WHY BE AN AUTHOR?
“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Ecclesiastes xii., 12.
The connecting of the making of books with study is an old world idea that it is difficult for a latter-day reader to understand. A modern world recognises that book-making in all its branches is a natural pursuit for those of the unemployed who honestly strive to live by their wits. But if the making of books was allowed to be a national nuisance in the days of Solomon, much more must it be so to-day, when books are fast ceasing to be saleable, and have to be given away with out-of-date or up-to-date newspapers, pounds of tea, and other doubtful merchandise.
If, therefore, the supply of authors could be mitigated, much of this long-standing trouble might be abated; and it becomes a reasonable thing for a citizen—especially one who has himself been guilty of some of the minor literary misdemeanours—to inquire why authors become authors, instead of following some useful trade, and what human motive it is that drives people to authorship. I do not pretend that I have found the answer to the question, “Why be an Author?” If I had I should have solved one of the riddles of the universe. But I can, perhaps, set forth a few suggestions upon the lines of which future scientists will be able to pursue the problem to its ultimate solution.
To make a rough attempt at the classification of the common motives of authorship is a bold thing to do. Experimentally I should set down—“in the order of going in,” to use a cricket phrase—the four following, namely:—
(1) Vanity, or conceit.
(2) Greed.
(3) The fun of the thing,
and
(4) Having a message to deliver.
And first of vanity or conceit. How easy this is to diagnose in the literary works of others; how impossible to admit, even for a moment, that it is at all a permissible suggestion about the motive of our own work. And yet if one will be honest with oneself, what is there in life that ministers to the delightful pleasure of vanity so thoroughly and satisfactorily as the sight of one’s first printed production. I remember well the first book I ever published. It was, curiously enough, a Life of Queen Elizabeth, a subject I returned to in later years. It was not a large book—but then at the time I published it I was not a large person, being only nine years old, and the physical act of writing was burdensome to me; spelling also had more difficulties about it than perhaps it has to-day. No, it was not a large volume: to be exact it contained two pages demi octavo of rather large print. It was not however, intended to be printed in book form at all. It was rather a first effort at journalism, and was written for the pages of an excellent periodical called Little Folks, which had offered a prize for the best life of the Maiden Queen. The prize, no doubt, was, as these things often are, carelessly adjudged to some budding author, who has probably never been heard of since. Anyhow, I did not get it, and my MS. was returned,—you send a stamped envelope if you want it returned, never forget that—mine was returned “highly commended.” That Editor has saved himself a lot of nasty abuse from literary historians of the next century by those two words, “highly commended.” He made a mistake, no doubt, about the prize; but I, who have had to give many hundred decisions in my later years—not perhaps verdicts of such moment, but concerning smaller matters, where right decision is equally advisable—know the difficulties of coming to a true result, and have long ago readily forgiven him. Doubtless the poor fellow did his best, and if he is still alive—more power to his elbow, if he has gone
Where the Rudyards cease from Kipling,
And the Haggards ride no more
then—peace to his ashes.
The world was not however to lose this masterpiece. I remember showing it to my father when it came back in its stamped envelope, and he put it in his pocket, gravely expressing a desire to read it. I am not sure that he did read it, but he had it printed—at Guildford, I believe, when he was away on circuit.
I remember him placing the parcel in my hands on his return and my delight in opening it, and my wild surprise at the discovery of the contents, and the awed silence that came over my soul when I saw the print on the pages and knew I was an author. I can hear my father’s good-natured laugh over the affair, and my mother’s insistence on my autograph on the front page “with the author’s compliments.” I spelt compliment with an “e.” It is absurd having two ways of spelling one word. Afterwards I have a dim remembrance of walking about on air for a few days, and finding it difficult to sit on chairs for any length of time, and quite impossible to learn lessons. All my spare time was taken up by reading the great work in solitary corners, and marvelling at the beauty of the language and the respectability of the spelling. When I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens I shrank from the gaze of the populace, much as a real grown-up author might do, who had lived at the Isle of Man or Stratford-on-Avon. After a time I became normal again, but the mischief was done: I had, in the seventeenth century phrase, “commenced author.”
Looking back at the matter from the cold, grey standpoint of a grandfather, there is this to be said for my first book. It is out of print. It is so rare that I doubt if an American millionaire could buy one. The last copies of it that I saw fell out of an old desk many years ago, and were made into paper boats by my children. Luckily I have plenty more materials for paper boats for the next generation when they shall need them.
I have written down this little experience because, to my mind, it is perhaps the one certain instance I can testify to, of a book being written wholly and entirely from motives of vanity or conceit. The prize did not attract me in the least; it was, I believe, a book of religious tendency. There was no greed about the matter. I did not do it for the love of the thing, for in those days I spent my spare time in carpentering and producing pantomime in a toy theatre. As for any sense of having a message to deliver that was absurd, because I copied the bulk of it out of Little Arthur’s History of England, carefully paraphrasing the language to hide from the over-curious the source of my authorities. There is no doubt that this book was written and produced solely by the author’s—and perhaps his parents’—strong sense of vanity and conceit. I can speak about the author impersonally to-day for he seems to me such an entirely different person from myself.
I have asked many living writers whether they have ever knowingly written anything purely from motives of vanity and conceit. They all answer me in a pained and haughty negative. For myself, I rather glory in it. It is good to have done something that nobody else has achieved. It is a big thing to have written at least one book that does not lie on the shelves of the British Museum, a book the original edition of which no gold can buy, a book that has given, to one reader at least, moments of more thrilling joy than any book that was ever printed.
But although we may accept the statements of living authors, that they never feel moved to authorship by vanity, yet if we look at the records of those who are gone we shall find schools of literature whose mainspring has been conceit. Of such are the French Philosophes of the reign of Louis XV. of whom Carlyle writes: “They invented simply nothing: not one of man’s powers, is due to them; in all these respects the age of Louis XV. is among the most barren of recorded ages. Indeed, the whole trade of our Philosophes was directly the opposite of invention: it was not to produce that they stood there, but to criticise, to quarrel with, to rend in pieces, what has been already produced;—a quite inferior trade: sometimes a useful, but on the whole a mean trade; often the fruit, and always the parent of meanness in every mind that permanently follows it.”
And indeed in all critics there must be a marrow of conceit stiffening the backbone. Else how could they—who fell out of the ranks footsore on the march to battle—come along so complacently when the fight is over, to talk to the soldiers covered with the grime and sweat of their work, and tell them how easily it might all have been done without soiling the pipeclay.
All critics however do not write merely from this motive. There are many of course writing from the far higher motive of greed. Then there are some few who do it for the rare fun of the thing—to enjoy the intense annoyance it gives to foolish, sensitive artists—these are the mud flingers and corner boys of the trade, and of course a few critics have lived who played the game and knew it and brought a message of heaven-sent sympathy to the artist. Maybe such a one exists to-day, in some corner behind the clouds, struggling to let his rays shine encouragement on honest endeavour.
But apart from the writings of critics vanity and conceit have always been strong motives of authors. They are found especially in schools of literature, where the form is preferred to the substance. Take our eighteenth century writers and read the story of their lives. Can it be denied that they were a vain crowd? Even Swift, Pope and Addison—the greatest of them—were not without it. As for the smaller fry, with their degrading squabbles and jealousies—their very faces seem to me pitted with the small-pox of conceit. And throughout this period you have one symptom;—the writer exalting the letter above the spirit,—and when you find that, it is invariably the indication of disease, and the disease is vanity.
This is not only the case in writing. It is so in nearly all pursuits. When you begin to believe in technical excellence of form as an end in itself, it is necessary to become to some extent narrow, vain and conceited or you will not achieve your end. In those arts in which form is more essential to the art than substance, vanity and conceit are more commonly found. Thus actors, singers, dancers, and schoolmasters are often not without vanity. You may notice, too, that the minor technical pursuits of life produce a certain conceit. It is occasionally observable in the semi-professional lawn-tennis amateur. In a lesser degree too by many golfers the same vice is sometimes displayed, but more often in the club-house and on the first tee than during the progress of the game. When a man is deeply bunkered style becomes a secondary consideration.
But generally speaking all writers who think literature an affair of quantities, metres, syntax and grammatical gymnastics, all men who reverence literary form rather than practical substance, are bound to write in a spirit of vanity and conceit, which is the only petrol that can push them along the weary road they have chosen. It oppresses you to-day to find this spirit in nearly all the great writers of the eighteenth century. How Oliver Goldsmith stands out amongst them as the one great writer with a human heart; how we readers of to-day love him and reverence him with an enthusiasm we cannot offer to Addison himself.
But enough of conceit and vanity, let us turn to our second motive—a far pleasanter and more everyday affair—greed. I should put Shakespeare among the first and greatest whose motive was greed. I cannot imagine anyone taking the trouble to write a play from any other motive, certainly not from a lower motive. Shakespeare’s main desire in life, if we may trust his biographers, was to become a landowner in Warwickshire—possibly a county magistrate. What an ideal chairman he would have made of a licensing bench. Would Mistress Quickly’s license have been renewed? I doubt it. Shakespeare wrote plays for the contemporary box office to make money out of them and thrive. As Mr. Sidney Lee tells us he “stood rigorously by his rights in all business relations.” There being in those days no law of copyright he borrowed all he could from common stock, added to it the wonderful flavouring of his own personality and served up the immortal dramatic soup which nourishes us to-day. After this fashion of borrowing, if Emerson be right, the Lord’s Prayer was made. The single phrases of which it is composed were, he says, all in use at the time of our Lord in the rabbinical forms. “He picked out the grains of gold.” It is the same if you think of it with Æsop’s fables, the Iliad and the Arabian Nights, which no single author produced. And so must all great work be done, for we are nothing of ourselves and if we do not take freely of those who are gone before we can do naught. But only those have the right to borrow who can embroider some new and glorious pattern on the homely stuff they appropriate. Shakespeare had no vanity and conceit; no doubt he wrote for the fun of the thing, as all writers who are worth their salt must do, possibly—though I for one doubt it—he knew of the message he was delivering to the world; but that he wrote his plays primarily for greed, the few records of his life that we possess seem to me to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Unless, of course, you are mad enough to believe Bacon wrote the plays. Then indeed the motive power of the author was greed—greed of a baser sort than Shakespeare’s—for the great Lord Chancellor never did anything that I know of, except a few trivial scientific experiments, from any other motive.
But when I speak of Shakespeare and greed, I speak as a modern and not as an Elizabethan. Greed in Shakespeare’s day meant the greed of filthy lucre, the insatiate greediness of evil desires. It was an insanitary word in those days. But greed to-day means something quite otherwise. When I speak of greed as the main motive of authorship I use the word, not with any old-fashioned dictionary meaning, but in an up-to-date, clear-sighted, clarion, socialist sense. You speak to-day—those of you who are in the movement—of the greed of the capitalist, the greed of the employer. In this way I speak of the greed of the author. The greed of anyone to-day is the greed which urges him to endeavour to enrich himself and provide for himself and his family by using his brains in producing things. Incidentally he may employ a vast number of people with less brains or no brains, incidentally he may ruin himself after he has used his brains, and paid a large number of people in publishing the result of his brain-work; but do not let us in an age of socialism gainsay that it is pure greed to use your brains for the purpose of putting money into your own pocket. It is true this kind of greed led to Columbus discovering America—but if he had not done so how many fewer capitalists there would have been. Sir Walter Raleigh, too, was a bad instance of a man moved by greed; we cannot acquit Drake, or the great Lord Burghley or even my own historical heroine the Maiden Queen herself. The greed of Elizabethan England is a thing to shudder at, if you are a real socialist, and Shakespeare, I fear, must be found guilty from a modern standpoint of having written his plays from the simple motive power of greed.
I am the more certain of this for the only Shakespearean play of modern times “What the Butler Saw,” was written, I am ashamed to say, from similar motives. I happen to know that this is a play after Shakespeare’s own heart. I learned it in a vision. I am not a believer in dreams myself, but there must be something in some of them, and mine is worthy of the consideration of the Psychical Research Society. It was after the first night of the Butler in London, and after a somewhat prolonged and interesting supper with some of those responsible for the production,—in psychical research supper should always be confessed to,—that I had a curious dream of the people who were present at the theatre. Many who appeared had actually been present, others had not. Milton and Oliver Cromwell, both came up to me and hoped it would not have a long run—Wordsworth, I remember, wanted to know what the Butler really did see, and Charles Lamb, winking at me, took him away to tell him. It was then that Shakespeare came and patted me lightly on the shoulder, saying “It’s all right, my young friend”—young of course from Shakespeare’s point of view—“I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
Many will wonder why this story has not long before this gone the round of the press. The answer is that I am not a business man. I once mentioned the dream to a spiritualist, who said that there was no evidence that it was the shade of Shakespeare—it might have been the astral body of one of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man. I replied that then we should have heard of it long ago.
As an instance of dramatic justice it is interesting to know that the production of this play costs its authors money. Incidentally it made money for others, actors, actresses, scene-shifters, proprietors of theatres, dramatic critics and the like, to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds. Some day when I publish the play, as I hope to do, I will set out in detail its financial side, which is quite as amusing as the play itself. But the main point, which from a socialist point of view is so entirely satisfactory, is that the brain-workers who wrote it, and the capitalist who produced it lost over it; but that it provided work and bread and cheese for a large number of people who might otherwise have filled the ranks of the unemployed. It is a fitting termination to the work of an author whose motive power is greed. The only fear is that if this were always to happen, there might come a time when there would be a shortage of authors ready to supply food and wages for others at a cost to themselves. Personally, I do not think this is all likely to occur, for authors seem to me a class of persons who will always be actuated by vanity, and a greed of so unintelligent and unbusinesslike a character that they will go on writing for others, rather than themselves to the end of time. I in no way regret the results of “What the Butler Saw.” I fear my greed is of a very poor commercial standard. I had plenty of fun for my money. It is something to have written a masterpiece, and it is something better to have seen it beautifully acted. I am very poor at taking the amusements of life seriously, and even when playing golf I often find myself looking at the scenery instead of at the ball. Indeed, I am not sure that I did write “What the Butler Saw,” from any really high sense of greed, and that may account for its having turned on me and bitten me financially. I have more than a half belief that I wrote it for the fun of the thing.
And this brings me to my third motive of authorship, writing for the fun of the things. All the best writing in the world—short of the very highest and most sacred work—is done for the fun of the thing. Some people prefer the phrase the love of the thing, and say it is the love of the beautiful, or the love of mischief, or the love of romance that moves them to writing. But I prefer to call it writing for the fun of the thing, because that describes to me exactly what I mean. All games should be played in this spirit, and writing is a far less serious game with most of us than games like bridge or chess or golf or cricket.
Charles Marriott—not the national novelist of our high seas, but Marriott the modern—who has a gracious gift of hinting great ideas in simple phrases and never shouts them at you, so that if you are a deaf reader you do not always get the best out of him—Marriott says in “The Remnant”: “Quite in the beginning, when men went out to kill their enemies or their dinner, there was always one man who wanted to stay, at home and talk to the women, and make rhymes and scratch pictures on bones.” There are two great truths in this. One is that the first author was an artist. He scratched pictures on bones long before he made rhymes. Of course he did it for the fun of the thing. There could be no other reason, the motives of vanity and greed were not open to him. There was no publisher in the cave-dwellers’ days to seize his bones, and pay him a royalty on them, and build a big cave for himself out of the proceeds of the speculation, whilst the bone-scratcher slept in the open. I think a cave-artist had a good time. He enjoyed his life in his own way, and I believe got better food for his work than many an artist of to-day. But modern artists have forgotten the great truth that to paint well you must paint for the fun of the thing, as the cave-man scratched his bones, and as children draw to-day if you give them paper and pencil, and don’t look on and worry them. Few artists now paint for the fun of the thing without vanity or greed, but when they do they sometimes find an echo in the shape of a patron as mad as themselves, who buys pictures for the fun of the thing, and not because the critics tell him that this or that is good. The recent McCullough collection at Burlington House was worth showing despite the sneers of the superior persons, because it was an honest collection of what one man had really liked. What annoyed the critics was that a man had bought the pictures because he loved them, and not because he had been told he ought to love them.
And then there is another great truth in what Marriott says. The cave-artist stayed at home to make rhymes and pictures for the women whilst the men went out to get the dinner. How few writers remember that the real judges of literature are and must be the women of the country. Women necessarily fill the churches and lecture halls, and the lending libraries, and the theatres, and the picture galleries—only in music halls do men predominate. It is for women primarily that all literature and art are made to-day, just as they were in the cave-dweller’s time. To follow out this interesting theme and account scientifically for the phenomenon would take a longer essay than this. Moreover, one would run up against the problem of the women who want to vote and many other dangerous questions. The cave-dwellers really knew all about it. The men went out to get the dinner in those days merely because there were no shops in Cave Street—but the researches of all professors show that even in those days the women ordered the dinner. And the voice that orders the dinner, and the hand that rocks the cradle will always rule the world.
If you want to test the value of writing for the fun of the thing in relation to the work produced take the case of Southey. Southey was, among the many mansions of literature of his day, the most eligible mansion of all. He was a most erudite and superior literary man. But though what he wrote was important and well paid for when he wrote it, to-day the world has no use for it. But once in a way Southey wrote a story for the fun of the thing and it will live for ever. I refer of course to “The Three Bears.” Southey, strange to say, wrote that wonderful story. He invented the immortal three, the Great Huge Bear with his great rough gruff voice, and the Middle Bear with his middle voice, and the Little Small Wee Bear with his little small wee voice. And such a work of genius is it that already it is stolen and altered and the name of the author is almost unknown. And just because he wrote it for the fun of the thing it will go on living as long as there are children in the world to tell it to. Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, Dumas’ three musketeers, may vanish into oblivion, but the three bears will be a folk-lore story when the affairs of this century are a prehistoric myth.
Remember too, Southey’s companion, Wordsworth, the “respectable poet” as De Quincey unkindly called him. Did he ever write anything for the fun of the thing? Had he any fun in him to write with? Wordsworth serves his purpose to-day, no doubt. He is there for professors of English literature to profess. He is there for serious-minded uncles to present as a birthday gift, in one volume bound in whole morocco, floral back and sides, gilt roll, gilt edges, price sixteen shillings and sixpence, to sedate nieces. But do the sedate nieces read his poetry? As Sam Weller says: “I don’t think.” Coleridge again, when you set aside the few poems that he did write for the fun of the thing, presents the somewhat mournful spectacle of a literary man spending a literary life doing literary work. You read of him starting this periodical and that periodical, roaming about England in search of subscribers under the impression that he had a message to deliver; when, sad to say, all the while he was ringing his bell and shouting “Pies to sell” the tray on his head was empty of any useful food for mankind.
Compare these great names with that of their humble companion, Charles Lamb. He never wrote an essay or a letter except for the fun of the thing. He had to go down to an office day by day and do his task. He might have kept pigeons or done a little gardening or played billiards, but he preferred to read books and to go to plays and write about things he loved. Not that his hobby was in its nature a higher thing to him than another man’s, but it was his naturally, and he simply wrote because he enjoyed writing, in the same way that he drank because he enjoyed drinking. And what is the result? Southey has departed into the shadows, when you take Wordsworth off the young lady’s shelves you have to blow the dust off the top of the volume, and Coleridge is only to be found in school poetry books which are carefully compiled by economic editors of poems which are non-copyright. But Charles Lamb has more friends and lovers to-day than he had in his own lifetime. He wrote for the fun of the thing and the fun remains with us to-day, bounteous and joyful, bubbling over with humour and delight, and overflowing with affection and respect for everything that is best in human nature.
And perhaps part of what I mean by writing for the fun of the thing is to be found in a phrase that used to be uttered about writings that they “touch your heart.” It is a curious old-fashioned phrase. It would be interesting to enquire what it is that keeps a book alive through after-generations. I think that this capacity of “touching the heart” has much to do with it. Shakespeare, Dickens and Goldsmith had this quality; so in a different way had Izaak Walton and Samuel Pepys. It may be that this magic power is the salt that keeps a man’s writings sweet among the varied temperatures of thought through which they survive. Qualities of brain and intellect vary century by century, but what we call the heart of man is the same to-day as it was when King David wrote his psalms. Therefore, unless our writings appeal to the heart it is impossible for them to attain everlasting life. Much of the literature of to-day is, I fear, as Touchstone says—“damned like an ill-roasted egg all on one side.” For the fashion of the hour is to despise the heart and to sneer at the simple folk whose hearts still beat in harmony with the silly domestic notions of love and honour and charity and family life. To-day who would be a writer must write for the brains and intellects of the learned—meaning by the learned those who have passed sufficient examinations to render it unnecessary they should ever think for themselves again. And even this is outdone by the new school who pride themselves that the brain is as old-fashioned an audience for the author as the heart, that the proper portion in the twentieth century is the liver. If a book stirs the bile of all decent people it is to-day a popular success. So unintelligent a view do some take of the movement that they try to throw opprobrium upon it by the use of the epithet “yellow” as in the phrase “Yellow Press”: whereas, yellow among the inner brotherhood is the holy colour as typical of the movement as it is of jaundice itself. Personally, I should like to send many of our great novelists and playwrights of to-day to Harrogate for the season. I believe that a course of ten ounce doses of the “strong sulphur,” at that charming watering place would diminish the risk for them of a far longer course of far stronger sulphur in the hereafter. Their writings may have a vogue for a time and after all their position in literature will not be decided by anything I say, or anything their friendly and scholarly critics say, except in so far as we are atoms of the general mob of mankind whose taste is final. For as Newman said: “Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only right judge.”
But before I deal with the last motive of authorship which I suggest, let me say a few words about an entirely different answer to the question I am putting “Why be an Author?” There are wise men who declare that a man is an author from pre-destination; because he cannot help himself, because he is built that way. In other words that to be an author is a habit like drink or gambling. I can see that if this theory gains ground, libraries are going to have a rough time of it in the future. No doubt there are people—like myself—who waste a great deal of time in reading and writing which might be better used by digging in the garden, or cleaning the boots. As education proceeds upon the lines of to-day this bad habit will grow more popular. Young folk will take to spending their evenings, and even their Sundays, in libraries and meeting together over books as they do over football. Older folks will imbibe books much as they imbibe beer. Respectable employers of labour will see the danger of it—indeed, many of them to-day are clamouring against plays and fiction and other literary products as evil in themselves. They will, I think, rightly begin by persuasion. They will form Blue Ribbon Societies and a United Kingdom Alliance for the total suppression of the Book Trade. Then will come, in the natural order of things, a Licensing Bench to license libraries. On this no magistrate will sit who has ever written a book, or been connected with the publishing trade, but magistrates who are total abstainers from reading and writing will properly form a majority of the tribunal. And in the city of Manchester, which is a city of Libraries, which library will they close first? I should say the Ryland’s Library. For there is a seductive beauty about its surroundings, and the books it gives you to drink are of such wondrous flavour and served in such rare goblets, that to the poor erring man, who like myself is not a teetotaler among books, the temptation to leave his worldly duties and forget his tasks among its luxurious pleasures, is one that wise magistrates will not permit. Then, too, the landlord—I mean the librarian—is such a kind-hearted fellow. Always ready to give you another—and nothing to pay. Charles Lamb would never have got to the East India Office if the Ryland’s Library had been in his path. For my part I always used to approach my County Court in Quay Street from the other side, saying to myself as I crossed Deansgate, “Lead us not into temptation.”
Do not think that this idea of a future licensing authority for literature is by any means a fanciful one. We have seen a Yorkshire town council turning Fielding’s works out of a free library to their own eternal disgrace, and a Library Committee in Manchester boycotting Mr. Wells. Already Town Councils decide what sort of plays we may go and see, and what sort of dances are good for us, and absolutely settle for us what we are to drink in between the acts, putting all the whisky on one side of the street and all the soda on the other. When, therefore, the town council mind wakes up to the fact that from a respectable employer of labour point of view the author habit is as dangerous a habit as the drink habit, the licensing system will most certainly extend. And I feel sure when things progress and authors themselves are made to take out licenses I shall run a serious risk—unless I mend my ways—of having my license endorsed.
But for my own part, I do not believe in an author habit any more than I greatly believe in a drink habit. Given sanity I believe a man can keep off authorship if he tries. I never seriously tried, but I think I could stop, if I wished to, even now. And there would be a danger in any system of state or municipal control of authors that you might hinder or prevent the author who has a message to deliver. Surely there are enough amateur censors to bully and destroy the man with a message without setting the Town Council at him. And the man with a message after all is the only man who can plead justification to the indictment “Why be an Author?”
Of course there are messages and messages; purely business and temporary messages, and heaven-sent messages of eternal import to mankind. Of temporary messages, sermons, and scientific treatises should be published by telegraph, lest the message become stale news before it reaches its destination. All books written by craftsmen and schoolmen to impart knowledge are instances of books written by people who have messages to deliver. Lamb calls some of them biblia a biblia—books that are no books. In a sense he is right, the more so because this class of book is generally written by an author, wholly unable to explain the very limited message he sets out to deliver. Reading a text-book is too often like listening to a stutterer over the telephone. You know that he knows what he has to say, but he can’t get it over the wires to your receiver. Some literary gift is required even to write a school book. One must have knowledge, power of arrangement, and the gift of imparting knowledge to the ignorant. This last quality depends, I believe, in a great measure on the capacity in the writer to conceive the depth of ignorance in his probable readers.
He must have the rare faculty of putting himself in the students’ place. I do not myself remember a single good school book—but that may be due to my youthful inattention, rather than any critical insight in early life. On the other hand, I can name three books which I regard as models of the kind of message-literature I am speaking about; books that told me clearly and admirably everything I wanted to know about the subjects they dealt with. These books are, Dr. Abbott’s “How to write clearly,” Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s “Law of Evidence,” and Mr. H. Paton’s “Etching Drypoint and Mezzotint.” The last book I regard as a model of what a practical treatise on a craft should be. Although himself an etcher of experience and great ability, he is able to follow the mind of the ignorant and its possible questions, so accurately, that he provides answers to the questions that arise from time to time in the mind of the duffer bent on making an etching on a copper plate. I have never seen the process done, but with the aid of this book I have made many etchings—and what I have done other duffers can do. I do not say these etchings of mine are masterpieces, but I do say that the book so delivers its message that the most ignorant may hear and understand. Mr. Justice Stephen’s book on Evidence is a most wonderful piece of codification. The English Law of Evidence has about as near relation to the real facts of life as the rules of the game of Poker. It is one of those things that must be learned more or less by heart, there is no sense or principle in it. Until Mr Justice Stephen published his book the law was a chaos of undigested decisions; since the publication it has been as orderly a science as a game of chess. It has still no reality about it, but the moves and gambits and openings are analysed and can be learned. As to Dr. Abbott’s “How to write clearly,” let no one think evil of the work on account of anything I have written, any more than Mr. Paton’s volume should be judged by the artistic quality of my etchings.
As to the greater messages of life which we have had delivered to us by the hands of the great authors, these are as I have suggested, the real answer to the question, “Why be an Author?” The writings of men like S. Paul and the author of the Book of Job and S. Augustine, and in our own day, of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, all seem to me to have been written in reply to some such command as was given to S. Paul himself to whom it was said: “Arise and go into the City and it shall be told thee what thou must do.” The writer who has a message to deliver is generally told what it is and he never, I think, fails to deliver it. He does not need motives of vanity or greed—nor is there any question of writing for the fun of the thing—he is told by some force beyond and outside him what he must do, and he does. He is a happy messenger boy sent on his errand by the Great Postmaster, whose messages he delivers.
There are many names we all instinctively remember of writers who seem to have had messages to deliver to ourselves, and whose messages we have received with thankfulness, and I trust, humility. It is wonderful sometimes to remember how these messengers have been upheld in their service through dangers and difficulty, and protected against the hatred, malice and uncharitableness of the official ecclesiastical post-boys who claim a monopoly of all moral letter carrying. Take as an instance the author of the Book of Job. It has always been a marvel to me how he ran his message through the cordon of the infidelity and ignorance by which the holy places of his time were surrounded, and landed his book safely and soundly into the centre of the literature of the world. I suppose the creed of the author of the Book of Job was, as Froude puts it, “that the sun shines alike on good and evil, and that the victims of a fallen tower are not greater offenders than their neighbours.” That was a new message then, and very few believe it in their hearts now. Most of us have a secret notion that riches are the right reward of goodness, and poverty the appropriate punishment of evil. It must have required a stout heart to pen that message when the Book of Job was written, and a fearless heart to face the publication of it among the orthodox literature of the time.
I do not know if attention has ever been drawn to the point, but the author of the Book of Job has always settled for me the literary righteousness of the happy ending. Job, you know—as every hero of every story-book ought to—lives happily ever afterwards. The Lord gave him twice as much as he had before, his friends each gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold, and he finished up with fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand she-asses, not to mention seven sons and three daughters—“So Job died, being old and full of days.”
Now-a-days, when every story we read or play we see is deliberately formed to leave us more unhappy than it found us, is it not pleasant to those, who like myself do not believe in the dismal Jemmy school of writers, to remember that the author of the Book of Job “went solid” for the happy ending? I have no doubt the dramatic critic of the Babylon Guardian “went solid” for him, and called him a low down, despicable person—but the critics, if any, have disappeared—the author, too, has disappeared—only his message remains, and will always remain until it is no longer necessary to us. And one reason that it remains is, because he was a big enough author to know that if you write for mankind you must not despise mankind, you must not sneer in your hearts at the very people you are writing for, but you must write for them in a spirit of love and affection, and respect, even to the respecting of their little weaknesses, and you must remember that one of the weaknesses of mankind—if it be a weakness—is the child-like love of a story which begins with “Once upon a time,” and ends with everyone living happily ever afterwards.
I have not answered the question, “Why be an author?” because as I said in the beginning I do not know the answer. In so far as there is an answer, it is given, I think, in the words of the prophet, Thomas Carlyle. He is reassuring himself that the work of a writer is after all as real and sensible and practical a work as that of any smith or carpenter. “Hast thou not a Brain?” he says to himself, “furnished with some glimmerings of light; and three fingers to hold a pen withal? Never since Aaron’s Rod went out of practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool: greater than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. For strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in continual restless flux, it is appointed that Sound to appearance the most fleeting, should be the most continuing of all things. The word is well said to be omnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine, can create as by a Fiat. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee; what God has given thee, what the Devil shall not take away. Higher task than that of Priesthood was allotted to no man: wert thou but the meanest in that sacred Hierarchy, is it not honour enough therein to spend and be spent?”
That, if any, is the answer to the question, “Why be an Author?”