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.


II.

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