The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.
If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped against the tradesman.
As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing ... but that is no matter.
It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on with it.
Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks and parasites and against our appalling decentralization, i. e., lack of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.
When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.—Bernard Shaw, 1916.
A Sorrowful Demon[1]
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet, though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth, Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane, freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.
But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier. Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.