CHAPTER XVII.
The poverty of literary men.—Poverty, a relative quality.—Of the poverty of literary men in what degree desirable.—Extreme poverty.—Task-work. —Of gratuitous works.—A project to provide against the worst state of poverty among literary men.
Poverty is a state not so fatal to genius, as it is usually conceived to be. We shall find that it has been sometimes voluntarily chosen; and that to connect too closely great fortune with great genius, creates one of those powerful but unhappy alliances, where the one party must necessarily act contrary to the interests of the other.
Poverty is a relative quality, like cold and heat, which are but the increase or the diminution in our own sensations. The positive idea must arise from comparison. There is a state of poverty reserved even for the wealthy man, the instant that he comes in hateful contact with the enormous capitalist. But there is a poverty neither vulgar nor terrifying, asking no favours and on no terms receiving any; a poverty which annihilates its ideal evils, and, becoming even a source of pride, will confer independence, that first step to genius.
Among the continental nations, to accumulate wealth in the spirit of a capitalist does not seem to form the prime object of domestic life. The traffic of money is with them left to the traffickers, their merchants, and their financiers. In our country, the commercial character has so closely interwoven and identified itself with the national one, and its peculiar views have so terminated all our pursuits, that every rank is alike influenced by its spirit, and things are valued by a market-price which naturally admits of no such appraisement. In a country where "The Wealth of Nations" has been fixed as the first principle of political existence, wealth has raised an aristocracy more noble than nobility, more celebrated than genius, more popular than patriotism; but however it may partake at times of a generous nature, it hardly looks beyond its own narrow pale. It is curious to notice that Montesquieu, who was in England, observed, that "If I had been born here, nothing could have consoled me in failing to accumulate a large fortune; but I do not lament the mediocrity of my circumstances in France." The sources of our national wealth have greatly multiplied, and the evil has consequently increased, since the visit of the great philosopher.
The cares of property, the daily concerns of a family, the pressure of such minute disturbers of their studies, have induced some great minds to regret the abolition of those monastic orders, beneath whose undisturbed shade were produced the mighty labours of a MONTFAUCON, a CALMET, a FLOREZ, and the still unfinished volumes of the BENEDICTINES. Often has the literary character, amidst the busied delights of study, sighed "to bid a farewell sweet" to the turbulence of society. It was not discontent, nor any undervaluing of general society, but the pure enthusiasm of the library, which once induced the studious EVELYN to sketch a retreat of this nature, which he addressed to his friend, the illustrious BOYLE. He proposed to form "A college where persons of the same turn of mind might enjoy the pleasure of agreeable society, and at the same time pass their days without care or interruption."[A] This abandonment of their life to their genius has, indeed, often cost them too dear, from the days of SOPHOCLES, who, ardent in his old age, neglected his family affairs, and was brought before his judges by his relations, as one fallen into a second childhood. The aged poet brought but one solitary witness in his favour—an unfinished tragedy; which having read, the judges rose before him, and retorted the charge on his accusers.
[Footnote A: This romantic literary retreat is one of those delightful reveries which the elegant taste of EVELYN abounded with. It may be found at full length in the fifth volume of Boyle's Works, not in the second, as the Biog. Brit. says. His lady was to live among the society. "If I and my wife take up two apartments, for we are to be decently asunder, however I stipulate, and her inclination will greatly suit with it, that shall be no impediment to the society, but a considerable advantage to the economic part," &c.]
A parallel circumstance occurred to the Abbé COTIN, the victim of a rhyme of the satirical Boileau. Studious, and without fortune, Cotin had lived contented till he incurred the unhappiness of inheriting a large estate. Then a world of cares opened on him; his rents were not paid, and his creditors increased. Dragged from his Hebrew and Greek, poor Cotin resolved to make over his entire fortune to one of his heirs, on condition of maintenance. His other relations assuming that a man who parted with his estate in his lifetime must necessarily be deranged, brought the learned Cotin into court. Cotin had nothing to say in his own favour, but requested his judges would allow him to address them from the sermons which he preached. The good sense, the sound reasoning, and the erudition of the preacher were such, that the whole bench unanimously declared that they themselves might be considered as madmen, were they to condemn a man of letters who was desirous of escaping from the incumbrance of a fortune which had only interrupted his studies.
There may then be sufficient motives to induce such a man to make a state of mediocrity his choice. If he lose his happiness, he mutilates his genius. GOLDONI, with all the simplicity of his feelings and habits, in reviewing his life, tells us how he was always relapsing into his old propensity of comic writing; "but the thought of this does not disturb me," says he; "for though in any other situation I might have been in easier circumstances, I should never have been so happy." BAYLE is a parent of the modern literary character; he pursued the same course, and early in life adopted the principle, "Neither to fear bad fortune nor have any ardent desires for good." Acquainted with the passions only as their historian, and living only for literature, he sacrificed to it the two great acquisitions of human pursuits—fortune and a family: but in what country had Bayle not a family and a possession in his fame? HUME and GIBBON had the most perfect conception of the literary character, and they were aware of this important principle in its habits—"My own revenue," said HUME, "will be sufficient for a man of letters, who surely needs less money, both for his entertainment and credit, than other people." GIBBON observed of himself—"Perhaps the golden mediocrity of my fortune has contributed to fortify my application."
The state of poverty, then, desirable in the domestic life of genius, is one in which the cares of property never intrude, and the want of wealth is never perceived. This is not indigence; that state which, however dignified the man of genius himself may be, must inevitably degrade! for the heartless will gibe, and even the compassionate turn aside in contempt. This literary outcast will soon be forsaken even by himself! his own intellect will be clouded over, and his limbs shrink in the palsy of bodily misery and shame—
Malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas
Terribiles visu formæ.
Not that in this history of men of genius we are without illustrious examples of those who have even learnt to want, that they might emancipate their genius from their necessities!
We see ROUSSEAU rushing out of the palace of the financier, selling his watch, copying music by the sheet, and by the mechanical industry of two hours, purchasing ten for genius. We may smile at the enthusiasm of young BARRRY, who finding himself too constant a haunter of taverns, imagined that this expenditure of time was occasioned by having money; and to put an end to the conflict, he threw the little he possessed at once into the Liffey; but let us not forget that BARRY, in the maturity of life, confidently began a labour of years,[A] and one of the noblest inventions in his art—a great poem in a picture—with no other resource than what he found by secret labours through the night, in furnishing the shops with those slight and saleable sketches which secured uninterrupted mornings for his genius. SPINOSA, a name as celebrated, and perhaps as calumniated, as Epicurus, lived in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of pensions, and of presents; which, however disguised by kindness, he would not accept, so fearful was this philosopher of a chain! Lodging in a cottage, and obtaining a livelihood by polishing optical glasses, he declared he had never spent more than he earned, and certainly thought there was such a thing as superfluous earnings. At his death, his small accounts showed how he had subsisted on a few pence a-day, and
Enjoy'd, spare feast! a radish and an egg.
[Footnote A: His series of pictures for the walls of the meeting-room of the Society of Arts in the Adelphi.—ED.]
POUSSIN persisted in refusing a higher price than that affixed to the back of his pictures, at the time he was living without a domestic. The great oriental scholar, ANQUETIL DE PERRON, is a recent example of the literary character carrying his indifference to privations to the very cynicism of poverty; and he seems to exult over his destitution with the same pride as others would expatiate over their possessions. Yet we must not forget, to use the words of Lord Bacon, that "judging that means were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means," DE PERRON refused the offer of thirty thousand livres for his copy of the "Zend-avesta." Writing to some Bramins, he describes his life at Paris to be much like their own. "I subsist on the produce of my literary labours without revenue, establishment, or place. I have no wife nor children; alone, absolutely free, but always the friend of men of probity. In a perpetual war with my senses, I triumph over the attractions of the world or I contemn them."
This ascetic existence is not singular. PARINI, a great modern poet of Italy, whom the Milanese point out to strangers as the glory of their city, lived in the same state of unrepining poverty. Mr. Hobhouse has given us this self-portrait of the poet:—
Me, non nato a percotere
Le dure illustri porte,
Nudo accorra, ma libero
Il regno della morte.
Naked, but free! A life of hard deprivations was long that of the illustrious LINNÆUS. Without fortune, to that great mind it never seemed necessary to acquire any. Perigrinating on foot with a stylus, a magnifying-glass, and a basket for plants, he shared the rustic meal of the peasant. Never was glory obtained at a cheaper rate! exclaims one of his eulogists. Satisfied with the least of the little, he only felt one perpetual want—that of completing his Flors. Not that LINNÆUS was insensible to his situation, for he gave his name to a little flower in Lapland—the Linnæa Borealis, from the fanciful analogy he discovered between its character and his own early fate, "a little northern plant flowering early, depressed, abject, and long overlooked." The want of fortune, however, did not deprive this man of genius of his true glory, nor of that statue raised to him in the gardens of the University of Upsal, nor of that solemn eulogy delivered by a crowned head, nor of those medals which his nation struck to commemorate the genius of the three kingdoms of nature!
This, then, is the race who have often smiled at the light regard of their good neighbours when contrasted with their own celebrity; for in poverty and in solitude such men are not separated from their fame; that is ever proceeding, ever raising a secret, but constant, triumph in their minds.[A]
Yes! Genius, undegraded and unexhausted, may indeed even in a garret glow in its career; but it must be on the principle which induced ROUSSEAU solemnly to renounce writing "par métier." This in the Journal de Sçavans he once attempted, but found himself quite inadequate to "the profession."[B] In a garret, the author of the "Studies of Nature," as he exultingly tells us, arranged his work. "It was in a little garret, in the new street of St. Etienne du Mont, where I resided four years, in the midst of physical and domestic afflictions. But there I enjoyed the most exquisite pleasures of my life, amid profound solitude and an enchanting horizon. There I put the finishing hand to my 'Studies of Nature,' and there I published them." Pope, one day taking his usual walk with Harte in the Haymarket, desired him to enter a little shop, where going up three pair of stairs into a small room, Pope said, "In this garret AUDISON wrote his 'Campaign!'" To the feelings of the poet this garret had become a consecrated spot; Genius seemed more itself, placed in contrast with its miserable locality!
[Footnote A: Spagnoletto, while sign-painting at Rome, attracted by his ability the notice of a cardinal, who ultimately gave him a home in his palace; but the artist, feeling that his poverty was necessary to his industry and independence, fled to Naples, and recommenced a life of labour.—ED.]
[Footnote B: Twice he repeated this resolution. See his Works, vol. xxxi, p. 283; vol. xxxii. p. 90.]
The man of genius wrestling with oppressive fortune, who follows the avocations of an author as a precarious source of existence, should take as the model of the authorial life, that of Dr. JOHNSON. The dignity of the literary character was as deeply associated with his feelings, and the "reverence thyself" as present to his mind, when doomed to be one of the Helots of literature, by Osborn, Cave, and Miller, as when, in the honest triumph of Genius, he repelled a tardy adulation of the lordly Chesterfield. Destitute of this ennobling principle, the author sinks into the tribe of those rabid adventurers of the pen who have masked the degraded form of the literary character under the assumed title of "authors by profession"[A]—the GUTHRIES, the RALPHS, and the AMHURSTS[B]. "There are worse evils for the literary man," says a living author, who himself is the true model of the great literary character, "than neglect, poverty, imprisonment, and death. There are even more pitiable objects than Chatterton himself with the poison at his lips." "I should die with hunger were I at peace with the world!" exclaimed a corsair of literature —and dashed his pen into the black flood before him of soot and gall.
[Footnote A: From an original letter which I have published from GUTHRIE to a minister of state, this modern phrase appears to have been his own invention. The principle unblushingly avowed, required the sanction of a respectable designation. I have preserved it in "Calamities of Authors.">[
[Footnote B: For some account of these men, see "Calamities of Authors.">[
In substituting fortune for the object of his designs, the man of genius deprives himself of those heats of inspiration reserved for him who lives for himself; the mollia tempora fandi of Art. If he be subservient to the public taste, without daring to raise it to his own, the creature of his times has not the choice of his subjects, which choice is itself a sort of invention. A task-worker ceases to think his own thoughts. The stipulated price and time are weighing on his pen or his pencil, while the hour-glass is dropping its hasty sands. If the man of genius would be wealthy and even luxurious, another fever besides the thirst of glory torments him. Such insatiable desires create many fears, and a mind in fear is a mind in slavery. In one of SHAKSPEARE'S sonnets he pathetically laments this compulsion of his necessities which forced him to the trade of pleasing the public; and he illustrates this degradation by a novel image. "Chide Fortune," cries the bard,—
The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds;
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, LIKE THE DYER'S HAND.
Such is the fate of that author, who, in his variety of task-works, blue, yellow, and red, lives without ever having shown his own natural complexion. We hear the eloquent truth from one who has alike shared in the bliss of composition, and the misery of its "daily bread." "A single hour of composition won from the business of the day, is worth more than the whole day's toil of him who works at the trade of literature: in the one case, the spirit comes joyfully to refresh itself, like a hart to the waterbrooks; in the other, it pursues its miserable way, panting and jaded, with the dogs of hunger and necessity behind."[A] We trace the fate of all task-work in the history of POUSSIN, when called on to reside at the French court. Labouring without intermission, sometimes on one thing and sometimes on another, and hurried on in things which required both time and thought, he saw too clearly the fatal tendency of such a life, and exclaimed, with ill-suppressed bitterness, "If I stay long in this country, I shall turn dauber like the rest here." The great artist abruptly returned to Rome to regain the possession of his own thoughts.
[Footnote A: Quarterly Review, vol. viii. p. 538.]
It has been a question with some, more indeed abroad than at home, whether the art of instructing mankind by the press would not be less suspicious in its character, were it less interested in one of its prevalent motives? Some noble self-denials of this kind are recorded. The principle of emolument will produce the industry which furnishes works for popular demand; but it is only the principle of honour which can produce the lasting works of genius. BOILEAU seems to censure Racine for having accepted money for one of his dramas, while he, who was not rich, gave away his polished poems to the public. He seems desirous of raising the art of writing to a more disinterested profession than any other, requiring no fees for the professors. OLIVET presented his elaborate edition of Cicero to the world, requiring no other remuneration than its glory. MILTON did not compose his immortal work for his trivial copyright;[A] and LINNÆUS sold his labours for a single ducat. The Abbé MABLY, the author of many political and moral works, lived on little, and would accept only a few presentation copies from the booksellers. But, since we have become a nation of book-collectors, and since there exists, as Mr. Coleridge describes it, "a reading public," this principle of honour is altered. Wealthy and even noble authors are proud to receive the largest tribute to their genius, because this tribute is the certain evidence of the number who pay it. The property of a book, therefore, represents to the literary candidate the collective force of the thousands of voters on whose favour his claims can only exist. This change in the affairs of the literary republic in our country was felt by GIBBON, who has fixed on "the patronage of booksellers" as the standard of public opinion: "the measure of their liberality," he says, "is the least ambiguous test of our common success." The philosopher accepted it as a substitute for that "friendship or favour of princes, of which he could not boast." The same opinion was held by JOHNSON. Yet, looking on the present state of English literature, the most profuse perhaps in Europe, we cannot refrain from thinking that the "patronage of booksellers" is frequently injurious to the great interests of literature.
[Footnote A: The agreement made with Simmons, the publisher, was 5_l_. down, and 5_l_. more when 1500 copies were sold, the same sum to be paid for the second and third editions, each of the same number of copies. Milton only lived during the publication of two editions, and his widow parted with all her right in the work to the same bookseller for eight pounds. Her autograph receipt was in the possession of the late Dawson Turner.—ED.]
The dealers in enormous speculative purchases are only subservient to the spirit of the times. If they are the purveyors, they are also the panders of public taste; and their vaunted patronage only extends to popular subjects; while their urgent demands are sure to produce hasty manufactures. A precious work on a recondite subject, which may have consumed the life of its author, no bookseller can patronise; and whenever such a work is published, the author has rarely survived the long season of the public's neglect. While popular works, after some few years of celebrity, have at length been discovered not worth the repairs nor the renewal of their lease of fame, the neglected work of a nobler design rises in value and rarity. The literary work which requires the greatest skill and difficulty, and the longest labour, is not commercially valued with that hasty, spurious novelty; for which the taste of the public is craving, from the strength of its disease rather than of its appetite. ROUSSEAU observed, that his musical opera, the work of five or six weeks, brought him as much money as he had received for his "Emile," which had cost him twenty years of meditation, and three years of composition. This single fact represents a hundred. So fallacious are public opinion and the patronage of booksellers!
Such, then, is the inadequate remuneration of a life devoted to literature; and notwithstanding the more general interest excited by its productions within the last century, it has not essentially altered their situation in society; for who is deceived by the trivial exultation of the gay sparkling scribbler who lately assured us that authors now dip their pens in silver ink-standishes, and have a valet for an amanuensis? Fashionable writers must necessarily get out of fashion; it is the inevitable fate of the material and the manufacturer. An eleemosynary fund can provide no permanent relief for the age and sorrows of the unhappy men of science and literature; and an author may even have composed a work which shall be read by the next generation as well as the present, and still be left in a state even of pauperism. These victims perish in silence! No one has attempted to suggest even a palliative for this great evil; and when I asked the greatest genius of our age to propose some relief for this general suffering, a sad and convulsive nod, a shrug that sympathised with the misery of so many brothers, and an avowal that even he could not invent one, was all that genius had to alleviate the forlorn state of the literary character.[A]
[Footnote A: It was the late Sir WALTER SCOTT—if I could assign the date of this conversation, it would throw some light on what might be then passing in his own mind.]
The only man of genius who has thrown out a hint for improving the situation of the literary man is ADAM SMITH. In that passage in his "Wealth of Nations" to which I have already referred, he says, that "Before the invention of the art of printing, the only employment by which a man of letters could make anything by his talents was that of a public or a private teacher, or by communicating to other people the various and useful knowledge which he had acquired himself; and this surely is a more honourable, a more useful, and in general even a more profitable employment than that other of writing for a bookseller, to which the art of printing has given occasion." We see the political economist, alike insensible to the dignity of the literary character, incapable of taking a just view of its glorious avocation. To obviate the personal wants attached to the occupations of an author, he would, more effectually than skilfully, get rid of authorship itself. This is not to restore the limb, but to amputate it. It is not the preservation of existence, but its annihilation. His friends Hume and Robertson must have turned from this page humiliated and indignant. They could have supplied Adam Smith with a truer conception of the literary character, of its independence, its influence, and its glory.
I have projected a plan for the alleviation of the state of these authors who are not blessed with a patrimony. The trade connected with literature is carried on by men who are usually not literate, and the generality of the publishers of books, unlike all other tradesmen, are often the worst judges of their own wares. Were it practicable, as I believe it to be, that authors and men of letters could themselves be booksellers, the public would derive this immediate benefit from the scheme; a deluge of worthless or indifferent books would be turned away, and the name of the literary publisher would be a pledge for the value of every new book. Every literary man would choose his own favourite department, and we should learn from him as well as from his books.
Against this project it may be urged, that literary men are ill adapted to attend to the regular details of trade, and that the great capitalists in the book business have not been men of literature. But this plan is not suggested for accumulating a great fortune, or for the purpose of raising up a new class of tradesmen. It is not designed to make authors wealthy, for that would inevitably extinguish great literary exertion, but only to make them independent, as the best means to preserve exertion. The details of trade are not even to reach him. The poet GESNER, a bookseller, left his librairie to the care of his admirable wife. His own works, the elegant editions which issued from his press, and the value of manuscripts, were the objects of his attention.
On the Continent many of the dealers in books have been literary men. At the memorable expulsion of the French Protestants on the edict of Nantes, their expatriated literary men flew to the shores of England, and the free provinces of Holland; and it was in Holland that this colony of littérateurs established magnificent printing-houses, and furnished Europe with editions of the native writers of France, often preferable to the originals, and even wrote the best works of that time. At that memorable period in our own history, when two thousand nonconformists were ejected on St. Bartholomew's day from the national establishment, the greater part were men of learning, who, deprived of their livings, were destitute of any means of existence. These scholars were compelled to look to some profitable occupation, and for the greater part they fixed on trades connected with literature; some became eminent booksellers, and continued to be voluminous writers, without finding their studies interrupted by; their commercial arrangements. The details of trade must be left to others; the hand of a child can turn a vast machine, and the object here proposed would be lost, if authors sought to become merely booksellers.
Whenever the public of Europe shall witness such a new order of men among their booksellers, they will have less to read, but more to remember. Their opinions will be less fluctuating, and their knowledge will come to them with more maturity. Men of letters will fly to the house of the bookseller who in that class of literature in which he deals, will himself be not the least eminent member.