was honour enough in the licensers not to allow other publishers 20 to infringe on the privilege granted to the first claimant. In Queen Anne’s time, when the office of licensers was extinguished, a more liberal genius was rising in the nation, and literary property received a more definite and a more powerful protection. A limited term was granted to every author to reap the fruits of his labours; and Lord Hardwicke pronounced this statute “a universal patent for authors.” Yet, subsequently, the subject of literary property involved discussion; even at so late a period as in 1769 it was still to be litigated. It was then granted that originally an author had at common law a property in his work, but that the act of Anne took away all copyright after the expiration of the terms it permitted.
As the matter now stands, let us address an arithmetical age—but my pen hesitates to bring down my subject to an argument fitted to “these coster-monger times.”[16] On the present principle of literary property, it results that an author disposes of a leasehold property of twenty-eight years, often for less than the price of one year’s purchase! How many living authors are the sad witnesses of this fact, who, like so many Esaus, have sold their inheritance for a meal! I leave the whole school of Adam Smith to calm their calculating emotions concerning “that unprosperous race of men” (sometimes this master-seer calls them “unproductive”) “commonly called men of letters,” who are pretty much in the situation which lawyers and physicians would be in, were these, as he tells us, in that state when “a scholar and a beggar seem to have been very nearly synonymous terms”—and this melancholy fact that man of genius discovered, without the feather of his pen brushing away a tear from his lid—without one spontaneous and indignant groan!
Authors may exclaim, “we ask for justice, not charity.” They would not need to require any favour, nor claim any other than that protection which an enlightened government, in its wisdom and its justice, must bestow. They would leave to the public disposition the sole appreciation of their works; their book must make its own fortune; a bad work may be cried up, and a good work may be cried down; 21 but Faction will soon lose its voice, and Truth acquire one. The cause we are pleading is not the calamities of indifferent writers, but of those whose utility or whose genius long survives that limited term which has been so hardly wrenched from the penurious hand of verbal lawyers. Every lover of literature, and every votary of humanity has long felt indignant at that sordid state and all those secret sorrows to which men of the finest genius, or of sublime industry, are reduced and degraded in society. Johnson himself, who rejected that perpetuity of literary property which some enthusiasts seemed to claim at the time the subject was undergoing the discussion of the judges, is, however, for extending the copyright to a century. Could authors secure this, their natural right, literature would acquire a permanent and a nobler reward; for great authors would then be distinguished by the very profits they would receive from that obscure multitude whose common disgraces they frequently participate, notwithstanding the superiority of their own genius. Johnson himself will serve as a proof of the incompetent remuneration of literary property. He undertook and he performed an Herculean labour, which employed him so many years that the price he obtained was exhausted before the work was concluded—the wages did not even last as long as the labour! Where, then, is the author to look forward, when such works are undertaken, for a provision for his family, or for his future existence? It would naturally arise from the work itself, were authors not the most ill-treated and oppressed class of the community. The daughter of Milton need not have craved the alms of the admirers of her father, if the right of authors had been better protected; his own “Paradise Lost” had then been her better portion and her most honourable inheritance. The children of Burns would have required no subscriptions; that annual tribute which the public pay to the genius of their parent was their due, and would have been their fortune.
Authors now submit to have a shorter life than their own celebrity. While the book markets of Europe are supplied with the writings of English authors, and they have a wider diffusion in America than at home, it seems a national ingratitude to limit the existence of works for their authors to a short number of years, and then to seize on their possession for ever.
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THE SUFFERINGS OF AUTHORS.
The natural rights and properties of AUTHORS not having been sufficiently protected, they are defrauded, not indeed of their fame, though they may not always live to witness it, but of their uninterrupted profits, which might save them from their frequent degradation in society. That act of Anne which confers on them some right of property, acknowledges that works of learned men have been carried on “too often to the ruin of them and their families.”
Hence we trace a literary calamity which the public endure in those “Authors by Profession,” who, finding often too late in life that it is the worst profession, are not scrupulous to live by some means or other. “I must live,” cried one of the brotherhood, shrugging his shoulders in his misery, and almost blushing for a libel he had just printed—“I do not see the necessity,” was the dignified reply. Trade was certainly not the origin of authorship. Most of our great authors have written from a more impetuous impulse than that of a mechanic; urged by a loftier motive than that of humouring the popular taste, they have not lowered themselves by writing down to the public, but have raised the public to them. Untasked, they composed at propitious intervals; and feeling, not labour, was in their last, as in their first page.
When we became a reading people, books were to be suited to popular tastes, and then that trade was opened that leads to the workhouse. A new race sprang up, that, like Ascham, “spoke as the common people;” but would not, like Ascham, “think as wise men.” The founders of “Authors by Profession” appear as far back as in the Elizabethan age. Then there were some roguish wits, who, taking advantage of the public humour, and yielding their principle to their pen, lived to write, and wrote to live; loose livers and loose writers!—like Autolycus, they ran to the fair, with baskets of hasty manufactures, fit for clowns and maidens.[17]
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Even then flourished the craft of authorship, and the mysteries of bookselling. Robert Greene, the master-wit, wrote “The Art of Coney-catching,” or Cheatery, in which he was an adept; he died of a surfeit of Rhenish and pickled herrings, at a fatal banquet of authors;—and left as his legacy among the “Authors by Profession” “A Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance.” One died of another kind of surfeit. Another was assassinated in a brothel. But the list of the calamities of all these worthies have as great variety as those of the Seven Champions.[18] Nor were the stationers, or book-venders, as the publishers of books were first designated, at a fault in the mysteries of “coney-catching.” Deceptive and vaunting title-pages were practised to such excess, that Tom Nash, an “Author by Profession,” never fastidiously modest, blushed at the title of his “Pierce Pennilesse,” which the publisher had flourished in the first edition, like “a tedious mountebank.” The booksellers forged great names to recommend their works, and passed off in currency their base metal stamped with a royal head. “It was an usual thing in those days,” says honest Anthony Wood, “to set a great name to a book or books, by the sharking booksellers or snivelling writers, to get bread.”
Such authors as these are unfortunate, before they are criminal; they often tire out their youth before they discover that “Author by Profession” is a denomination ridiculously assumed, for it is none! The first efforts of men of genius are usually honourable ones; but too often they suffer that genius to be debased. Many who would have composed history have turned voluminous party-writers; many a noble satirist has become a hungry libeller. Men who are starved 24 in society, hold to it but loosely. They are the children of Nemesis! they avenge themselves—and with the Satan of Milton they exclaim,
| Evil, be thou my good! |
