Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

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?”