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.
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]
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,