To what is due this decline amongst us of free intelligence? There are several explanations possible, though none is wholly satisfying. It can be attributed to the industrialisation of our own country, a metamorphosis of occupation which has been longer in being in England than anywhere else. The economic balance between primary and secondary production has been for a longer period lost in this country than elsewhere, with the consequence that we have been the first to exhibit the effects of over-industrialisation in the loss of the free intelligence associated with primary production. The other nations may be expected to follow suit as the same metamorphosis overtakes them. Another explanation is the reaction against the intellectualism of the nineteenth century. It is a familiar topic, but it is obvious that if faith in the ultimate use of intelligence is lost, men become cynical in regard to the passion itself. Let us suppose that every love affair always and invariably ended in disappointment or disaster. Let us suppose that it became the accepted belief that such would always be the case. Would it not soon become fashionable to nip the first stirrings of love in the bud, and to salt its path whenever its shoots began to appear? The nineteenth century reached its climax in a vast disappointment with science, with the intellect, with intellectualism. The fifth act of the thrilling drama inaugurated after the French Revolution closed in utter weariness and ennui. It was no wonder that the twentieth century opened in a return to impulse and in a corresponding reaction from intellectuality. That the reaction has gone too far is the very disease we are now trying to diagnose; for only an excessive reaction towards impulse and away from thought can account for the poverty of free intelligence. Sooner or later, the pendulum must be set free again, if not in this country, then in America, or in some of the countries whose rebirth we are now witnessing. It cannot be the will of God that free intelligence should be extinguished from the planet; the world, somehow or other, must be made safe for intelligence as well as for democracy.
My last guess at the origin of the phenomenon is the decline of the religious spirit. Religion, I conceive, is the study and practice of perfection, and it is summed up in the text: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” This impossible and infinite aim includes, as a matter of course, the employment and development of intelligence as one of the most powerful aids to perfection. Fools, the Indian Scriptures inform us, can enter heaven, but only wise men know how to stay there. And if the perfection we seek is to be lasting and incorruptible, it is certain that an infinite amount of intelligence will be necessary to its accomplishment. The loss of the belief in the perfectibility of the human spirit, in the religious duty of perfection, might easily account for the diminution of our regard for one of the chief instruments of perfection, namely, intelligence. Why should we strive to set the crooked straight, since it is not only impossible, but is no duty of ours? And why labour with the instrumental means when the end is of no value? None of these explanations, however, really satisfies me.
The free Press is more severely criticised by its readers than the “kept” Press by its clientèle. The reason is, no doubt, that in comparison with the “kept” Press it protests its freedom and sets itself up on a pedestal. Every “excuse” is consequently denied to it, and the smallest complaint is enlarged to a grievance. The “kept” Press may be caught in flagrant self-contradiction, in lies, in chicanery of all kinds, in every form of intellectual and other dishonesty—it continues to be read and “followed” as if the oracle were infallible. No newspaper in this country has ever died of exposure; many live by being found out. The free Press, on the other hand, has often for its readers not only the most exigent of critics, but the most contradictory. They are not only hard to please (which is a merit), but their reasons for being pleased, or the reverse, are bewilderingly various. And, moreover, when they are pleased they are usually silent, and when they are displeased they cease to buy the journal.
Literary Copyright in America.—Horace Walpole used to say that the Americans were the only people by whom he would wish to be admired. Let me put the compliment a little differently and say that the Americans are the people among all others whom we would most wish to admire most. Having done so much to command our admiration already, we are not only willing, we are desirous and anxious, that they should leave no amendable fault unamended in themselves. Our command to them is that they should become perfect.
This must be my excuse for joining in the discussion concerning the law of literary copyright in America, and the effect it has on the literary relations of this country and America. I must agree with Mr. Pound that the literary relations of our two countries are bad, and that much of this estrangement, if not all of it, is due to remediable causes lying at present on the American book of statutes. The actual facts of the situation are simple. The copyright laws of America, unlike those of any other civilised country, with the exception of ex-Tsarist Russia, require as a condition of extending the protection of its copyright to any work of foreign publication, that the latter shall be set up, printed, and published in America within a period of thirty to sixty days after its publication in the country of its origin. Failing such practically simultaneous publication in America, not only is an American publisher thereafter entitled to proceed immediately to publish the work in question without the permission of the author, but the author and his national publisher are not entitled to demand any royalties or fees on the sale of the same. In other words, as far as the original author and publisher are concerned, they are non-existent in America unless they have made arrangements for the publication of their work in America within one, or, at most, two months of its original publication in their own country.
Not to exaggerate in describing such a procedure it can be exactly characterised by no other phrase than looting under the form of law. Every author and publisher in this country knows how difficult it is to arrange for the simultaneous publication of works at home and in America. The time-conditions of publication are seldom the same in both countries. A book that is timely in this country may not be simultaneously timely in America, and it would be very odd if it always were.
Again, a couple of months is a small period of time in which to arrange to have an English work dispatched, accepted, set up, printed, and published in America. Commercial difficulties of all kinds arise in the course of the transaction, and every delay brings the day of the accursed shears of the American Copyright Act nearer. Is an English publisher to bargain with the advantage of time always on the side of America, with the certain knowledge that, unless he comes to terms at once, he will lose everything both for himself and his author? But either that or indefinitely delaying publication in this country is his only possible course. The American Copyright Law is thus seen to be a modern example of Morton’s fork. By requiring that the foreign author shall publish his work in America within one or two months of its publication at home, the law compels him to make a choice (in the majority of cases) between forfeiting his copyright in America, and delaying, at his own cost, the publication of his book in his own country. Upon either prong he is impaled. If he elects for American publication he must forgo the chance of the immediate market at home, and if he elects for immediate publication at home he must forgo the protection of American copyright.
Such an ingenious device for Dick-Turpining European authors cannot have been invented and enforced without some presumed moral justification. America cannot be conceived as a willing party to the legislation of literary piracy, and it was and is, no doubt, under some cover of justification that the law was enacted and now runs. The defence for it, I should suppose, is the presumed necessity for protecting the industry of book-making in America on behalf of American authors, printers, and publishers alike. Its defence, in short, is the same defence that is set up for protection in commercial matters in this country, namely, the desirability of excluding foreign competition, and of encouraging home-industry. Against this defence, however, there is a great deal to be said that ought to weigh with the American people, and that ought to weigh in their calculations as well as in their taste and sense of right. For, as to the latter, I take it that no American would undertake to defend his Copyright Law on the principles either of good taste or common justice. It cannot be in conformity with good taste for the literary artists of America to procure protection for themselves by penalising their European confrères, and it cannot be justice to rob a European author of his copyrights, or to compel him to delay his publication in Europe. These admissions I take for granted, and the only defence left is the calculation that such a Copyright Act is good for the American book-making interests.
If books were like other commodities, their sale, like the sale of other commodities, would fall under the economic law of diminishing returns. Thereunder, as their supply increased, the demand for books would tend to decrease, as is the case with cotton, say, or wooden spoons. And upon such an assumption there might be some reason for prohibiting the free importation of printed books, since the imported articles would compete in the home market for a relatively inelastic demand. But books, it is obvious, are not a commodity in this sense of the word. They do not satisfy demand, but stimulate it, and their sale, therefore, does not fall under the economic law of diminishing returns, but under the very contrary, that of increasing returns. Books, there is no doubt of it, are the cause of books. New books do not take the place of old books; nor do books really compete, as a general rule, with each other. On the contrary, the more books there are, the more are demanded and the more are produced. The free importation of books is not a means of contracting the home-production of books; it is the very opposite, the most effective means of stimulating home-production to its highest possible degree. If I were an American author, resident in America, and concerned for the prosperity of the American book-making profession, craft, and industry, I should not be in the least disposed to thank the American Copyright Law for the protection it professes to give me. The appetite for books, upon which appetite I and my craft live, grows, I should say, by what it feeds on. Addressing the Copyright Act as it now exists, I should say to it: “In discouraging the free importation of foreign books, and in alienating the good-will of foreign authors and publishers, you are robbing foreign authors (that is true), but, much worse, you are depriving my public of the stimulus necessary to its demand for my books. Since we authors in America have a vital interest in increasing literary demand, and the more books the more demand is created, our real protection lies in freely importing books, and not in placing any impediment in their way. Intending to help us, you—the Copyright Law—are really our enemy.” I cannot see what reply the Copyright Law could make to this attack upon it by its protégés, and I believe, moreover, that if they were to make it, the Law would soon be amended.
Right Criticism.—To abandon the aim of “finality” of judgment is to let in the jungle into the cultivated world of art; it is to invite Tom, Dick, and Harry to offer their opinions as of equal value with the opinions of the cultivated. It is no escape from this conclusion to inquire into the “mentality” of the critic and to attach importance to his judgment as his mentality is or is not interesting. In appraising a judgment I am not concerned with the mentality, interesting or otherwise, of the judge who delivers it. My concern is not with him, but with the work before us; nor is the remark to be made upon his verdict the personal comment, “How interesting!” but the critical comment, “How true!” or “How false!” Personal preferences turn the attention in the nature of the case from the object criticised to the critic himself. The method substitutes for the criticism of art the criticism of psychology. In a word, it is not art criticism at all.