DON'T TURN AUTHOR.

Press, Volume LII, Issue 9182, 13 August 1895, Page 6

DON'T TURN AUTHOR.

» Mi* W&Uer Besant has too often been represented as urging all and sundry to rush into literature for a livelihood, with the assurance that there were millions in it. Mr Besant's authentic view ot the profession of letters is something very different. Hi* sdvics to a young man, ho says, would be;: "Do not attempt to live by literature. Earn a livelihood some other way. Fight Mr Grant; Allen, if necessary, for his pitch and his broom. At all cost—at any costbe independent of your literary work. There is hardly any kind of work which does not allow a man time for as much literary work and study a» is good for him. Look at the men who hare been journalists, Civil servants, medical men, lawyers — anything. Ba independent." Mr Besant does not apeak of (hat he does not know. There U one thing ia his own experience, he tells us, on which he looks back with great eatitfaction. It in that he was able to resist the very great temptation to live by writing till such time—about eight years ago—when he thought himself justified in doing bo. He then, and not till then, resigned a post which had for twenty years taken the cream of the day and given him a certain independence. Mr Besanb's advice is identical with that of illustrious predecessors—with Charles Lamb 3, for instance, and Walter Scott's. Lamb complained to Bernard Barton that, like himself, he was a prisoner to the desk. "I have been chained to that galley thirty five years—a long •hot. I have almost grown to the wood." He was very tired of clerking it, be said, but had no remedy, let wh'en Barton proposed to give up his situation, to depend upon poetry, for a subsistence, Lamb explained in horror,"Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you! 1! Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash, headlong upon iron spikes. It yon had but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and lire a century in them rather than turn slave to the booksellers. I have known many authors for bread: some.repining, others envying the blessed security of the count-ing-house, all agreeing they would rather have been tailors, weavers—what not— rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse." •'Keep to your bank," he goes on, "and the'bank will keep you. Trust not to the public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy personage cares. I .bless every star that Providence, not, seeing gooi to make mc independent, has seen it nest good to settle mc upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B. 8., in the banking office. What I is there not from sis to eleven p.m. six days in week, and ia there not all Sunday ? Fie, what a superfluity ot man's time, if you could think aol—enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. Oh, the corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts that disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber of a desk that makes mc live. A little grumbling Is a wholesome medicine for the spleen; but in my inner heart do I approve and embrace this oar close bat unbar&saing wftyoflife."