[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]