PRESS TO SCRAPBASKET

A recent novel has been advertised as "the book of the hour". First the newspaper, then the magazine, and last the novel, reached the stage where it is printed, read, and discarded, in an hour, figuratively speaking. D'Alembert once said "Write as if you lived for glory; act as if you were indifferent to it". But D'Alembert was old-fashioned. Now fame, "that last infirmity of noble mind", is becoming more and more infirm. The glory of literature is no more. Literature--can it be that literature itself, in the original sense of the word, is no more? The classics of the future--what of them?

Coleridge, it seems, was right after all, when he declared that letters should be an avocation, not a vocation. Those of us who are receiving training in literature are merely being trained for a pleasant avocation; for the author, unless he writes the "book of the hour", cannot make his living by writing. The case is well set forth by Mr. Hergesheimer: the successful novel, excluding best sellers and failures, earns for its author a maximum of $4,000. Few writers, even at their best, are capable of publishing more than one complete novel a year; yet $4,000 is a yearly income even less than that of the college professor. Thus, three feasible courses only are open to the author: to remain poor, to write best sellers, or to marry a rich wife. All three have been tried with varying degrees of success, but none can be said to have resulted in the steady production of future classics.

Writing has become recognized as a profession, with "best seller" and "book of the hour" as its rallying cries. But as to literature--pure literature which makes no compromise with the cheap, the tawdry, the false--literature is still an avocation, and always will be. The kind of writing that inspired Stevenson and Barrie, that makes up the sum of the best in literature, is an avocation in the true sense of the word. All of which is a cause for deep satisfaction that Harvard has as yet shown no symptoms of the vocational mania.