The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
Book Excerpt
ent of the United States gets for doing far less work of a
much more perishable sort. If the man of letters were wholly a
business man this is what would happen; he would make his forty
or fifty thousand dollars a year, and be able to consort with
bank presidents, and railroad officials, and rich tradesmen, and
other flowers of our plutocracy on equal terms. But,
unfortunately, from a business point of view, he is also an
artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight the
public disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly. "No rose
blooms right along," as the English boys at Oxford made an
American collegian say in a theme which they imagined for him in
his national parlance; and the man of letters, as an artist, is
apt to have times and seasons when he cannot blossom. Very often
it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow between novels or
stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when the suggestions
of the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays or
articles desired; when the
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