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It is useless to say that a man who writes or paints or carves for something other than money meets a human necessity—a spiritual thirst for beauty, perhaps. There is no spiritual thirst for beauty which cannot be satisfied completely by work done for an adequate and monetary reward. And to satisfy the human longing for the beautiful without requiring a proper price is to demoralize society by showing men that they can have something for nothing.

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Now it is just here that the moral pressure of the great body of readers is felt, a pressure that is constantly misunderstood by the author. So surely as the writer has turned from writing to make money and has taken up writing for art’s sake (whatever that means) or writing for some ethical purpose or writing in the interest of some propaganda, though it be merely the propaganda of his own poor, single intellect—just so surely as he has done this his readers find him out. Whether they then continue to read him or not depends entirely on what they think of his new and unavowed (but patent) motive. Of course readers ought to be stern; having caught their author in a wrong motive they ought to punish him by deserting him instantly. But readers are human; they are even surprisingly selfish at times; they are capable of considering their own enjoyment, and, dreadful to say, they are capable of considering it first. So if, as in the case of Mr. Chambers, they find his new motive friendly and flattering they read him more than ever; on the other hand, if they find the changed purpose disagreeable or tiresome, aiming to uplift them or to shock them unpleasantly or (sometimes) to make fun of them, they quit that author cold. And they hardly ever come back. Usually the author is not perspicacious enough to grasp the cause of the defection; it is amazing how seldom authors think there can be anything wrong with themselves. Usually the abandoned author goes right over and joins a small sect of highbrows and proclaims the deplorable state of his national literature. “The public be damned!” he says in effect, but the public is not damned, it is he that is damned, and the public has done its utmost to save him.