fly the humorists, for whom women are said nowhere to have any
warm liking, and who have generally with us come up through the
newspapers, and have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers.
They have become literary men, as it were, without the newspapers'
readers knowing it; but those who have approached literature from
another direction, have won fame in it chiefly by grace of the women,
who first read them, and then made their husbands and fathers read
them. Perhaps, then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for
a serious 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
unseemly for an author or two to be making half as much by their pens
as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is used to the
pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at least sees nothing
droll in it; but the paragrapher can always get a smile out of