Artist has seasons, as trees, when he cannot blossom
    Book that they are content to know at second hand
    Business to take advantage of his necessity
    Competition has deformed human nature
    Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets
    Fate of a book is in the hands of the women
    God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity
    Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist
    I do not think any man ought to live by an art
    If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading
    Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success
    Literature beautiful only through the intelligence
    Literature has no objective value
    Literature is Business as well as Art
    Man is strange to himself as long as he lives
    Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books
    More zeal than knowledge in it
    Most journalists would have been literary men if they could
    Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it
    No man ought to live by any art
    No rose blooms right along
    Our huckstering civilization
    Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best
    Results of art should be free to all
    Reviewers
    Reward is in the serial and not in the book—­19th Century
    Rogues in every walk of life
    There is small love of pure literature
    Two branches of the novelist’s trade:  Novelist and Historian
    Warner’s Backlog Studies
    Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money

LITERATURE AND LIFE—­The Confessions of a Summer Colonist

by William Dean Howells

CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST

The season is ending in the little summer settlement on the Down East coast where I have been passing the last three months, and with each loath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant.  A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go already begins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form of words which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; some shadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or change should destroy or transform it, or, what is more likely, if I should never come back to it.  Perhaps others in the distant future may turn to it for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its most characteristic phases; I am sure that in the distant present there are many millions of our own inlanders to whom it would be altogether strange.

I.

In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony; as far as the visible body of it is concerned it is inexpressibly perishable; a fire and a high wind could sweep it all away; and one of the most American of all American things is the least fitted among them to survive from the present to the future, and impart to it the significance of what may soon be a “portion and parcel” of our extremely forgetful past.