Instead, therefore, of offering to young writers the usual comforting assurance, that, if they produce anything of real merit, it will be sure to succeed, I should caution them first to make their own definition of success, and then act accordingly.  Hawthorne succeeded in his way, and Mr. M.T.  Walworth in his way; and each of these would have been very unreasonable if he had expected to succeed in both ways.  There is always an opening for careful and conscientious literary work; and by such work many persons obtain a modest support.  There are also some great prizes to be won; but these are commonly, though not always, won by work of a more temporary and sensational kind.  Make your choice; and, when you have got precisely what you asked for, do not complain because you have missed what you would not take.

THE CAREER OF LETTERS

A young girl of some talent once told me that she had devoted herself to “the career of letters.”  I found, on inquiry, that she had obtained a situation as writer of society gossip for a New York newspaper.  I can hardly imagine any life that leads more directly away from any really literary career, or any life about which it is harder to give counsel.  The work of a newspaper correspondent, especially in the “society” direction, is so full of trials and temptations, for one of either sex, in our dear, inquisitive, gossiping America, that one cannot help watching with especial solicitude all women who enter it.  Their special gifts as women are a source of danger:  they are keener of observation from the very fact of their sex, more active in curiosity, more skilful in achieving their ends; in a world of gossip they are the queens, and men but their subjects, hence their greater danger.

In Newport, New York, Washington, it is the same thing.  The unbounded appetite for private information about public or semi-public people creates its own purveyors; and these, again, learn to believe with unflinching heartiness in the work they do.  I have rarely encountered a successful correspondent of this description who had not become thoroughly convinced that the highest desire of every human being is to see his name in print, no matter how.  Unhappily, there is a great deal to encourage this belief:  I have known men to express great indignation at an unexpected newspaper-puff, and then to send ten dollars privately to the author.  This is just the calamity of the profession, that it brings one in contact with this class of social hypocrites; and the “personal” correspondent gradually loses faith that there is any other class to be found.  Then there is the perilous temptation to pay off grudges in this way, to revenge slights, by the use of a power with which few people are safely to be trusted.  In many cases, such a correspondent is simply a child playing with poisoned arrows:  he poisons others; and it is no satisfaction to know that in time he may also poison himself, and paralyze his own power for mischief.