A great author once surprised me by inquiring what I meant by "an
Author by Profession." He seemed offended at the supposition that I
was creating an odious distinction between authors. I was only placing
it among their calamities.
The title of AUTHOR is venerable; and in the ranks of national glory,
authors mingle with its heroes and its patriots. It is indeed by our
authors that foreigners have been taught most to esteem us; and this
remarkably appears in the expression of Gemelli, the Italian traveller
round the world, who wrote about the year 1700; for he told all Europe
that "he could find nothing amongst us but our writings to distinguish
us from the worst of barbarians." But to become an "Author by
Profession," is to have no other means of subsistence than such as are
extracted from the quill; and no one believes these to be so
precarious as they really are, until disappointed, distressed, and
thrown out of every pursuit which can maintain independence, the
noblest mind is cast into the lot of a doomed labourer.
Literature abounds with instances of "Authors by Profession"
accommodating themselves to this condition. By vile artifices of
faction and popularity their moral sense is injured, and the literary
character sits in that study which he ought to dignify, merely, as one
of them sings,
To keep his mutton twirling at the fire.
Another has said, "He is a fool who is a grain honester than the times
he lives in."
Let it not, therefore, be conceived that I mean to degrade or vilify
the literary character, when I would only separate the Author from
those polluters of the press who have turned a vestal into a
prostitute; a grotesque race of famished buffoons or laughing
assassins; or that populace of unhappy beings, who are driven to
perish in their garrets, unknown and unregarded by all, for illusions
which even their calamities cannot disperse. Poverty, said an ancient,
is a sacred thing--it is, indeed, so sacred, that it creates a
sympathy even for those who have incurred it by their folly, or plead
by it for their crimes.
The history of our Literature is instructive--let us trace the origin
of characters of this sort among us: some of them have happily
disappeared, and, whenever great authors obtain their due rights, the
calamities of literature will be greatly diminished.
As for the phrase of "Authors by Profession," it is said to be of
modern origin; and GUTHRIE, a great dealer in literature, and a
political scribe, is thought to have introduced it, as descriptive of
a class of writers which he wished to distinguish from the general
term. I present the reader with an unpublished letter of Guthrie, in
which the phrase will not only be found, but, what is more important,
which exhibits the character in its degraded form. It was addressed to
a minister.
_June 3, 1762._
"My Lord,
"In the year 1745-6, Mr. Pelham, then First Lord of the Treasury,
acquainted me, that it was his Majesty's pleasure I should
receive, till better provided for, which never has happened,
200_l._ a-year, to be paid by him and his successors in the
Treasury. I was satisfied with the august name made use of, and
the appointment has been regularly and quarterly paid me ever
since. I have been equally punctual in doing the government all
the services that fell within my abilities or sphere of life,
especially in those critical situations that call for unanimity in
the service of the crown.
"Your Lordship may possibly now suspect that _I am an Author by
Profession_: you are not deceived; and will be less so, if you
believe that I am disposed to serve his Majesty under your
Lordship's _future patronage and protection, with greater zeal, if
possible, than ever_.
"I have the honour to be,
"My Lord, &c.,
"WILLIAM GUTHRIE."
Unblushing venality! In one part he shouts like a plundering
hussar who has carried off his prey; and in the other he bows with
the tame suppleness of the "quarterly" Swiss chaffering his halbert
for his price;--"to serve his Majesty" for--"his Lordship's future
patronage."
Guthrie's notion of "An Author by Profession," entirely derived from
his own character, was twofold; literary taskwork, and political
degradation. He was to be a gentleman convertible into an historian,
at ---- per sheet; and, when he had not time to write histories, he
chose to sell his name to those he never wrote. These are mysteries of
the craft of authorship; in this sense it is only a trade, and a very
bad one! But when in his other capacity, this gentleman comes to hire
himself to one lord as he had to another, no one can doubt that the
stipendiary would change his principles with his livery.[4]
Such have been some of the "Authors by Profession" who have worn the
literary mask; for literature was not the first object of their
designs. They form a race peculiar to our country. They opened their
career in our first great revolution, and flourished during the
eventful period of the civil wars. In the form of newspapers, their
"Mercuries" and "Diurnals" were political pamphlets.[5] Of these, the
Royalists, being the better educated, carried off to their side all
the spirit, and only left the foam and dregs for the Parliamentarians;
otherwise, in lying, they were just like one another; for "the father
of lies" seems to be of no party! Were it desirable to instruct men by
a system of political and moral calumny, the complete art might be
drawn from these archives of political lying, during their flourishing
era. We might discover principles among them which would have humbled
the genius of Machiavel himself, and even have taught Mr. Sheridan's
more popular scribe, Mr. Puff, a sense of his own inferiority.
It is known that, during the administration of Harley and Walpole,
this class of authors swarmed and started up like mustard-seed in a
hot-bed. More than fifty thousand pounds were expended among them!
Faction, with mad and blind passions, can affix a value on the basest
things that serve its purpose.[6] These "Authors by Profession" wrote
more assiduously the better they were paid; but as attacks only
produced replies and rejoinders, to remunerate them was heightening
the fever and feeding the disease. They were all fighting for present
pay, with a view of the promised land before them; but they at length
became so numerous, and so crowded on one another, that the minister
could neither satisfy promised claims nor actual dues. He had not at
last the humblest office to bestow, not a commissionership of wine
licences, as Tacitus Gordon had: not even a collectorship of the
customs in some obscure town, as was the wretched worn-out Oldmixon's
pittance;[7] not a crumb for a mouse!
The captain of this banditti in the administration of Walpole was
Arnall, a young attorney, whose mature genius for scurrilous
party-papers broke forth in his tender nonage. This hireling was "The
Free Briton," and in "The Gazetteer" _Francis Walsingham, Esq._,
abusing the name of a profound statesman. It is said that he received
above ten thousand pounds for his obscure labours; and this patriot
was suffered to retire with all the dignity which a pension could
confer. He not only wrote for hire, but valued himself on it; proud of
the pliancy of his pen and of his principles, he wrote without remorse
what his patron was forced to pay for, but to disavow. It was from a
knowledge of these "Authors by Profession," writers of a faction in
the name of the community, as they have been well described, that our
great statesman Pitt fell into an error which he lived to regret. He
did not distinguish between authors; he confounded the mercenary with
the men of talent and character; and with this contracted view of the
political influence of genius, he must have viewed with awe, perhaps
with surprise, its mighty labour in the volumes of Burke.
But these "Authors by Profession" sometimes found a retribution of
their crimes even from their masters. When the ardent patron was
changed into a cold minister, their pen seemed wonderfully to have
lost its point, and the feather could not any more tickle. They were
flung off, as Shakspeare's striking imagery expresses it, like
An unregarded bulrush on the stream,
To rot itself with motion.
Look on the fate and fortune of AMHURST. The life of this "Author by
Profession" points a moral. He flourished about the year 1730. He
passed through a youth of iniquity, and was expelled from his college
for his irregularities: he had exhibited no marks of regeneration when
he assailed the university with the periodical paper of the _Terrae
Filius_; a witty Saturnalian effusion on the manners and Toryism of
Oxford, where the portraits have an extravagant kind of likeness, and
are so false and so true that they were universally relished and
individually understood. Amhurst, having lost his character, hastened
to reform the morals and politics of the nation. For near twenty years
he toiled at "The Craftsman," of which ten thousand are said to have
been sold in one day. Admire this patriot! an expelled collegian
becomes an outrageous zealot for popular reform, and an intrepid Whig
can bend to be yoked to all the drudgery of a faction! Amhurst
succeeded in writing out the minister, and writing in Bolingbroke and
Pulteney. Now came the hour of gratitude and generosity. His patrons
mounted into power--but--they silently dropped the instrument of their
ascension. The political prostitute stood shivering at the gate of
preferment, which his masters had for ever flung against him. He died
broken-hearted, and owed the charity of a grave to his bookseller.
I must add one more striking example of a political author in the case
of Dr. JAMES DRAKE, a man of genius, and an excellent writer. He
resigned an honourable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very
contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession for a party. As
a Tory writer, he dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded
it by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MS.
to the printer, who was never discovered, and was once saved by a flaw
in the indictment from the simple change of an _r_ for a _t_, or _nor_
for _not_;--one of those shameful evasions by which the law, to its
perpetual disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punishment.
Dr. Drake had the honour of hearing himself censured from the throne;
of being imprisoned; of seeing his "Memorials of the Church of
England" burned at London, and his "Historia Anglo-Scotica" at
Edinburgh. Having enlisted himself in the pay of the booksellers,
among other works, I suspect, he condescended to practise some
literary impositions. For he has reprinted Father Parson's famous
libel against the Earl of Leicester in Elizabeth's reign, under the
title of "Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1706,"
8vo, with a preface pretending it was printed from an old MS.
Drake was a lover of literature; he left behind him a version of
Herodotus, and a "System of Anatomy," once the most popular and
curious of its kind. After all this turmoil of his literary life,
neither his masked lady nor the flaws in his indictments availed him.
Government brought a writ of error, severely prosecuted him; and,
abandoned, as usual, by those for whom he had annihilated a genius
which deserved a better fate, his perturbed spirit broke out into a
fever, and he died raving against cruel persecutors, and patrons not
much more humane.
So much for some of those who have been "Authors by Profession" in one
of the twofold capacities which Guthrie designed, that of writing for
a minister; the other, that of writing for the bookseller, though far
more honourable, is sufficiently calamitous.
In commercial times, the hope of profit is always a stimulating, but a
degrading motive; it dims the clearest intellect, it stills the
proudest feelings. Habit and prejudice will soon reconcile even genius
to the work of money, and to avow the motive without a blush. "An
author by profession," at once ingenious and ingenuous, declared that,
"till fame appears to be worth more than money, he would always prefer
money to fame." JOHNSON had a notion that there existed no motive for
writing but money! Yet, crowned heads have sighed with the ambition of
authorship, though this great master of the human mind could suppose
that on this subject men were not actuated either by the love of glory
or of pleasure! FIELDING, an author of great genius and of "the
profession," in one of his "Covent-garden Journals" asserts, that "An
author, in a country where there is no public provision for men of
genius, is not obliged to be a more disinterested patriot than any
other. Why is he whose _livelihood is in his pen_ a greater monster in
using it to serve himself, than he who uses his tongue for the same
purpose?"
But it is a very important question to ask, is this "livelihood in the
pen" really such? Authors drudging on in obscurity, and enduring
miseries which can never close but with their life--shall this be
worth even the humble designation of a "livelihood?" I am not now
combating with them whether their taskwork degrades them, but whether
they are receiving an equivalent for the violation of their genius,
for the weight of the fetters they are wearing, and for the entailed
miseries which form an author's sole legacies to his widow and his
children. Far from me is the wish to degrade literature by the
inquiry; but it will be useful to many a youth of promising talent,
who is impatient to abandon all professions for this one, to consider
well the calamities in which he will most probably participate.
Among "Authors by Profession" who has displayed a more fruitful
genius, and exercised more intense industry, with a loftier sense of
his independence, than SMOLLETT? But look into his life and enter into
his feelings, and you will be shocked at the disparity of his
situation with the genius of the man. His life was a succession of
struggles, vexations, and disappointments, yet of success in his
writings. Smollett, who is a great poet, though he has written little
in verse, and whose rich genius composed the most original pictures of
human life, was compelled by his wants to debase his name by selling
it to voyages and translations, which he never could have read. When
he had worn himself down in the service of the public or the
booksellers, there remained not, of all his slender remunerations, in
the last stage of life, sufficient to convey him to a cheap country
and a restorative air on the Continent. The father may have thought
himself fortunate, that the daughter whom he loved with more than
common affection was no more to share in his wants; but the husband
had by his side the faithful companion of his life, left without a
wreck of fortune. Smollett, gradually perishing in a foreign land,[8]
neglected by an admiring public, and without fresh resources from the
booksellers, who were receiving the income of his works, threw out his
injured feelings in the character of _Bramble_; the warm generosity of
his temper, but not his genius, seemed fleeting with his breath. In a
foreign land his widow marked by a plain monument the spot of his
burial, and she perished in solitude! Yet Smollett dead--soon an
ornamented column is raised at the place of his birth,[9] while the
grave of the author seemed to multiply the editions of his works.
There are indeed grateful feelings in the public at large for a
favourite author; but the awful testimony of those feelings, by its
gradual progress, must appear beyond the grave! They visit the column
consecrated by his name, and his features are most loved, most
venerated, in the bust.
Smollett himself shall be the historian of his own heart; this most
successful "Author by Profession," who, for his subsistence, composed
masterworks of genius, and drudged in the toils of slavery, shall
himself tell us what happened, and describe that state between life
and death, partaking of both, which obscured his faculties and
sickened his lofty spirit.
"Had some of those who were pleased to call themselves my friends been
at any pains to deserve the character, and told me ingenuously what I
had to expect in _the capacity of an author, when I first professed
myself of that venerable fraternity_, I should in all probability have
spared myself the _incredible labour and chagrin I have since
undergone_."
As a relief from literary labour, Smollett once went to revisit his
family, and to embrace the mother he loved; but such was the
irritation of his mind and the infirmity of his health, exhausted by
the hard labours of authorship, that he never passed a more weary
summer, nor ever found himself so incapable of indulging the warmest
emotions of his heart. On his return, in a letter, he gave this
melancholy narrative of himself:--"Between friends, I am now convinced
that _my brain was in some measure affected_; for I had a kind of
_Coma Vigil_ upon me from April to November, without intermission. In
consideration of this circumstance, I know you will forgive all my
peevishness and discontent; tell Mrs. Moore that with regard to me,
she has as yet seen nothing but the wrong side of the tapestry." Thus
it happens in the life of authors, that they whose comic genius
diffuses cheerfulness, create a pleasure which they cannot themselves
participate.