author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and
probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim
at the countenance of the men. Except as a humorist he certainly
never will get it, for your American, when he is not making
money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it.


IX.

I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who
approaches literature through journalism is not as fine and high
a literary man as the author who comes directly to it, or through
some other avenue; I have not the least notion of condemning
myself by any such judgment. But I think it is pretty certain
that fewer and fewer authors are turning from journalism to
literature, though the entente cordiale between the two
professions seems as great as ever. I fancy, though I may be as
mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most
journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the
beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young
authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own
thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the
saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is
different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no
longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would
willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise
brought to grief and shame. They are apt to gird at him for his
unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this if they
proposed any way for him to live without them; as I have allowed
at the outset, the gains ARE unhallowed. Apparently it is