Be under no apprehension, gentle public, that you are about to be kept in suspense touching the moral of our argumentation, as too often in the pamphlets addressed in Johnsonian English to Thompsonian understandings, wherein a pennyworth of matter is set forth by a monstrous quantity of phrase. We mean to speak to the point; we mean to enlighten your understanding as by the smiting of a lucifer-match. Refrain, therefore, from running your eye impatiently along the page, as you are doing at this moment, in hopes of discovering, italicized, the secret of the enigma; for we have no intention of keeping you another moment ignorant that the monster-misery of literature is—guess! Which of you hath hit it? The monster-misery of literature is—The Circulating Library!
In this devout conviction, devote we to the infernal gods the memory of the Athenian republic—the first keeper of a circulating library. Every tyro is aware that this Sams or Ebers of antiquity lent out to Ptolemy of Egypt, for a first-rate subscription of fifteen talents, the works of Euripides, Eschylus, and Sophocles; thereby affording a precedent for the abominable practice, fatal to bookmakers and booksellers, which has converted the waters of Castalia into their present disgraceful puddle!
Every scribbler of the day who has a Perryian pen in hand, is pleased to exercise it on the decline of the drama; one of the legitimate targets of penny-a-liners. But how inadequately are the goose quills, and ostrich quills, phoenix quills, and roc quills, of the few standard critics of the age, directed towards the monstrous abuse of public patience which will render the Victorian age the sad antithesis of the Elizabethan, in the literary history of the land! Content so long as they can get a new work, tale quale, as a peg whereon to hang the rusty garments of their erudition, not a straw care they for the miserable decline and fall of the great empire of letters; an empire overrun by what Goths—what Huns—what Vandals!—by the iniquitous and barbarous hosts of circulating libraries!
It has been agreed for some centuries past, that the only modern Mæcenas is the publisher. The days of patrons are past; and the author is forced to look for the reward of his labour to the man who, by selling the greatest number of copies to the public, can bestow the greatest number of pounds upon his pains. In order to augment this amount, the bibliopole naturally consults the taste of his customers; and nearly the sole remaining customers of the modern bookseller are—the circulating libraries. For what man in his senses who, for an annual mulct of half-a-dozen sovereigns, commands the whole range of modern literature, would waste his substance in loading his house with books of doubtful interest? Who that, by a message of his servant into Bond Street, procures the last new novel cut and dry, instead of wet from the press, and demanding the labour of the paper-knife, would proceed to the extremity of a purchase? And the result is, that Messrs Folio and Duodecimo, in order to procure satisfactory orders from the circulating libraries of the multitudinous cities of this deluded empire, issue orders to their helots, Mr Scribblescrawl and Mrs Wiredrawn, requiring them to produce per annum so many sets of three volumes, adapted to the atmosphere wherein they are fated to flourish.
It is an avowed fact, that the publishers of the day will purchase the copyrights of only such works as "the libraries will take;" which libraries, besotted by the mystic charm of three volumes, immutable as the sacred triad of the Graces or Destinies, would negative without a division such a work as the "Vicar of Wakefield" were it now to undergo probation. "Robinson Crusoe" or "Paul and Virginia" would be returned unread to their authors, with a civil note of "extremely sorry to decline," &c. "The Man of Feeling" would be made to feel his insignificance. "Thinks I to Myself" might think in vain; and the "Cottagers of Glenburnie" retain their rural obscurity. So much for the measure of the maw of the circulating library. Of its taste and palate it is difficult to speak with moderation; for those of Caffraria or Otaheite might be put to the blush.
The result, however, of this fatal ascendancy is, that not a publisher who has the fear of the Gazette before his eyes, presumes to hazard a guinea on speculations in the belles-lettres. Poetry is seldom, if ever, published except at the cost of the poet; and the foreman of one of the leading London houses is deputed to apprize aspiring rhymesters, that "his firm considers poetry a mild species of insanity"—Anglice, that it does not suit the appetite of the circulating library! For behold! this despot of bookmakers must have length, breadth, and thickness, to fill the book boxes dispatched to its subscribers in the country, as well as satisfy in town the demands of its charming subscriber, Lady Sylvester Daggerwood, and all her daughters.
It happens that the said Lady Sylvester does not like Travels, unless "nice little ladylike books of travels," such as the Quarterly informed us last year, in a fit of fribbledom, were worthy the neat little crowquills of lady-authors. Nor will she hear of Memoirs, unless light, sparkling, and scandalous, as nearly resembling those of Grammont as decency will allow. Essays she abominates; nor can she exactly understand the use of quartoes, unless, as Swift describes the merit of
"A Chrysostom to smooth his band in"—
to serve for flattening between the leaves her rumpled embroidery or netting!
Now you are simply and respectfully asked, beloved public, what must be the feelings of a man of genius, or of any sensible scholarly individual, when, after devoting years of his life to a work of standard excellence—a work such as in France would obtain him access to the Academy, or in Russia or Prussia a pension and an order of merit—he is told by the publisher, who in Great Britain supplies the place of these fountains of honour and reward, that "the public of the present day has no taste for serious reading;" for Messrs Folio and Duodecimo cannot, of course, afford to regard a few dons of the universities, or a few county bookclubs, parsonically presided, as representatives of the public! What the disappointed man, thus enlightened, must think of "glorious Apollo" when he goes to bed that night, we should be sorry to conjecture!