impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem,
or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself
feels this. He puts on a bold front with the
world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business;
but he knows very well that there is something false
and vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be
truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money.
He can, of course, say that the priest takes money
for reading the marriage service, for christening
the new-born babe, and for saying the last office
for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that
justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely
a party to the thing that is and must be. He
can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his
art he cannot live, that society will leave him to
starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture,
or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true.
He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a
market for his wares. Without a market for his
wares he must perish, or turn to making something
that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues.
All the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the
averted eye sees them still, with its inward vision.
Many will make believe otherwise, but I would rather
not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write
of Literature as Business I am tempted to begin by
saying that Business is the opprobrium of Literature.
Literature is at once the most intimate and the most
articulate of the arts. It cannot impart its
effect through the senses or the nerves as the other
arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence;
it is the mind speaking to the mind; until it has
been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance,
it does not exist at all. It cannot awaken this
emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to
express precisely the meaning of the author, if it
does not say him, it says nothing, and is nothing.
So that when a poet has put his heart, much or little,
into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal
is greater than when a painter has sold a picture
to a patron, or a sculptor has modelled a statue to
order. These are artists less articulate and less
intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their
work; they are less personally in it; they part with
less of themselves in the dicker. It does not
change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson
and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which
they couched the most mystical messages their genius
was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to
the conditions which none can escape; but that does
not justify the conditions, which are none the less
the conditions of hucksters because they are imposed
upon poets. If it will serve to make my meaning
a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been
crossed in love, or has suffered some real sorrow,
like the loss of a wife or child. He pours out
his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of
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