XII.

In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the
publisher, always the contributor rather than the editor, whom I
am concerned for. I study the difficulties of the publisher and
editor only because they involve the author and the contributor;
if they did not, I will not say with how hard a heart I should
turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizing the business
conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, not the
purveyors of it.

After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of
letters ever a business man? I suppose that, strictly speaking,
he never is, except in those rare instances where, through need
or choice, he is the publisher as well as the author of his
books. Then he puts something on the market and tries to sell it
there, and is a man of business. But otherwise he is an artist
merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage-workers who are
paid for the labor they have put into the thing done or the thing
made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a
thing after some other man has done it or made it. The quality
of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the
case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a workingman,
and is under the rule that governs the workingman's life. If he
is sick or sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy and will
not, then he earns nothing. He cannot delegate his business to a
clerk or a manager; it will not go on while he is sleeping. The
wage he can command depends strictly upon his skill and
diligence.