——"Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer."
DR. HUNTINGTON ON COPYRIGHT.
The author of Alice and Alban has written the following piquant letter on the important subject of International Copyright.
To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle.
As an American deeply interested in the subject of international copyright, and much struck by the fallacies of some of the speakers at a meeting of authors and publishers, recently reported in the London journals, may I, as the subject is fresh so long as it is undecided, beg of your courtesy a little space to point them out.
Let me begin by admitting the force of most that was said by the distinguished chairman on that occasion, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. No man living, perhaps, has a better right than he to complain of my countrymen, to whose intellectual pleasures and moral instruction he has contributed ever since I was a boy, out of the hard labor of his brains—helping to enrich our publishers and booksellers, and to stimulate all the trade connected with bookmaking, and vivifying the circulation of magazines and newspapers—for all which he has never received a penny. The same may be said of Dickens, whose works are of course as familiar to us as to you, and whose characters have become a part of our stock of ideas, more precious than the gold from our new-discovered mines. It is true that neither of these great men has benefited us so much as he might have done if we had paid for our pleasure honorably, for the influence of genius is like that of grace—the fertilizing shower falls in vain on the arid, stony places of selfish and unjust enjoyment. Charles Dickens has never received a penny from us, although we insulted our unpaid creditor when he came among us by asking him to Boz balls and dinners, given on a scale of splendor which showed how well we could have afforded to pay our debt if we had been honest enough to have admitted it. How degrading—how incongruous—for a great nation, such as we boast of being, to be thus the literary pensioners, the intellectual beggars of England, meanly enjoying what we won't pay for? An American would scorn to be fed or clothed gratis; he would "stand treat" with the world; yet he lets an Englishman (of all men!) gratuitously amuse his leisure, satisfy his thirst for knowledge, and clothe the nakedness of his mind. If Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, or Mr. Dickens, were to offer to pay for a pair of trousers for Brother Jonathan, he would knock him down; or if Miss Bell, or whatever is the name of the lady who wrote "Jane Eyre," and her sisters, pretended to make him up a dozen fine shirts as a charity, I think he would go out of his senses. He would rather go bare to the end of his days than owe such an obligation to any he or she Briton in existence; but what are such favors to those which he unblushingly accepts, year after year, from Sir Edward Bulwer and Miss Bell?
But I think, sir, with submission, that an injury has been done to the cause of copyright by resting it on false abstract grounds, which cannot be, and never have been, carried out. If a man has a rightful monopoly in his book, merely because he has produced it, your law is unjust and piratical in fixing a term to copyright—for why should you take away a man's property after he has enjoyed it a certain number of years? On the contrary, one would suppose that the longer he has enjoyed it the more perfect his right, and the greater the wrong to deprive him of it. Time converts even what is unjustly acquired into a legitimate possession—how much more that which the owner has actually created? I would put the matter on simple, concrete grounds, which all men can appreciate. The production of books is an element of civilization, by the common consent of nations. Books cannot be produced unless in some way they procure the authors a subsistence. And whoever produces by his labor a beneficial thing, is entitled to a reasonable compensation from those who are thereby benefited. In former times, when readers were scarce, as copies were costly, the rich, or sovereigns, supported authors directly, by pensions or otherwise. It is now conceded that the best mode of rewarding them is by allowing them an exclusive copyright in their works, and all civilized nations do so. But this mode of remuneration being once established, a foreign author, coming personally, or in his work, into a country, "has as much moral right to his book as he has to his baggage," and it is as barbarous to plunder him of the one as of the other. Why, when was there a time in Europe, or even in Asia or the antique world, that princes and states did not receive and cherish, and nobly reward, foreign men of letters? Are they to be more ignobly treated now that the people have become patrons? But, if deaf to the voice of honor, hear that of justice. Those who enjoy their works are bound to remunerate them for what they have produced at a great expenditure of time, money, and soul-wearing labor. That "the laborer is worthy of his hire," is a divine sentence which sooner or later will judge all those by whom that hire is by fraud "kept back." A country which refuses a fair copyright to authors, whether native or foreign, condemns itself to barbarism. It cultivates in itself a spirit of violence, aggravated by ingratitude to benefactors. There is, too, a sort of indelicacy in this injury, which even the law of reprisal cannot excuse. The benefit which the author of genius confers is something personal. You might as well, if some savage tribe ravished your women, condemn its females, when captured, to insult and dishonor.
Moreover, to refuse copyright to any class of authors (and here, again, I agree with Sir Bulwer), is to refuse it, in part, to all. The native author is robbed of his just hire by such a law, as much as the foreigner. I am compelled by the existing law of American copyright to part with my books for a sum which is under their natural price, and which is not a remunerating price, because I am undersold by reprints for which the authors are paid nothing. Look the fact in the face, ye readers of cheap reprints, who are unwilling to abandon an unjust privilege, which affords you so much pleasure at so low a rate. I have written a book. I have spent years in writing or learning to write it. Perhaps I could do nothing else. The influence of the literary atmosphere in which all who read the English language are forced to live, acting on my special organization, has made literary production a necessary resource. It is the same as if I were a poor shirt-maker, over whose sorrows a Hood has taught you to weep and be indignant. At all events, you approve of my writing, or you would not have read my book so extensively. And yet, because you can refuse to pay foreign authors for books of the same kind, you oblige me to take a nominal price for mine—a price for which it could not be produced by any man living, and less than it would command if you honestly paid for such labor in other instances. You have beaten me down most unfairly. I consider it so; and if every one of the 10 or 12,000 buyers of the cheap edition of "Lady Alice" were to send me a "quarter" (1s.) by mail, I should regard it as a simple restitution; nor would the sum total cover my expenses while writing it.
So far, then, Sir Edward Lytton and myself (if it is not too great presumption in me to join myself with him) cordially agree. And further, it is a most nonsensical and absurd policy for a country thus to swamp its native literature, and to depress and degrade the whole class of native writers. No nation can afford to let foreigners write for it; it would be as unwise as to let them fight its battles. I may add that no nation can afford to embitter its own writers against itself by producing in their minds a sense of injustice. Strong as our feeling of nationality undoubtedly is, it will not stand this for ever. It has seemed strange to some that an American should have written such a book as "Lady Alice," the author of which appears, at first sight, to have expatriated his mind, if not his heart. His being an episcopal clergyman accounts for it in part—for the Church is essentially of Old England, and its clergy and more devoted members are morally domiciled in England, with whose institutions and social system they have a stronger sympathy than with those of their own country. Moreover, for years, he lived only among Englishmen of that class which is most intensely attached to things as they are—a part of the time in England itself. These circumstances made the thing possible. But despair of obtaining any thing like a fair copyright for an American book made it actual—led him to lay aside a projected American story, and try his hand at an English novel, with a bent less serious: at first, indeed, not without some idea of caricature, in a gay, lawless, audacious spirit, in defiance of cant of every kind: but the calm, methodical, somewhat mechanical ηθος of actual English life, when he saw it and felt its restraints, tamed down these peculiarities somewhat. The result was a book which truly excited more surprise than sympathy in England—but which, in America, proved its real nationality by bursting in a trice all the bonds of clique, and, in spite of its acknowledged faults, securing near a hundred thousand readers in a few months. If copyright had been protected as it ought, I should have been reimbursed by so large a sale; but, as it was, even this successful book paid me less than a day laborer could have earned in the time I was writing it, in any part of the States.