LITERATURE AS A CALLING.
MR. JAMES PAYN has been chatting in this month's Nineteenth Century to Paterfamilias in a very amusing and decidedly misleading way. Every father of a family with big sons in it should read him, and enjoy him, and forget him, till some day or other, when "clever Jack" has taken to his pen for himself, Mr. Payn's words may come up as a consolation, and himself as an authority to quote in defence of the "rash" lad. Every word of Mr. Payn's paper is as true as it is pleasantly put, except the main thesis on which the words are strong. Mr. Payn's idea is that a father with tolerably clever sons, and no great amount of capital, could hardly do better than bring one of them up to Literature as a calling,—that is, train him with a distinct impression that he is to get his living by writing articles in newspapers, papers in magazines, and books that will sell, with a chance, of course, if it is in him to do that kind of work for the world, of producing books which deserve to live. He will not have to send his son to a public school or to a university, or to provide him with any plant beyond a pen, a quire of paper, and a decent suit of clothes. That will sound to the father, gradually growing anxious what to do with his boy, and becoming rapidly aware that "every door is barred with gold," very pleasant indeed ; and so will some farther informa- tion which Mr. Payn gives him. The calling, once entered upon, is not, he thinks, a bad one. There arc scores of papers, dozens of magazines, all of which need writers, most of which pay them fairly well, and none of which either are, nor, it is probable, will be, over-supplied with the kind of men they want. The demand for such articles increases hourly, as does also the demand for ordinary fiction ; and the pay increases also, both directly in an increase of rate per column and page, and indirectly in an increase of the means of using the same work profitably twice over. The last applies chiefly to fiction, but is partly true of graver com- position, more especially lectures and descriptive papers. Why not bring up "clever Jack" to that trade, and so give him the advan- tage which any man specially brought up to any business always has over the amateur P There is no particular difficulty in it, no learning to be acquired, except sound general information and a habit of composition, and no reason for thinking that genius, whatever that quality may be, "the zigzag lightning in the brain," or what not, is at all indispensable. Jack will get a fair income very early, and will not have to pay any of that " gate- money," in the shape of premiums, fees, share-purchases, and " maintenance for a year or two "—which means seven years— that now presses so heavily upon all parents and guardians who have not considerable sums to spare. The posi- tion acquired is a fairly pleasant one, much better than that occupied by junior professionals without money ; and there is no need to be too much alarmed by the portentous fact, which Mr. Payn, nevertheless, honestly reveals to his audience, that in a book of precedence, after a long list of Eminent Per- sons and Notables, he found at the end the words, "Burgesses, Literary Persons, &c." Social standing now-a-days is not wholly regulated by codes, nor is John Delane less esteemed because he "ranks after" Mr. Deputy Aitchdropper, or Lieu- tenant Tassels. • That is all true, and all false, too, in Paterfamilias's sense of falseness. It is perfectly true,.for example, though with certain reserves, which might be made about any other profession, that the literary calling has, as regards the income it yields, become a fairly good one. The man who succeeds in it at all, without any great or special success, may reckon on making, without exhaust- ing labour, from four to six hundred a year, or if he can write political leaders, two hundred a year more ; while the prizes open to special capacity are—we are not speaking of the great prizes—equal to more than double those amounts. The work, to those who are fitted for it, is probably less than in most pro- fessions; and the risks, to a man in decent health, are of no un- usual kind. Health, it is true, is indispensable, health, that is, of the kind which enables a man, well or ill, to rely on himself for a certain amount of work each day, or week, or month. There is a notion abroad, we believe, that because literature is a sedentary occupation, it will suit any ricketty man conscious of liver, or lungs, or nerves, or other bodily entities,—and there never was a more dangerous delusion. Literature in the great sense may be pursued by anybody, however sickly, who has intervals of health ; but literature as a calling can be pro- fitably followed only by people who know of themselves that, accidents and infectious complaints apart, "they are never ill," —that is, they can always make themselves do their work. Journalists must no more be ill than country. doctors, and even magnifies detest men who are constantly ailing, or incompetent to keep their engagements. But reasonable health granted, there is no special drawback to the calling, except, per- haps, at first a certain appearance, quite unreal, of soliciting patronage, and the usual difficulty of getting known ; and as Mr. Payn says, it is never full. The men who have to pay never have too much of the best work before them; they like the best work ; and, subject to human nature, they care painfully little about individuals. If Brown writes better than Smith, all Smith's charmingness will not, sooner or later, and very soon, too, avail him against Brown. In certain branches of the calling, for instance, really good political writing, there is, as every editor in the country will acknowledge, a distinct want of professionals—amateurs are more frequent—as there is also, we believe, though Mr. Payn would be a better autho- rity, of men who can write light articles with thought in them, most precious of all provender to a new magazine. Writers of fiction are endless, but for all who can do that work well the market is always "firm," and for the whole body of the profession there is always the comfort with which an English editor in China once consoled himself. He went out with a bag of letters to the writing people there, and was informed with beautiful unanimity that the calling was hopelessly overstocked. "Toss, then, which of you shall commit suicide," was the much- baited man's remark, "for I am coming in ;" and he did, retiring with the largest competence ever made in China in that line of life, The market, in fact, is always open, and as a rule the com- petent—we do not say the most competent—are those who are engaged.
And nevertheless, Paterfamilias who brings up his boy to literature as a calling, will, nine times out of ten, make a huge mistake. Mr. Payn may be quite right in depreciating the quality of mind required to make an average litarateur, but all the same there is a quality required, which is not in every man, or in the majority of men, which cannot be tested except by experience, and the absence of which involves failure more total and more ruinous than is possible in any other profession whatever,—except, perhaps, a painter's. We should not ourselves rank this quality very high, though a little higher than Mr. Payn does, and certainly do not consider its absence any discredit, any more than the absence of musical ear,, or any other quality resulting from organisation, but without it there is no hope either of success or happiness. There are able men in the world, plenty of them, who can no more succeed in the calling than blind men could in painting ; and we know no position more melancholy than that of the man who, having "taken to literature," and being, perhaps, conscious of certain powers of thought, lacks the something—call it expression, if you like—with- out which the calling is not for him. What it is, we hardly know, though we might describe it as an artist's faculty for expressing thoughts in words ; but this we do know, that we have come in the journey of life into professional contact with dozens of men, able men, many of them, who did not possess it, and with two or three who possessed it in such a degree, not being men of genius either, that training or experience seemed to them almost needless. We very much doubt if any training in the world would infuse this quality, though, of course, a certain training would develope it, the best and quickest being the work itself ; and we are quite certain that the method of training which could be relied on to make a boy of average brains, or brains a little better than ordinary, a fair litterateur, has yet to be discovered. Mr. Payn doubts University training, and he may be right; but suppose he had been a journalist on the look-out for contributors, can he name or think of persons he would have preferred to T. B. Macaulay at twenty-four, the last embodiment of Cambridge culture, or B. Disraeli at twenty, educated princi- pally in his father's study ? Or as magazine editor, which would he have taken,—De Quincey, with his five years of Oxford study ; or Charles Lamb, without any training beyond Christ's Hospital, then usually worse than none P If be were selling fiction, he would of course leap at Charles Dickens, who was rather dragged up, than educated in any way ; but he would hardly reject Thackeray, who, though he never took a degree, had the regular training ; or Scott, who went to the University ; or Fielding, student of "learned Leyden," with the queerest vein in him of pedantry. Would be, if he wanted fugitive verses, have rejected Coleridge any more than Burns ? We have no experience of magazines, but we should say distinctly that of all "leader "-writers we ever en- countered, the four best qualified to make money by their art were a graduate of Aberdeen, stuffed to the lips with " feelo- sophy ;" a Rugby boy, subsequently saturated with Oxford ; hard-drinking Canadian, who had never learned anything but French ; and a Scotch compositor, who had never learned any- thing at all, and for that matter, never knew anything, but who made and spent a fortune through a charm of style which, in London, would have made him both powerful and famous. Cobbett even to-day would be snapped at as editor for a Radical paper, which Douglas Jerrold would edit even better ; while the most successful editor of our time was a man from Magdalen. No training makes, and no training apparently spoils, the successful litt4rateur who makes of it a calling; and the father who deli- berately trained a son for it, would probably find that he had produced one of three results :—Either the lad could not do the work at all, which would be best, as he would then find him- self out early, and take to some work he could do ; or he could do it fairly well in the precise way which spoiled his work as a saleable article ; or he would absolutely refuse to make the attempt. Mr. Payn omits that last element in the question from his calculation, but it is a very important one. A man with a disgust for the law may make himself a very good solicitor, and a man with a hatred of the dissecting-room might become a fair operator, but no man with an inner dislike of the work amounting to an aversion will over become a successful litarateur by calling. It is creative work, after all, of however poor a kind ; and into all creative work, if it be but making water-jars, something of willingness, some faint emotion of delight in the work itself, must always enter as the first condi- tion of success. The delight may die when habitude has come, but it must be there first.
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