ated buyers of fiction in
book-form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not think all
of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they get, I
should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who did
not.

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has
no objective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so
express it. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political
economy, may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing
whatever to another. It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and
worthless to another mood of the same reader. How, then, is it to be
priced, and how is it to be fairly marketed? All people must be fed,
and all people must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so
meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious
necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them. But
there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry to say, for
fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. The sort of fiction
which corresponds to the circus and the variety theatre in the
show-business seems essential to the spiritual health of the masses,
but the most cultivated of the classes can get on, from time to time,
without an artistic novel. This is a great pity, and I should be very
willing that readers might feel something like the pangs of hunger and
cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but apparently they never
do. Their dumb and passive need is apt only to manifest itself
negatively, or in the form of weariness of this author or that. The
publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales
of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of
the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate touch.
Sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself that his
readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for Jones; even then he
cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is by no means safe
in cutting down Smith's price and putting up Jones's. With the best
will in the world to pay justly, he cannot. Smith, who has been boring
his readers to death for a year, may write to-morrow a thing that will
please them so much that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and
Jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something so
uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in the
magazine. The only thing