, as the truth that the baker, the grocer, and the producer generally must produce what the public wants to buy, not what he himself thinks would be best for the public. There is no way out of it, work it how you will. He can't possibly force the market. You may not like the conclusion -- the conclusions of political economy are usually distasteful; but, like it or lump it, it is true none the less. We have to deal here with a crowded trade, in which competition is exceptionally and fatally severe -- a trade which kills off its workmen faster than any sweating system ever designed by human ingenuity -- a trade compared with which (I speak seriously) match-making and silvering and house-painting and coal-mining are healthy and congenial light occupations. Paternoster Row (as every passer-by must surely have observed) is white underfoot with the blanched and mouldering skeletons of its victims. The hours are long, the strain is severe, the pace is killing, and the pay is inadequate. In this trade, therefore, unless a man produces the precise object the public wants, for a public exceptionally fastidious and capricious, he goes to the wall as sure as fate, and the black earth yawns hollow below to receive him.

Of course most men, in spite of the public, have their own fancies and their own likings. The best of us are human. Your native taste may be all in the direction of baa-lambs and buttercups; you may love to babble of green fields and to purl melodiously in limpid prose of purling brooks; but all that is naught. If the public of the moment demands sensation you must throw the Whitechapel murders into the shade with your paper atrocities, and revel in human gore with a cheerful face, as though you much preferred that unpleasant medium for your morning tub to any less clammy and sanguine liquid. Or your natural bent may be all for tragedy; you may pant to ennoble the buskined stage, and to purify the souls of Mr Mudie's subscribers with Aristotelian correctness by fear and pity. But if the public has detected in you some faint undercurrent of amatory vein, you must exhibit Aphrodite, robed round with nothing but the world's desire, on every page of your glowing verse, or must unravel the tangles of Neraea's hair through three long volumes, till you're sick and tired of it. The people want to be amused, and amused it will be in its own way, in spite of you. Just now that way is hacking dusky South African flesh into small pieces; and all the fiction and imagination of the age must needs warp itself from its predestined path to gratify this jejune recrudescence of barbarism, this morbid taste for blood and thunder in literature.

There's no help for it, no way out of it. As a plain matter of political economy the facts are these: Innumerable workers possess the field. Competition is keen, success is difficult. If you don't supply what the public wants, somebody else will step in and oust you; and the somebody else will survive in the struggle for life, while you go to the wall or into the workhouse. That is the gospel according to Darwin and Malthus applied to art. ''Saltavit et placuit''* is all the epitaph you can ever hope for; and not to please is simply fatal.

''But high aims in art, the noble desire to elevate and train the taste of the people -- have we not heard that great artists must create the faculty by which they are to be appreciated?'' and so forth, and so forth, with variations innumerable. Now, let us be serious. I am speaking here, not about great artists, but about the common and respectable trade of author. There are authors who do not depend upon the trade; those lucky dogs can please themselves if they like in this matter, and I don't doubt that in the end they often succeed in pleasing the public also. Ruskin is a splendid case in point; others occur, but, mindful of the dignity of British prose once more, I refrain from naming them. In such instances the author's subsistence is secured meanwhile, and he can go on writing the way he chooses, and as long as he chooses, till he secures his public as well. But what is the use of waiting for your public, if you die of starvation yourself in the meantime? Moreover, it must be remembered that most authors can't print what they like at their own expense. They haven't the capital. They are dependent upon publishers, editors, booksellers, proprietors, and those sensible people -- sound business heads -- will only print the sort of stuff they expect to pay them. All this talk about its being the duty of the author to elevate public taste, &c., &c., belongs to a purely ideal world, where political economy and the struggle for life have not yet penetrated. In the actual practical world we all live in, the author must work for his daily wage like any other journeyman labourer. If he pleases his public, he earns his salt; if he doesn't please it -- open the doors, and exit. You might as well tell the baker's man, as he goes his round, he should aim at elevating the taste of the back streets by supplying the people with Vienna bread and French rolls of the daintiest pattern. How is he to get the flour and machinery to turn them out? and supposing he does, of what use would it be if the back-street folks have no money to buy them with, or don't want them?

Of course there are always a few authors who insist upon ''following the intuitions of their own genius,'' and who sometimes succeed (with iron constitutions) in pulling through, in spite of everything; but far more often they faint by the way and perish in the attempt, to receive payment thereafter, at the public expense, sumptuous but unsatisfactory marble monuments. These are the martyrs, and martyrdom is always an edifying spectacle; but it isn't practical, and moreover, in most cases, it isn't even right. A man may be ready enough to starve, himself, but the better part of us have given hostages to fortune; and there is more real heroism in toiling on uncomplainingly at distasteful work for those hostages' sakes than in making your wife and children starve with you uncomplainingly because, forsooth, you are a heaven-born genius, and must give free play to the inspiration within you. The first plain duty of most plain men is to discharge their responsibilities to those who are dependent upon them. Martyrdom is a showy and effective business, it brings down the house at the close with a rush; but a modest sum put away in the Three per Cents commends itself rather as an aim in life to what is, after all, the highest morality.

Not that there are not heroic instances on the other side. One there is of a great thinker who resolutely devoted his small capital and years of his life to the development of a philosophical system, on which at first he wasted himself in vain, with no return and little sympathy, till at last, after many days, the world of a sudden woke up with a start to find him acknowledged as its profoundest teacher. But, then, the great thinker had that little capital to start with; he had no family ties; he stood alone in the world, to sink or swim; and he resolutely determined to spend himself in the effort. That was heroism if you like, but heroism possible or praiseworthy only in a few exceptional instances. A trade can't be carried on upon such terms as those; it must keep alive its workmen, and the workmen can only be kept alive by pleasing their public.

It is one of the minor annoyances of the author's life, indeed, that the world at large can never be made to recognise this plain fact, but constantly insists on identifying the writer with his books or his articles. It takes for granted that he writes what he likes, and that he chooses his themes because he is personally interested in them. Sometimes it scolds him for his evil selection: ''Oh, how can you write such horrid things?'' or, ''Why do you always make your plots so dreadfully bloodthirsty? -- while he, poor innocent soul, with his finger in his mouth, would probably far prefer to spin out a pretty idyllic story about the domestic loves of two nice young people, who after many vicissitudes were happily married, or to enlighten the world to the best of his ability on the precise relations of the double stars to the unresolved nebulae. They little know that at that very moment a note from an editor, supreme arbiter of fate, lies open upon his table, ''Why don't you give us a little more incident? Couldn't you manage, now, to kill off Guy and let Ethel's throat be finally cut after a desperate struggle by the insurgent Zulus?'' But oftener still -- and this is far more annoying -- the world makes little complimentary speeches: ''That was a sweet story of yours'' -- good heavens, the Trial of the Ruddigore Mystery! or ''How I did laugh over that clever essay on the Ethics of Bores!'' pumped up perforce with a nervous headache in response to an urgent demand from an employer for a humorous article. What is worst of all, the world even writes you earnest argumentative letters about the precious subject on which you have last written, as though you cared for it: ''Have you seen my pamphlet on the South Australian corn question?'' or ''Do you know that there exists at Rome a more perfect copy of the Apollo of Lysippus than even the one you praise so highly in your interesting paper on the Development of the Plastic Art in Corinth?'' Why, that tedious article was written to order, for the editor of a leading art-magazine; and you take about as much personal interest in the plastic art of Corinth or of Corioli, as a shoemaker takes in the metatarsal bones of this, that, or the other particular customer. You mugged it all up, as Mr. Potts's young man** mugged up the subject of Chinese metaphysics, and as soon as you had delivered your soul, according to contract, of the five thousand words, neither more nor less, sufficient to imbed those eight interesting engravings in a shallow stratum of insipid letterpress, you dismissed the plastic art of Corinth for good from your mind, with a fervent hope that no malignant influence would ever compel you in an evil hour a second time to approach the dry details of Hellenic sculpture.

VI.

Cynicism? Ah, no; despondent realisation of economic law. These are the conditions under which alone the author by trade necessarily lives. But do you think he likes them? Incredible! Impossible!

For the author, too, has had his day of illusion, you may be sure. There was once a time, long, long ago, when he thought he might say what lay nearest his own heart; might speak out to the world, for good or for evil, the truth that was in him. Never mind whether the truth was worth speaking or not; to him at least it was all important. Hard experience alone has knocked all that out of him. And to the end, for the most part, he kicks against the pricks. He hates the sordid, squalid necessity for earning his bread by lowering himself to the tastes of the public he must needs serve with its daily literature. Slowly and painfully he learns to take his place beside the maker of hats and the importer of latest Paris fashions, as a unit in a trade that lives by pleasing. Perhaps pot-boiling is his true function in life, but he at any rate must have other ideals and other interests. For the author has usually aims and aspirations and theories of his own. The very ability which enables him to spin words into pretty phrases that take the editorial mind by their freshness, implies as a rule tastes, feelings, and sympathies above the common. If he could, he would gladly say what he has deepest and most earnest within him. He would give the people of his best. But when he tries it on, the people too often turn it over listlessly at the railway bookstalls, and say with a yawn, ''We prefer his shilling shockers, thank you.''

And most of us have tried it on, every now and again. We have listened, as advised, to the intuitions of our inspired genius. The publishers, to be sure, looked askance at our work; they shook their capitalist heads ominously. Never mind; we have a few hundreds of our own laid by -- the spoils of the Philistines from those shockers aforesaid: let us publish at our own risk and expense. 'Sdeath, we'll print it. Alas, alas, how flat that work fell, in which we tried to elevate the taste or improve the morals or intellect of the public!

The public chose rather to keep its taste and morals at its own dull level. A loss or two of this sort soon taught us wisdom. We accepted our true place in the world. We boiled the pot, if not cheerfully, yet resignedly. We began to feel the pulse of the market. Most of us never quite succeed in catching it, to be sure; that pulse is so capricious -- or we ourselves have such insensitive finger-ends -- that we fail exactly to synchronize somehow with its erratic movements. But we get near enough to make both ends meet approximately. That modest result amply suffices for the average ruck of a hard-worked but eminently humble and contented profession.

The fact is, as the world is constituted, to say out in full what you actually think about anything is simply fatal. You must write always with one eye askew upon ten thousand foolish popular prejudices. Especially in England, to hold opinions about any really great and important subject -- about the relations of man to the Cosmos, for example; to space and time and energy; to earth and ocean and plant and animal; or again, about the relations of man to man, of man to woman, to the child and the family, to the past and the future; to the evolution and ultimate perfection of the race; any question, in short, of politics, or religion, or social science, or sexual morality, in the least degree above the opinions vulgarly held by the bourgeois mass of our Philistine fellow-countrymen, is nothing less than damning. To have ethical theories superior to the morality of the grocer, the baker, and the Baptist minister; to have views of life more comprehensive than the views of blushing sixteen in the rectory drawing-room, is to write yourself anathema. On all these subjects -- all the subjects about which it is worth giving an opinion at all -- the world doesn't want to hear anybody's opinion; it wants to go on uncriticised and unthinking, on its own commonplace banal level.

''But the great geniuses said their say boldly and made their mark, and pleased in spite of it.'' Of course. What can you not do if you are a great genius? That is small consolation to those hard-working souls who are not geniuses; and the rank and file of every profession can never hope to be all field-officers. What is the use of telling the corporal who finds military cheer in barracks hard, that at the officers' mess they fare sumptuously every day off champagne and turtle? Yet even amongst the great geniuses of the world there have been no doubt four classes. The first is the class who could afford to wait and bide their time; who were not of the trade; who cared little what the world thought of them; who would go their own way and say their own say, and care for no man. The second is the class who perish in the attempt -- the Chattertons and Keatses, the Brunos and Dolets -- the noble army of martyrs whom few can follow. The third is the class of lucky hits -- the men who early take the public fancy, like Dickens or Hugo, and can do thenceforth pretty much as they like. The fourth is the class of those who deliberately set themselves to please, and succeed at last by dint of their genius in pleasing royally.

To most journeymen authors, however, literature is simply a hard trade, governed like any other by the cruel laws of supply and demand. The one glorious possibility the craft encloses is the stray chance of a hit -- one of those sudden jumps whereby a man's price goes up at a bound from hundreds to thousands, by some inexplicable whim of public fancy. Every workman in the literary trade lives in a perpetual deferred hope of accomplishing some day such a grand revolution. It is this strange gambling element of the craft that keeps him at times from losing heart entirely when things look blackest. It is this that reconciles him to the homely, slighted shepherd's trade. Every now and then he sees one of his friends burst out in this wise into sudden blaze, often with a work no better than many of his previous good works which the public slighted, sometimes, indeed, by no means with his best one; and why may not he too in his turn do likewise? To the journeyman author that chance, if ever it comes, means not only a competence, it means also, what is dearer by far to him, emancipation, freedom. For when once an author has attained success, he is free indeed. He may say what he likes. He may tell the truth at last, and no man will curb him. From its favourites the public will suffer anything. Carlyle gave it abuse, Ruskin gives it nonsense, but it smiles benignly. That long self-repression will be all at an end. That drudgery of applying his noblest faculties to work that he hates will all be over. He can bring out after all his great work on the celestial parallax, or can explain his heretical and unpalatable views on the population question. He can even publish his epic poem, or print the tragedy that the management of the Lyceum so unaccountably rejected. So at each fresh book his hopes rise high; surely the hit is coming now; he has fetched that thick-skinned ruminant the public, this time! Alas, the new venture falls flat as all its predecessors at Mudie's, or has that modest bookselling succes d'estime that attends all through his best efforts to please the pachydermatous public. He has failed again to find the thin spot in that rhinoceros hide. To work once more, with foolscap in reams! Surely at last, with all his striving, he must find out exactly what that capricious many-headed beast really wants from him!

* 'He danced and gave pleasure'. From a Roman grave-stone found on the Riviera of a 12-year-old boy from the North. It is unlikely that GA was unaware of the sexual innuendo, or that his readers would have been either.

** I don't recognise this allusion.

***