In the history of literature, and perhaps in that of the human mind, the
institution of the LICENSERS OF THE PRESS, and CENSORS OF BOOKS, was a
bold invention, designed to counteract that of the Press itself; and
even to convert this newly-discovered instrument of human freedom into
one which might serve to perpetuate that system of passive obedience
which had so long enabled modern Rome to dictate her laws to the
universe. It was thought possible in the subtlety of Italian _astuzia_
and Spanish monachism, to place a sentinel on the very thoughts as well
as on the persons of authors; and in extreme cases, that books might be
condemned to the flames as well as heretics.
Of this institution, the beginnings are obscure, for it originated in
caution and fear; but as the work betrays the workman, and the national
physiognomy the native, it is evident that so inquisitorial an act could
only have originated in the Inquisition itself. Feeble or partial
attempts might previously have existed, for we learn that the monks had
a part of their libraries called the _inferno_, which was not the part
which they least visited, for it contained, or hid, all the prohibited
books which they could smuggle into it. But this inquisitorial power
assumed its most formidable shape in the council of Trent, when some
gloomy spirits from Rome and Madrid foresaw the revolution of this new
age of books. The triple-crowned pontiff had in vain rolled the thunders
of the Vatican, to strike out of the hands of all men the volumes of
Wickliffe, of Huss, and of Luther, and even menaced their eager readers
with death. At this council Pius IV. was presented with a catalogue of
books of which they denounced that the perusal ought to be forbidden;
his bull not only confirmed this list of the condemned, but added rules
how books should be judged. Subsequent popes enlarged these catalogues,
and added to the rules, as the monstrous novelties started up.
Inquisitors of books were appointed; at Rome they consisted of certain
cardinals and "the master of the holy palace;" and literary inquisitors
were elected at Madrid, at Lisbon, at Naples, and for the Low Countries;
they were watching the ubiquity of the human mind. These catalogues of
prohibited books were called _Indexes_; and at Rome a body of these
literary despots are still called "the Congregation of the Index." The
simple _Index_ is a list of condemned books which are never to be
opened; but the _Expurgatory Index_ indicates those only prohibited till
they have undergone a purification. No book was allowed to be on any
subject, or in any language, which contained a single position, an
ambiguous sentence, even a word, which, in the most distant sense, could
be construed opposite to the doctrines of the supreme authority of this
council of Trent; where it seems to have been enacted, that all men,
literate and illiterate, prince and peasant, the Italian, the Spaniard
and the Netherlander, should take the mint-stamp of their thoughts from
the council of Trent, and millions of souls be struck off at one blow,
out of the same used mould.
The sages who compiled these Indexes, indeed, long had reason to imagine
that passive obedience was attached to the human character: and
therefore they considered, that the publications of their adversaries
required no other notice than a convenient insertion in their indexes.
But the heretics diligently reprinted them with ample prefaces and
useful annotations; Dr. James, of Oxford, republished an Index with due
animadversions. The parties made an opposite use of them: while the
catholic crossed himself at every title, the heretic would purchase no
book which had not been indexed. One of their portions exposed a list of
those authors whose heads were condemned as well as their books: it was
a catalogue of men of genius.
The results of these indexes were somewhat curious. As they were formed
in different countries, the opinions were often diametrically opposite
to each other. The learned Arias Montanus, who was a chief inquisitor in
the Netherlands, and concerned in the Antwerp Index, lived to see his
own works placed in the Roman Index; while the inquisitor of Naples was
so displeased with the Spanish Index, that he persisted to assert that
it had never been printed at Madrid! Men who began by insisting that all
the world should not differ from their opinions, ended by not agreeing
with themselves. A civil war raged among the Index-makers; and if one
criminated, the other retaliated. If one discovered ten places necessary
to be expurgated, another found thirty, and a third inclined to place
the whole work in the condemned list. The inquisitors at length became
so doubtful of their own opinions, that they sometimes expressed in
their license for printing, that "they tolerated the reading, after the
book had been corrected by themselves, till such time as the work should
be considered worthy of some farther correction." The expurgatory
Indexes excited louder complaints than those which simply condemned
books; because the purgers and castrators, as they were termed, or as
Milton calls them, "the executioners of books," by omitting, or
interpolating passages, made an author say, or unsay, what the
inquisitors chose; and their editions, after the death of the authors,
were compared to the erasures or forgeries in records: for the books
which an author leaves behind him, with his last corrections, are like
his last will and testament, and the public are the legitimate heirs of
an author's opinions.
The whole process of these expurgatory Indexes, that "rakes through the
entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any
could be offered to his tomb," as Milton says, must inevitably draw off
the life-blood, and leave an author a mere spectre! A book in Spain and
Portugal passes through six or seven courts before it can be published,
and is supposed to recommend itself by the information, that it is
published with _all_ the necessary privileges. They would sometimes keep
works from publication till they had "properly qualified them,
_interemse calficam_," which in one case is said to have occupied them
during forty years. Authors of genius have taken fright at the gripe of
"the master of the holy palace," or the lacerating scratches of the
"corrector-general por su magestad." At Madrid and Lisbon, and even at
Rome, this licensing of books has confined most of their authors to the
body of the good fathers themselves.
The Commentaries on the Lusiad, by Faria de Souza, had occupied his
zealous labours for twenty-five years, and were favourably received by
the learned. But the commentator was brought before this tribunal of
criticism and religion, as suspected of heretical opinions; when the
accuser did not succeed before the inquisitors of Madrid, he carried the
charge to that of Lisbon: an injunction was immediately issued to forbid
the sale of the Commentaries, and it cost the commentator an elaborate
defence, to demonstrate the catholicism of the poet and himself. The
Commentaries finally were released from perpetual imprisonment.
This system has prospered to admiration, in keeping public opinion down
to a certain meanness of spirit, and happily preserved stationary the
childish stupidity through the nation, on which so much depended.
Nani's History of Venice is allowed to be printed, because it contained
_nothing against princes_. Princes then were either immaculate or
historians false. The History of Guicciardini is still scarred with the
merciless wound of the papistic censor; and a curious account of the
origin and increase of papal power was long wanting in the third and
fourth book of his history. Velly's History of France would have been an
admirable work had it not been printed at Paris!
When the insertions in the Index were found of no other use than to
bring the peccant volumes under the eyes of the curious, they employed
the secular arm in burning them in public places. The history of these
literary conflagrations has often been traced by writers of opposite
parties; for the truth is, that both used them: zealots seem all formed
of one material, whatever be their party. They had yet to learn, that
burning was not confuting, and that these public fires were an
advertisement by proclamation. The publisher of Erasmus's Colloquies
intrigued to procure the burning of his book, which raised the sale to
twenty-four thousand!
A curious literary anecdote has reached us of the times of Henry VIII.
Tonstall, Bishop of London, accused at that day for his moderation in
preferring the burning of books to that of authors, which was then
getting into practice, to testify his abhorrence of Tindal's principles,
who had printed a translation of the New Testament, a sealed book for
the multitude, thought of purchasing all the copies of Tindal's
translation, and annihilating them in the common flame. This occurred to
him when passing through Antwerp in 1529, then a place of refuge for the
Tindalists. He employed an English merchant there for this business, who
happened to be a secret follower of Tindal, and acquainted him with the
bishop's intention. Tindal was extremely glad to hear of the project,
for he was desirous of printing a more correct edition of his version;
the first impression still hung on his hands, and he was too poor to
make a new one; he gladly furnished the English merchant with all his
unsold copies, which the bishop as eagerly bought, and had them all
publicly burnt in Cheapside. The people not only declared this was a
"burning of the word of God," but it inflamed the desire of reading that
volume; and the second edition was sought after at any price. When one
of the Tindalists, who was sent here to sell them, was promised by the
lord chancellor, in a private examination, that he should not suffer if
he would reveal who encouraged and supported his party at Antwerp, the
Tindalist immediately accepted the offer, and assured the lord
chancellor that the greatest encouragement they had was from Tonstall,
the Bishop of London, who had bought up half the impression, and enabled
them to produce a second!
In the reign of Henry VIII. we seem to have burnt books on both sides;
it was an age of unsettled opinions; in Edward's, the Catholic works
were burnt; and Mary had her pyramids of Protestant volumes; in
Elizabeth's, political pamphlets fed the flames; and libels in the reign
of James I. and his sons.
Such was this black dwarf of literature, generated by Italian craft and
Spanish monkery, which, however, was fondly adopted as it crept in among
all the nations of Europe. France cannot exactly fix on the era of her
_Censeurs de Livres_; and we ourselves, who gave it its death-blow,
found the custom prevail without any authority from our statutes. The
practice of licensing books was unquestionably derived from the
Inquisition, and was applied here first to books of religion. Britain
long groaned under the leaden stamp of an _Imprimatur_. Oxford and
Cambridge still grasp at this shadow of departed literary despotism;
they have their licensers and their _Imprimaturs_. Long, even in our
land, men of genius were either suffering the vigorous limbs of their
productions to be shamefully mutilated in public, or voluntarily
committed a literary suicide in their own manuscripts. Camden declared
that he was not suffered to print all his Elizabeth, and sent those
passages over to De Thou, the French historian, who printed his history
faithfully two years after Camden's first edition, 1615. The same
happened to Lord Herbert's History of Henry VIII. which has never been
given according to the original, which is still in existence. In the
poems of Lord Brooke, we find a lacuna of the first twenty pages; it was
a poem on Religion, cancelled by the order of Archbishop Laud. The great
Sir Matthew Hale ordered that none of his works should be printed after
his death; as he apprehended that, in the licensing of them, some things
might be struck out or altered, which he had observed, not without some
indignation, had been done to those of a learned friend; and he
preferred bequeathing his uncorrupted MSS. to the Society of Lincoln's
Inn, as their only guardians, hoping that they were a treasure worth
keeping. Contemporary authors have frequent allusions to such books,
imperfect and mutilated at the caprice or the violence of a licenser.
The laws of England have never violated the freedom and the dignity of
its press. "There is no law to prevent the printing of any book in
England, only a decree in the Star-chamber," said the learned
Selden.[107] Proclamations were occasionally issued against authors and
books; and foreign works were, at times, prohibited. The freedom of the
press was rather circumvented, than openly attacked, in the reign of
Elizabeth, who dreaded the Roman Catholics, who were at once disputing
her right to the throne, and the religion of the state. Foreign
publications, or "books from any parts beyond the seas," were therefore
prohibited.[108] The press, however, was not free under the reign of a
sovereign, whose high-toned feelings, and the exigencies of the times,
rendered as despotic in _deeds_, as the pacific James was in _words_.
Although the press had then no restrictions, an author was always at the
mercy of the government. Elizabeth too had a keen scent after what she
called treason, which she allowed to take in a large compass. She
condemned one author (with his publisher) to have the hand cut off which
wrote his book; and she hanged another.[109] It was Sir Francis Bacon,
or his father, who once pleasantly turned aside the keen edge of her
regal vindictiveness; for when Elizabeth was inquiring whether an
author, whose book she had given him to examine, was not guilty of
treason, he replied, "Not of treason, madam, but of robbery, if you
please; for he has taken all that is worth noticing in him from Tacitus
and Sallust." With the fear of Elizabeth before his eyes, Holinshed
castrated the volumes of his History. When Giles Fletcher, after his
Russian embassy, congratulated himself with having escaped with his
head, and on his return wrote a book called "The Russian Commonwealth,"
describing its tyranny, Elizabeth forbad the publishing of the work. Our
Russian merchants were frightened, for they petitioned the queen to
suppress the work; the original petition, with the offensive passages,
exists among the Lansdowne manuscripts. It is curious to contrast this
fact with another better known, under the reign of William the Third;
then the press had obtained its perfect freedom, and even the shadow of
the sovereign could not pass between an author and his work. When the
Danish ambassador complained to the king of the freedom which Lord
Molesworth had exercised on his master's government, in his Account of
Denmark, and hinted that, if a Dane had done the same with a King of
England, he would, on complaint, have taken the author's head off--"That
I cannot do," replied the sovereign of a free people; "but if you
please, I will tell him what you say, and he shall put it into the next
edition of his book." What an immense interval between the feelings of
Elizabeth and William, with hardly a century betwixt them!
James the First proclaimed Buchanan's history, and a political tract of
his, at "the Mercat Cross;" and every one was to bring his copy "to be
perusit and purgit of the offensive and extraordinare materis," under a
heavy penalty. Knox, whom Milton calls "the Reformer of a Kingdom," was
also curtailed; and "the sense of that great man shall, to all
posterity, be lost for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a
perfunctory licenser."
The regular establishment of licensers of the press appeared under
Charles the First. It must be placed among the projects of Laud, and the
king, I suspect, inclined to it; for by a passage in a manuscript letter
of the times, I find, that when Charles printed his speech on the
dissolution of the parliament, which excited such general discontent,
some one printed Queen Elizabeth's last speech as a companion-piece.
This was presented to the king by his own printer, John Bill, not from a
political motive, but merely by way of complaint that another had
printed, without leave or license, that which, as the king's printer, he
asserted was his own copyright. Charles does not seem to have been
pleased with the gift, and observed, "You printers print anything."
Three gentlemen of the bed-chamber, continues the writer, standing by,
commended Mr. Bill very much, and prayed him to come oftener with such
rarities to the king, because they might do some good.[110]
One of the consequences of this persecution of the press was, the
raising up of a new class of publishers, under the government of Charles
I., those who became noted for what was then called "unlawful and
unlicensed books." Sparkes, the publisher of Prynne's "Histriomastix,"
was of this class. I have elsewhere entered more particularly into this
subject.[111] The Presbyterian party in parliament, who thus found the
press closed on them, vehemently cried out for its freedom: and it was
imagined, that when they had ascended into power, the odious office of a
licenser of the press would have been abolished; but these pretended
friends of freedom, on the contrary, discovered themselves as tenderly
alive to the office as the old government, and maintained it with the
extremest vigour. Such is the political history of mankind.
The literary fate of Milton was remarkable: his genius was castrated
alike by the monarchical and the republican government. The royal
licenser expunged several passages from Milton's history, in which
Milton had painted the superstition, the pride, and the cunning of the
Saxon monks, which the sagacious licenser applied to Charles II. and the
bishops; but Milton had before suffered as merciless a mutilation from
his old friends the republicans; who suppressed a bold picture, taken
from life, which he had introduced into his History of the Long
Parliament and Assembly of Divines. Milton gave the unlicensed passages
to the Earl of Anglesea, a literary nobleman, the editor of Whitelocke's
Memorials; and the castrated passage, which could not be licensed in
1670, was received with peculiar interest when separately published in
1681.[112] "If there be found in an author's book one sentence of a
venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it
might not be the dictate of a divine spirit, yet not suiting every low
decrepit humour of their own, they will not pardon him their dash."
This office seems to have lain dormant a short time under Cromwell, from
the scruples of a conscientious licenser, who desired the council of
state, in 1649, for reasons given, to be discharged from that
employment. This Mabot, the licenser, was evidently deeply touched by
Milton's address for "The Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." The office
was, however, revived on the restoration of Charles II.; and through the
reign of James II. the abuses of licensers were unquestionably not
discouraged: their castrations of books reprinted appear to have been
very artful; for in reprinting Gage's "Survey of the West Indies," which
originally consisted of twenty-two chapters, in 1648 and 1657, with a
dedication to Sir Thomas Fairfax,--in 1677, after expunging the passages
in honour of Fairfax, the dedication is dexterously turned into a
preface; and the twenty-second chapter being obnoxious for containing
particulars of the artifices of "the papalins," as Milton calls the
Papists, in converting the author, was entirely chopped away by the
licenser's hatchet. The castrated chapter, as usual, was preserved
afterwards separately. Literary despotism at least is short-sighted in
its views, for the expedients it employs are certain of overturning
themselves.
On this subject we must not omit noticing one of the noblest and most
eloquent prose compositions of Milton; "the Areopagitica; a Speech for
the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." It is a work of love and
inspiration, and breathing the most enlarged spirit of literature;
separating, at an awful distance from the multitude, that character "who
was born to study and to love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any
other end, but, perhaps, for that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise,
which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose
published labours advance the good of mankind."
One part of this unparalleled effusion turns on "the quality which ought
to be in every licenser." It will suit our new licensers of public
opinion, a laborious corps well known, who constitute themselves without
an act of Star-chamber. I shall pick out but a few sentences, that I may
add some little facts, casually preserved, of the ineptitude of such an
officer.
"He who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books,
whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to
be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and
judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in his censure.
If he be of such worth as behoves him, there cannot be a more
tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time
levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of
unchosen books and pamphlets. There is no book acceptable,
unless at certain seasons; but to be enjoyned the reading of
that at all times, whereof three pages would not down at any
time, is an imposition which I cannot believe how he that
values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensible
nostril, should be able to endure.--What advantage is it to be
a man over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only 'scaped
the ferula to come under the fescue of an _Imprimatur_?--if
serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than
the theme of a grammar lad under his pedagogue, must not be
uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporising licenser?
When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason
and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is
industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious
friends, as well as any that writ before him; if in this, the
most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no
industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to
that state of maturity as not to be still mistrusted and
suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all
his midnight watchings, and expense of Palladian oil, to the
hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger,
perhaps inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the
labour of book writing; and if he be not repulsed or slighted,
must appear in print like a Punie with his guardian, and his
censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and
surety that he is no idiot or seducer, it cannot be but a
dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the
privilege and dignity of learning."
The reader may now follow the stream in the great original; I must,
however, preserve one image of exquisite sarcasm.
"Debtors and delinquents walk about without a keeper; but
inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailor
in their title; nor is it to the common people less than a
reproach; for if we dare not trust them with an English
pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vitious, and
ungrounded people, in such a sick and weak state of faith and
discretion, as to be able to take nothing but thro' the
glister-pipe of a licenser!"
The ignorance and stupidity of these censors were often, indeed, as
remarkable as their exterminating spirit. The noble simile of Milton, of
Satan with the rising sun, in the first book of the Paradise Lost, had
nearly occasioned the suppression of our national epic: it was supposed
to contain a treasonable allusion. The tragedy of Arminius, by one
Paterson, who was an amanuensis of the poet Thomson, was intended for
representation, but the dramatic censor refused a license: as Edward and
Eleanora was not permitted to be performed, being considered a party
work, our sagacious state-critic imagined that Paterson's _own_ play was
in the same predicament by being in the same hand-writing! Malebranche
said, that he could never obtain an approbation for his "Research after
Truth," because it was unintelligible to his censors; at length Mezeray,
the historian, approved of it as a book of geometry. Latterly, in
France, it is said that the greatest geniuses were obliged to submit
their works to the critical understanding of persons who had formerly
been low dependents on some man of quality, and who appear to have
brought the same servility of mind to the examination of works of
genius. There is something, which, on the principle of incongruity and
contrast, becomes exquisitely ludicrous, in observing the works of men
of genius allowed to be printed, and even commended, by certain persons
who have never printed their names but to their licenses. One of these
gentlemen suppressed a work, because it contained principles of
government which appeared to him not conformable to the laws of Moses.
Another said to a geometrician--"I cannot permit the publication of your
book: you dare to say, that, between two given points, the shortest line
is the straight line. Do you think me such an idiot as not to perceive
your allusion? If your work appeared, I should make enemies of all those
who find, by crooked ways, an easier admittance into court, than by a
straight line. Consider their number!" This seems, however, to be an
excellent joke. At this moment the censors in Austria appear singularly
inept; for, not long ago, they condemned as heretical, two books; one of
which, entitled "_Principes de la Trigonométrie_," the censor would not
allow to be printed, because the _Trinity_, which he imagined to be
included in trigonometry, was not permitted to be discussed: and the
other, on the "Destruction of Insects," he insisted had a covert
allusion to the _Jesuits_, who, he conceived, were thus malignantly
designated.
A curious literary anecdote has been recorded of the learned Richard
Simon. Compelled to insert in one of his works the qualifying opinions
of the censor of the Sorbonne, he inserted them within crotchets. But a
strange misfortune attended this contrivance. The printer, who was not
let into the secret, printed the work without these essential marks: by
which means the enraged author saw his own peculiar opinions overturned
in the very work written to maintain them!
These appear trifling minutiæ; and yet, like a hair in a watch, which
utterly destroys its progress, these little ineptiæ obliged writers to
have recourse to foreign presses; compelled a Montesquieu to write with
concealed ambiguity, and many to sign a recantation of principles which
they could never change. The recantation of Selden, extorted from his
hand on his suppressed "Historie of Tithes," humiliated a great mind;
but it could not remove a particle from the masses of his learning, nor
darken the luminous conviction of his reasonings; nor did it diminish
the number of those who assented and now assent to his principles.
Recantations usually prove the force of authority rather than the change
of opinion. When a Dr. Pocklington was condemned to make a recantation,
he hit the etymology of the word, while he caught at the spirit--he
began thus: "If _canto_ be to sing, _recanto_ is to sing again." So that
he rechanted his offending opinions, by repeating them in his
_recantation_.
At the Revolution in England, licenses for the press ceased; but its
liberty did not commence till 1694, when every restraint was taken off
by the firm and decisive tone of the Commons. It was granted, says our
philosophic Hume, "to the great displeasure of the king and his
ministers, who, seeing nowhere in any government, during present or past
ages, any example of such unlimited freedom, doubted much of its
salutary effects; and probably thought that no books or writings would
ever so much improve the general understanding of men, as to render it
safe to entrust them with an indulgence so easily abused."
And the present moment verifies the prescient conjecture of the
philosopher. Such is the licentiousness of our press, that some, not
perhaps the most hostile to the cause of freedom, would not be averse to
manacle authors once more with an IMPRIMATUR. It will not be denied that
Erasmus was a friend to the freedom of the press; yet he was so shocked
at the licentiousness of Luther's pen, that there was a time when he
considered it necessary to restrain its liberty. It was then as now.
Erasmus had, indeed, been miserably calumniated, and expected future
libels. I am glad, however, to observe, that he afterwards, on a more
impartial investigation, confessed that such a remedy was much more
dangerous than the disease. To restrain the liberty of the press, can
only be the interest of the individual, never that of the public; one
must be a patriot here: we must stand in the field with an unshielded
breast, since the safety of the people is the supreme law. There were,
in Milton's days, some who said of this institution, that, although the
inventors were bad, the thing, for all that, might be good. "This may be
so," replies the vehement advocate for "unlicensed printing." But as the
commonwealths have existed through all ages, and have forborne to use
it, he sees no necessity for the invention; and held it as a dangerous
and suspicious fruit from the tree which bore it. The ages of the wisest
commonwealths, Milton seems not to have recollected, were not diseased
with the popular infection of publications, issuing at all hours, and
propagated with a celerity on which the ancients could not calculate.
The learned Dr. _James_, who has denounced the invention of the
_Indexes_, confesses, however, that it was not unuseful when it
restrained the publications of atheistic and immoral works. But it is
our lot to bear with all the consequent evils, that we may preserve the
good inviolate; since, as the profound Hume has declared, "The LIBERTY
OF BRITAIN IS GONE FOR EVER, when such attempts shall succeed."
A constitutional sovereign will consider the freedom of the press as the
sole organ of the feelings of the people. Calumniators he will leave to
the fate of calumny; a fate similar to those who, having overcharged
their arms with the fellest intentions, find that the death which they
intended for others, in bursting, only annihilates themselves.