Genius. And am I not to die now?—And what matters the world?
Therefore let me write it: that I was a man of Genius. And that you have trodden me down in the struggle for existence. That I saw things that no other man has ever seen, I would have written things that no other man can ever write. And that you have trodden me down in the struggle for existence—that you have trodden me down because I could not earn my bread!
This is what I tell you—this is what I cry out to you, that the man of Genius can not earn his bread! That the work by which he develops his power is something absolutely and utterly different from the work by which he earns his bread! And that every hour which he gives to the one, he lessens his power and his capacity for the other! Every hour that he gives to the earning of his bread, he takes from his soul, he weakens his work, he destroys beauty which never again can he know or dream!
And this again is what I tell you, this again is what I cry out to you: that the power by which a man of Genius does his work, and the power by which he earns his bread, are things so entirely distinct that they may not occur together at all! The man may have both, but then again he may only have the former.—And in that case he will die like a poisoned rat in a hole.
What is the first principle of the democracy of which we boast, if it be not that excellence, that power, that Genius, is not the attribute of the rich or the noble, but that it may make its appearance anywhere among men? And you who sigh for men of talent to raise American letters—what do you do about it? I will tell you something right now, to begin with; it will startle you, perhaps, and you may not believe it; but I mean to prove it later on. For the present I say this: that of the seven poets who constitute the glory of the literature of England in the nineteenth century, four of them were rich men, five of them were independent, one of them was endowed when he was a youth, and the seventh, the greatest of them all, died like a poisoned rat in a hole.
And what do you do about it? What you do is to lean back in your chair and say: “The literary market was never so wide-awake as it is now, and the publishers never so anxious for new talent”!
Fools! And you think that the publishers are in business for the developing of talent, and for the glory of literature! And that they care about whether a man of Genius dies in the streets, or not! Why, have I not heard them tell me, with their own lips, that “a publisher who published books that the trade did not want would be driven out of business in a year”?