The weekly Shasta courier., 1873-02-01
Literature as a Profession.

| 1t is a melancholy truth that, even in the
nineteenth century, literature, as profess
sion. rarely pays. Each day makes this
more clear to the observant. Yet, as re-
CARDS the votarles of this fascinating and
delusve craft, the cry is " still they come, ;"
to offer at her crowded shrine. Booksellers
and editors can testify, by painful expert
ence, to the ever-increasing number of those
who are painting to make the pen their bread
winner. 1t is, of course, highly to be de-
sired that there should be many to whom
gain is a secondary obiect-wlling, for the
| qualification of an honest ambition, or in the
ardent pursuit of some special branch of
science, to forego those pecuniary prizes
| which are, to the bulk of mankind, the grand
| stimulus to exertion.
But, in the case of a very large proportion
of those who follow literature as a means
Of livelihood, it is much to be regretted that
they should not have sought their subsist-
ence in some other field. "Aim," says
Junius, in the letter to Woodfall, in which
he requires emolument, at an independ-
ence, solid, however small. No man can be
happy, or even honest, without it."
While we should decline to indorse this
dictum in its entirety, we are convinced of
the sound, practical sense it conveys and
it Is because literary career renders the
consolidation of an independence almost
impossible in about nine cases out of ten,
at least as concerns married man. that we
should endeavor to dissuade nine men out
of ten from embarking in it. The Grub
street poor-devil author, out at elbows and
redolent of gin, is pretty much a being of
the past; but he has his representatives to-
day, among far more refined order of be-
ings, men and women, whom, perhaps, some
| early amateur success has fattered into the
belief that there are great things in them,
and that they are destined to be famous.
Time goes on, yet the booksellers continue
inappreciative and obdurate. At length,
heart-sick and weary, the book or poem
which was to have won fame is abandoned,
and the victim of mistaken vocation endea-
vors to scrape precarious subsistence from
newspapers or magazines. The compost
tions of such persons often have considera-
BILE merit; and, indeed, frequently give
proof of far more learning and accuracy of
thought than those of others who earn their
livelihood by the pen with comparative ease.
The trouble is, that they cannot write what
the public cares to read. 1t would save a
great deal of suffering if a large class of
would-be authors could be persuaded that
it is not enough to have ideas, and to clothe
them in appropriate language, unless they,
further, have the art of adaptation to pop
ular taste.
What painful example in point is that
afforded by the well known fate of man of
undoubted talent in sister-profession
Hayden, the English historical painter?
What chronicle Of disappointed ambition
tells sadder tale than the passage in his
diary wherein he refers to the crowds show
ering guineas into the Golfers of Barnum,
then exhibiting Tom Thumb, under the
same roof where Hayden, in last desperate
effort to put bread into his children mouths,
was exhibiting, to perfectly inappreciativs
public, his historical paintingsl That he
could paint excellently no one denied-but
not SO as to please the popular taste. His
end was suicide.
1t is not, however, only those literary men
who fail to please the public who are unable
to keep their heads well above water. There
are certain lines even of highly popular liter
ature which are lamentably unremunerative
"a fact of which the recent repeated appeal
in aid of Mark Lemons destitute family
affords a painful indication. There is no
reason to suppose that he was either reck-
less or extravagant he was simply the VIC
tim of class of abilities which threw him