Goldsmith had the good sense to ‘heartily wish to be rich,’ but he scarcely went the right way about it. One remembers Dr. Johnson sending him a guinea, and going across to his lodgings to find that his landlady had arrested him for debt and that he had changed the guinea for a bottle of Madeira. Dr. Johnson immediately makes across to the bookseller and sells the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for sixty pounds. The Box Office test absolutely settled the merit of the book in its own generation, and from then until now. One may regret that Goldsmith reaped so poor a reward, and that is what so constantly happens, not that the Box Office test fails to be a true test at revealing merit, but that, owing to superior business capacity, a very inferior author will for a time reap a bigger reward than a better author. This is generally the result of bad business management, and the cases even of authors and artists who are not discovered in their own lifetime, and are discovered by future generations, are rarer than one would suppose. It is an amusing modern craze among the cognoscenti to assess the ability of a writer or an artist of to-day by the mere fact alone that he has few admirers of his own generation.
If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box Office success.
Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature, writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:
I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays, or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion of every number, I am ensured for that writing in every number, a certain sum of money.
That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself. As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of America:
To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with me in spirit is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not barter for a mine of wealth.
Dickens’s Box Office returns brought him a similar message from hundreds and thousands of his fellow-men to that contained in the letter from the backwoods of America, and though in the nature of things such messages can only come in any number through the Box Office, Dickens understood the meaning of a Box Office success, and had too honest a heart to pretend that he despised it.
Thackeray was of course absolutely dogmatic on the Box Office principle. He rightly regarded the Box Office as the winnowing machine separating chaff from wheat. He refused to whimper over imaginary men of genius who failed to get a hearing from the world. One of the first duties of an author, in his view, was that of any other citizen, namely, to pay his way and earn his living. He puts his cold sensible views into the mouth of Warrington reproving Pen for some maudlin observation about the wrongs of genius at the hands of publishers.
What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand? Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad, saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals, but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.
One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’ as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and recognition have produced the best work that has been done.