The Club thinks that the life of this city, brutally intense and bewildering, has yet a beauty and glamour and a secret word to the mind, so subtle that it cannot be closely phrased, but so important that to miss it is to miss life itself.  And to forfeit an attempt to see, understand, and mutually communicate this loveliness is to forfeit that burning spark that makes men’s spirits worth while.  To such halting meditations the Club devotes its aspirations undistressed by humorous protest.  If this be treason...!

      [Illustration]

A PREFACE TO THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM

(BEING AN ANSWER TO A LETTER FROM A COLLEGE STUDENT,
ASKING ADVICE AS TO TAKING UP WRITING AS A CAREER)

Your inquiry is congenial, and I feel guilty of selfishness in answering it in this way.  But he must be a poor workman, whether artisan or artist, who does not welcome an excuse now and then for shutting out the fascinating and maddening complexity of this shining world to concentrate his random wits on some honest and self-stimulating expression of his purpose.

There are exceptions to every rule; but writing, if undertaken as a trade, is subject to the conditions of all other trades.  The apprentice must begin with task-work; he must please his employers before he can earn the right to please himself.  Not only that, he must have ingenuity and patience enough to learn how editors are pleased; but he will be startled, I think, if he studies their needs, to see how eager they are to meet him half way.  This necessary docility is in the long run, a wholesome physic, because, if our apprentice has any gallantry of spirit, it will arouse in him an exhilarating irritation, that indignation which is said to be the forerunner of creation.  It will mean, probably, a period—­perhaps short, perhaps long, perhaps permanent—­of rather meagre and stinted acquaintance with the genial luxuries and amenities of life; but (such is the optimism of memory) a period that he will always look back upon as the happiest of all.  It is well for our apprentice if, in this season, he has a taste for cheap tobacco and a tactful technique in borrowing money.

The deliberate embrace of literature as a career involves very real dangers.  I mean dangers to the spirit over and above those of the right-hand trouser pocket.  For, let it be honestly stated, the business of writing is solidly founded on a monstrous and perilous egotism.  Himself, his temperament, his powers of observation and comment, his emotions and sensibilities and ambitions and idiocies—­these are the only monopoly the writer has.  This is his only capital, and with glorious and shameless confidence he proposes to market it.  Let him make the best of it.  Continually stooping over the muddy flux of his racing mind, searching a momentary flash of clearness in which he can find mirrored some delicate beauty or