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embraced within the same category as a yard of calico, or a bushel of wheat.

But while these goods have no value except what is exhibited by their outward form, so that the independent producers of other bushels of wheat or yards of calico meet them in the market upon equal terms, the producer of the book exhibits to the world a double entity, one material, the other mental; and the author pleads that, as the material thing which we call a book is protected by the law against abstraction, so the thoughts contained in it, and wrought by him into a structure more or less elaborate, should in like manner be protected from reproduction. For reproduction, from his point of view, is theft. It is offering to the world, for such price as the world may be willing to give, not only the paper and print which the producer has to buy and pay for, but the composition contained in them, which represents the time and labor, and therefore the food and raiment, and lodging, and all the lawful needs of the author. These he gets for nothing, and sells for something.

The

some capitalist who will agree to become
joint partner of the book, giving it a body
where the author has supplied the soul,
and thus at length constituting it a market-
able and productive commodity.
author cannot himself as a rule be the
publisher, and publishers are extremely
few; so few that until a very recent date,
they might be counted on the fingers.
Practically, and as a general rule, the
author in relation to his customer is no-
body, until his initial performance has
been capped by the accession of the pub-
lisher. Better would be the position of a
man who should offer for sale the stock
and lock of a rifle, without the barrel to
complete it.

The publisher, then, stands in an im movable position between the author and the public; and it largely depends upon his choice whether he shall starve or feed both the one and the other. His office faces both ways. As to that side of it which regards the author, I know of no reason to doubt that it has now reached, in the main, its mature and final development. In these volumes of Dr. Smiles, we find set before us for the first time a full and systematic account of the manner in which this office, as towards the author, was understood and discharged by a great London publisher. Great, not in the limited

On this basis has been erected that curious formation which we call the law of copyright. The conditions of its birth and history have been chequered and abnormal; but the reasonableness of the proposition that mental toil, on taking lit-beginnings of the business inherited from erary form, should not be deprived of the remuneration enjoyed by bodily labor, has brought it out into the light of day, and so secured its acceptance. And it appears in this century of ours to take an increasing hold on the intelligence of societies, and the assent of states. It has a train of satellites, such as the protection of pictures from copying in the sphere of sight, and of music in the sphere of sound, and again in the prohibition to convert the contents of private letters into public property without the consent of the writer.

But the author, when he has obtained an acknowledgment of his right to protection, has not yet surmounted all his difficulties. The growth of wheat, and the manufacture of calico, produce articles complete in themselves, and only requiring certain manipulations before reaching the ultimate consumer. These processes are capable of being performed by a multitude of persons; and the function of the intermediate distributors, being simple, is performed by many, not by few. But the author has given birth to a commodity which is entirely unavailable for the purpose of yielding him support, until he has contracted, as it were, a marriage with

his father, but in the qualities by which he enlarged and converted it into a wide and complicated scale of transactions. These were marked throughout by a treat ment of authors so full of enterprise, of liberality, and of considerateness, as to entitle him not only to the acknowledg ments of individuals, but to the grateful recollections of the class. The fortune he acquired was not, I believe, in full proportion to the magnitude and apparent success of his undertakings. Undoubtedly the perusal of these volumes tends to create an impression that it would have been larger, had he been somewhat more stinted in the terms which he offered or allowed to the writers of books. His large, genial, sympathetic spirit sometimes permitted feeling for the individual with whom he dealt, if not to color his expectation of a market, yet certainly to enter into and to swell the price he was to allow for the commodity. It is even probable that by his individual action he either permanently raised, or at least accelerated the rise, of the standard of literary remunera. tion.

The process, by which the great profession of letters has advanced to its present

position, has been a slow one. It can in my belief only become wholly satisfactory when the law of copyright shall have been placed upon such a footing as to allow the public, its true patron, earlier and more effective access to the perusal of new and high-class works, than for the most part it at present enjoys. But the progress actually effected has been immense. Let us go back to the time when, in this country, Milton accepted from a bookseller £5, with contingent payments of £10 more, for the privilege of issuing Paradise Lost." We are accustomed tacitly to commiserate the poet, and to hold his publisher in small account for liberality. But there is a word to be said on the publisher's behalf. Fifteen pounds, even if we multiply it (say) by three, with reference to the altered relation of value between cash and commodities, may be but a small sum. Still it is a sum, and passes into the pocket; and the question arises whether there had ever before been given among us, by any publisher, for any work, any payment at all. Such cases may have existed, but I have never been able to discover them. Take another instance. Fifty years ago, America, as a very young country, probably represented a much earlier stage of development in the literary question than England, or than the America of to-day with its huge and rapid development. At any rate, we have before us in the revised "Life of Mr. Dana," but just published, a curious account of his transactions with one of the first publishers of New York respecting his peculiarly interesting work, "Two Years before the Mast."* As he was not a rich man, considerable pains were taken to get the best possible price for it. But this proved to be only two hundred and fifty dollars, or £50. It was reprinted in England by Mr. Moxon without the protection of copyright, and a larger sum was voluntarily remitted to the author than he had obtained in America by parting with his legal property in the work. Compare with these cases the state of things in which "Wood stock," only in part composed, had already, in 1826, been set down by the house of Constable as an asset at £7,500; while another novel, not yet begun, but to be written during the year, at £7,500 more.t Of the immense advance thus effected on behalf of literary livelihood, the reader of these volumes may be led to surmise that an appreciable share is due to Mr. Murray.

R. H. Dana; a Biography, vol. i., pp. 25-7. ↑ A. Constable and his Literary Correspondents, chap. vi., p. 405.

Let me illustrate this general statement from the biography, by instances which shall not be associated with names so famous as those of Scott and Byron. In 1820, for the "Memoirs of Lord Waldegrave," together with Horace Walpole's "Last Nine Years of George II.," he agreed to pay £2,500, a price which no other publisher would give, and which he did not recover from the public. He gave Washington Irving three thousand guineas for the "Voyages of Columbus; " two thousand for the "Conquest of Granada," losing on the two works £2,250. He gave one thousand guineas for the first volume of Napier's "Peninsular War;" £1,200 for "Franklin's Second Expedition;" £3,000 for the copyright of "Crabbe's Poems;" five hundred guineas for Milman's "Fall of Jerusalem;" for the "Martyr of Antioch" and "Belshazzar" the same sum in each case. He gave Miss F. Kemble four hundred guineas for "Francis the First."* In most of these cases (but not the last), he went against or beyond the judgment of his own literary advisers; no inconsiderable persons, for they were such as Gifford, Croker, Lockhart, and Sharon Turner.

He showed an enlightened judgment in preferring a system of sharing profits to that of purchasing outright. But the largeness of these prices was not the only form in which he exhibited his pecuniary disinterestedness. To Scott, by whose genius he had profited, he presented his fourth share of the copyright of "Marmicn ""as an act of grateful acknowledgment;" and when it was desired to withhold from publication the memoirs. Byron had written, on account of their contents, he warmly concurred in promoting the suppression, though he held the property; and, in order to secure this end, he was willing to sacrifice two thousand guineas which he had paid for them. An arrangement was, however, eventually made by which the money was repaid to him. Indeed the liberality of his mind habitually went beyond pecuniary forms; and we repeatedly find him lending to authors without any security for repayment; or laboring to bring about accommodations among his rivals in trade, which by withdrawing business from himself went directly to the diminution of his gains.

In one instance only perhaps did he offer a niggardly remuneration for literary

Memoirs, vol. ii., pp. 89, 104, 106, 257, 258, 260, 283, 290, 385. t Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 275. Vol. i., pp. 441-50.

strown, bear witness to his real literary capacity.

And this is perhaps the proper place to notice his concern in the foundation of the Quarterly Review.

Along with that review, Mr. Murray seems to have rather hardened in his Toryism with the lapse of years; but it was, in its inception, a literary undertaking. It followed the Edinburgh, founded in 1802, which has the honor of originality, and with which Murray came to be connected, as part agent, and then as sole agent in London, about three years later. First in the field, "it appeared at the right time, and, as the first quarterly organ of the higher criticism, evidently hit the mark at which it aimed."*

work. It was in the case of the poet Coleridge. This extraordinary man, though not in the full enjoyment of his fame, had at the time of the transaction executed his great translation of "Wallenstein," which has all the character of an original, and which some, it is believed, have preferred to the work of Schiller himself. In 1814 it was proposed to Coleridge that he should translate "Faust." But the price offered him by Mr. Murray for the translation, together with a preliminary analysis, was no more than £100, payable within two months after the work should have been placed complete in the hands of the publisher.† The explanation of what seems a marked deviation from his ordinary scale may have lain in his suspicions of Coleridge as a man of business, and in Differences with the Edinburgh puba consequent lukewarmness as to the for-lisher soon arose, we are told, out of his mation of any relations with him. Poor practice of drawing accommodation bills, Coleridge, probably under pressure of that is to say bills not represented by circumstances, sent what was meant to be values. Accordingly, before 1808 had an acceptance of the terms. But, very expired, the agency was withdrawn from unfortunately, the matter did not proceed, Mr. Murray. He was then left free to and the world lost in this instance what is prosecute a plan for the establishment of in literature a rare and very interesting a review in the southern capital, anticiphenomenon, the rendering by a great pated in this matter by the northern. poet, in a tongue foreign to the original, of the thoughts of a poet greater still.

Mr. Murray exhibited his self-reliance and decision of character, when his years were still few, and his resources slender, by his peremptory dissolution of partnership with Mr. Highley, a sort of inherited partner whom he felt to be an incumbrance. His proposal, he says, he knows to be a fair one, and "I declare it to be the last with which I intend to trouble you." These qualities marked his whole career; and were shown in the promptitude of his offers, in his disposition to constant multiplication of engagements, and in the large share of work properly literary which he habitually took upon himself. He did not follow the practice common among publishers of employing a salaried reader, but obtained pro re natâ the friendly aid of eminent men, who valued their relations with him, and gladly lent it. His private judgment could not but be considerably exercised in the choice of this or that adviser as occasion arose, and it has been seen that he withheld from them any servile deference, even to the increase of his own costs and charges. From their letters it is evident that they respected his judg. ment, and those letters of his, with which the volumes are thickly, but not too thickly

Memoirs, vol. i, p. 300.

+ Vol. i., p. 297.

Vol. i., p. 31.

This plan seems to have been eminently and exclusively his own. The inception of the Quarterly was a matter far more arduous and complicated than had been that of the Edinburgh. In the case of the elder sister, a body of distinguished men appear to have framed their own literary scheme, and then to have found a publisher ready to undertake its mercantile counterpart, each party having its own province, and its own responsibility. There was not, in the case of the Quarterly, any such compact combination of writers, formed beforeband under an editorial head. The editor was appointed, the writers one by one attracted, the literary arrangements constantly considered, by Mr. Murray, who is evidently and exclusively entitled to the honors of a founder. Next to him comes Sir Walter Scott; and in the third place stands Gifford, whose office in docking, trimming, adapting, and almost rewriting articles appears to have been one of great labor and anxiety, peremptorily and strongly, but ably and conscientiously performed. Although the Review had the aid of Scott from the first, although Southey, Croker, and other notable men came in, although it enjoyed in a few cases the brilliant superintendence of Canning, yet the want of a regular staff, and of undivided re

• Memoirs, vol. i., p. 91.

and its aspects multitudinous. On some, and the very highest, of them, I have not presumed to touch. But Murray raised the tone of his profession; and every man who does that, is among the benefactors of his race. I have therefore sought to mark the work as a literary life which is entitled to the rare and solid distinction of a permanent place in the history of letters. My own title so to mark it is to be found simply in the fact that, though two distinguished ladies still survive, one of whom preceded me, I am the only man now living, who has had Mr. Murray, second of his race, for his publisher. His saltem accumulem donis. And may that race long continue.

Mrs. Butler and Lady Eastlake.

From Longman's Magazine. ON AUTOGRAPHS.

I.

GRAY has written his elegy. He has commemorated the memento mori in the country churchyard of those who have "gone over to the majority," as men put it, with the presumptuous numerical speculation which ignores the possibilities of a present and a future, of whose limit of life no man holds the measuring line. But it remains for some poet, perhaps unborn, to write a new elegy, and in the light of his inspiration to interpret the pathos and the humor and the irony of those other mementoes, of the great, or at least of the notorious, which lie collected in those literary cemeteries in which the autograph collector buries his possessions or advertises his spoils.

It is true that the squalid and rapacious character which too often belongs to the collectors of such memorials has obscured the picturesque aspect of his chase, and that the lists of "autograph letters " for sale have intruded ideas into our minds which have desecrated the resting-places of these relics, faded or fresh, and have transformed them into precincts where anatomists drive their bargains for skeletons and physiologists select subjects for not infrequently for vivisec

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But, however that may be, the fact nevertheless remains that, to those who look below, a great part of the strange humor of life's relations is epitomized in these motley assortments, where the dramatis persona are represented, each by his own

signature, in fragmentary moods of grief or jesting, of anger, or hate, or lovemoods deep and light, serious and volatile, where are found records of tears long forgotten by the mourner; of wrongs unrighted, forgotten by their champions; of jests from which the laughter has faded, and anecdotes robbed by time of their point, or, it may often be more accurately described, of their edge.

Take, for example, the collection of manuscript letters, rather than autographs, which lie before us. They are, it is true, bound together by one link, and possess one characteristic in common; for, with comparatively few exceptions, they are addressed to a single correspondent, and the reflection of his personality lies mirrored, in varying degrees of strength, across the whole collection. It is the transitory principle of cohesion which unites for the time elements so various, sometimes so antagonistic- the rallyingpoint round which the assemblage gathers. For a moment they meet, like the personages represented at a fancy ball; then the kaleidoscope is shaken; its broken splinters of color separate to unite again in fresh patterns; the crimson triangle detaches itself from the blue star to join the yellow octagon, and the green square mingles with what once formed the crystallized design of a radiating diamond.

It is a heterogeneous procession that passes us by in irregular order, or, more properly speaking, in no order at all, except that of the alphabet. No precedence is here given, none demanded; the living and the dead, the old and the young, the comparatively insignificant and the illus trious, men and women, mingle together in the crowd, whilst the memorials of each are as various in their nature and character as those they represent. Here and there we meet with a letter important enough in subject and treatment to claim attention on its own merits, independently of the name which stands below it, whilst as frequently it is the personality of the writer alone which lends an interest to the trivialities he registers. Nothing is added by these last to the sum of human knowledge or wisdom, they were never intended for publication, would be out of place in any serious collection of letters, and would never, as the phrase goes, be included in a man's "remains ;" and yet this driftwood of literature possesses a value altogether its own. In the more serious achievements of the literary artist he leaves behind him a monument in which we see what him as philosopher, poet, scientist

best read in the narrative of Dr. Smiles.* | Controversy arose upon Lockhart's treat Suffice it to say that the chapter containing it is one of those in which fact beats fiction; and that Mr. Murray lost £26,000 by the ill-starred adventure.

An impartial reader will, I think, conclude from the perusal, that Mr. Murray's miscarriage was by no means due to mere pecuniary greed; that a spirit of enterprise, true though pushed into exaggera tion, had more to do with it; and that strong personal sympathy, perhaps even affection, was a main factor in the undertak ing. He comes out of it smaller, perhaps, as a calculator, but more than ever a man. And it is in truth the strong and genuinely human element, marking and following the whole course of his career, which height ened its interest, but from time to time endangered its success; and which has impressed much of the stamp of chivalry on a trading career.

ment of Constable in his great biography. However, in a letter of the year 1827, Lockhart says all literary men know the debt they owe to him personally “for having thrown so much of new life and vigor into the conduct of the profession." And he seems to be entitled to some share of the praise which has been earned by Murray on a larger scale, and through a surer sagacity, and a closer adherence to sound principles of business.

In the grand enterprise of cheapening literature, and making it accessible to the public at large, Mr. Murray, Mr. Charles Knight, and Mr. Constable had their respective shares. The "Family Library" and "The Library of Entertaining Knowledge" began in 1829. But Constable had been beforehand with them, and had brought out his "Miscellany" in the beginning of 1827‡ Mr. Murray had long Many of the side-lights of this biog- been pondering his own scheme, which he raphy open subjects of great interest; for at length brought into beneficial operation. instance, the origin and character of Gif- And it seems no improbable conjecture ford. But there is one of them which that this delay was owing to the pre-occucannot be passed by, by reason of its prob-pation, first of his mind by the fascinations able bearing on Mr. Murray's commercial of the Representative, and then of his education. Constable, whose large and resources by the disastrous liquidation. enterprising business came to a disastrous I must not close these remarks without end in 1826, and made place for that great referring to the literary court of Mr. Murepic presented to us in the heroic close of ray.§ His hospitality was large and conthe life of Scott, was, if not the tutor, yet stant. It was not confined to authors of certainly the foreshadower of Murray. He standing and repute, for I myself, without had something of the same boldness of the smallest pretension to such a characconception, and largeness of liberality ter, shared it half a century ago. His towards authors; with the disadvantage of drawing-room, open from day to day, had a less central position, and a narrower the attractions of a most refined literary market at his doors. Their relations were club, minus the subscription. His relaclose for a considerable time, and their tions with the distinguished circle did not sentiments of reciprocal regard were merely represent what Carlyle calls "the warm. The tie was weakened by Mur- cash-nexus between man and man." The ray's distrust of his friend's finance, which company which so freely went in and out he thought dangerously mixed up with had no limit of nationality, and was of no reliance on accommodation bills. In 1807 sect in politics or letters. In another dethe junior entered on a course of remon- velopment of his munificent spirit, he strance with the senior trader. But the coveted and contrived the formation of a bond between them was not then broken, gallery of portraits. The hand of Lawand Mr. Murray most warmly acknowl- rence was to be traced there; and, when edges the value of pecuniary support he had not long passed the middle of received from him in 1810,† when his his career, it already included Byron, own resources may have been seriously Scott, Coleridge, Southey, Moore, Gifford, strained by the heavy charges attending the first establishment of the Quarterly Review. This is related in the memoir of Constable by his son; a work which is unduly swollen with much padding, but which contains no small amount of valuable information, and forms a portion of what may be called the Scott literature. Memoirs, vol. ii., chap. xxvi.

↑ Archibald Constable, vol. i., p. 384.

|

Croker, Barrow, Hallam, Irving, Campbell,
Lockhart, Crabbe, among men of letters,
besides the chief voyagers to the North
Pole and to Africa.||

The scope of human life is indeed wide,

Archibald Constable, vol. iii., p. 439.

† Memoirs, vol. ii.. pp. 295-6.
Archibald Constable, chap. vii., p. 440.
$ Vol. ii., p. 83.

Vol. ii., p. 317.

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