pleasure to write, to put as much heart and soul as you have
about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to reach the
heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That,
and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.

The failures in literature are no less mystifying than the
successes, though they are upon the whole not so mortifying. I
have seen a good many of these failures, and I know of one case
so signal that I must speak of it, even to the discredit of the
public. It is the case of a novelist whose work seems to me of
the best that we have done in that sort, whose books represent
our life with singular force and singular insight, and whose
equipment for his art, through study, travel, and the world, is
of the rarest. He has a strong, robust, manly style; his stories
are well knit, and his characters are of the flesh and blood
complexion which we know in our daily experience; and yet he has
failed to achieve one of the first places in our literature; if I
named his name here, I am afraid that it would be quite unknown
to the greatest part of my readers. I have never been able to
account for his want of success, except through the fact that his
stories did not please women, though why they did not, I cannot
guess. They did not like them for the same reason that they did
not like Dr. Fell; and that reason was quite enough for them. It
must be enough for him, I am afraid; but I believe that if this
author had been writing in a country where men decided the fate
of books, the fate of his books would have been different.

The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United
States the fate of a book is in the hands of the women. It is
the women with us who have the most leisure, and they read the