【英文原著类】THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS(儒商).pdf

"THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS"
"THE MAN OF
LETTERS AS A MAN OF
BUSINESS"
by William Dean Howells
1
"THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS"
I
I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception,
and that when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society
should provide him with work and warrant him a living. I do not think any
man ought to live by an art. A man's art should be his privilege, when he
has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily
bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of
this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being;
people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking
money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself
feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it
out as Business; but he knows very well that there is something false and
vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be truly priced in money
cannot be truly paid in money. He can, of course, say that the priest takes
money for reading the marriage service, for christening the new-born babe,
and for saying the last office for the dead; that the physician sells healing;
that justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that
is and must be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art he
cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit its fancy
in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true. He is, and
he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares. Without a
market for his wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will
sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues. All the same, the sin and the
shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with its inward vision.
Many will make believe otherwise, but I would rather not make believe