But, indeed, my image just now was both uncomplimentary and unjust: for,
parallel with the change in the poet to which I have referred, a still
more unnatural change is making itself apparent in the type of the
publisher. It would almost seem as if the two are changing places. Instead
of the poet humbly waiting, hat in hand, kicking his heels for half a day
in the publisher's office, it is the publisher who seeks him, who writes
for appointments at his private house, or invites him to dinner. Yet it
behoves the poet to be on his guard. A publisher, like another personage,
has many shapes of beguilement, and it is not unlikely that this
flattering deference is but another wile to entrap the unwary. There is
no way of circumventing the dreamer so subtle as to flatter his business
qualities. We all like to be praised for the something we cannot do. It is
for this reason that Mr. Stevenson interferes with Samoan politics, when
he should be writing romances--just the desire of the dreamer to play the
man of action.
But I am not going to weary you by indulging in the stale old diatribes
against the publisher. For, to speak seriously the honest truth, I think
they are in the main a very much abused race. Thackeray put the matter
with a good deal of common-sense, in that scene in _Pendennis_ where Pen
and Warrington walk home together from the Fleet prison, after hearing
Captain Shandon read that brilliant prospectus of the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
which he had written for bookseller Bungay, and for which that gentleman
disbursed him a £5 note on the spot. Pen, you will remember, was full of
the oppressions of genius, of Apollo being tied down to such an Admetus as
Bungay. Warrington, however, took a maturer view of the matter.
'A fiddlestick about men of genius!' he exclaimed, 'I deny that there are
so many geniuses as people who whimper about the fate of men of letters
assert there are. There are thousands of clever fellows in the world who
could, if they would, turn verses, write articles, read books, and deliver
a judgment upon them; the talk of professional critics and writers is not
a whit more brilliant, or profound, or amusing than that of any other
society of educated people. If a lawyer, or a soldier, or a parson outruns
his income, and does not pay his bills, he must go to gaol; and an author
must go too. If an author fuddles himself, I don't know why he should be
let off a headache the next morning--if he orders a coat from the
tailor's, why he shouldn't pay for it....'
Dr. Johnson, who had no great reason to be prejudiced in their favour,
defined booksellers as 'the patrons of literature,' and M. Anatole France
has recently said that 'a great publisher is a kind of Minister for
_belles-lettres_.' Such definitions are, doubtless, prophecies of the
ideal rather than descriptions of the actual. Yet, fairly dealt with, the
history of publishing would show a much nearer living up to them on the
part of publishers than the poets and their sentimental sympathisers are
inclined to admit. We hear a great deal of Milton getting £10 for
_Paradise Lost_, and the Tonsons riding in their carriage, but seldom of
Cottle adventuring thirty guineas on Coleridge's early poems, or the
Jacksons giving untried boys £10--or, according to some accounts, £20--for
_Poems by Two Brothers_.
To open the case for the bookseller or the publisher. The poet, to start
with, bases his familiar complaints on a wilful disregard of the relation
which poetry bears to average humanity. You often hear him express
indignant surprise that the sale of butcher's meat should be a more
lucrative business than the sale of poetry. But, surely, to argue thus is
to manifest a most absurd misapprehension of the facts of life. Wordsworth
says that 'we live by admiration, joy, and love.' So doubtless we do: but
we live far more by butcher's meat and Burton ale. Poetry is but a
preparation of opium distilled by a minority for a minority. The poet may
test the case by the relative amounts he pays his butcher and his
bookseller. So far as I know, he pays as little for his poetry as
possible, and never buys a volume by a brother-singer till he has vainly
tried six different ways to get a presentation copy. The poet seems
incapable of mastering the rudimentary truth that ethereals must be based
on materials. 'No song, no supper' is the old saw. It is equally true
reversed--no supper, no song. The empty-stomach theory of creation is a
cruel fallacy, though undoubtedly hunger has sometimes been the spur which
the clear soul doth raise.
The conditions of existence compel the publisher to be a tradesman on the
same material basis as any other. Ideally, a poem, like any other
beautiful thing, is beyond price; but, practically, its value depends on
the number of individuals who can be prevailed upon to purchase it. In its
ethereal--otherwise its unprinted--state, it is only subject to the laws
of the celestial ether, one of which is that it yields no money; properly
speaking, money is there an irrelevant condition. Byron, you remember,
would not for a long time accept any money from Murray for his poems,
successful as they were. He had a proper sense of the indignity of
_selling_ the children of his soul. The incongruity is much as though we
might go to Portland Road and buy an angel, just as we buy a parrot. The
transactions of poetry and of sale are on two different planes. But so
soon as, shall we say, you debase poetry by bringing it down to the lower
plane, it becomes subject to the laws of that plane. An unprinted poem is
a spiritual thing, but a printed poem is subject to the laws of matter. In
the heaven of the poet's imagination there are no printers and
paper-makers, no binders, no discounts to the trade and thirteen to the
dozen; but on earth, where alone, so far as we know, books exist, these
terrestrial beings and conditions are of paramount importance, and cannot
be ignored. It may be perfectly true that a certain poem is so fine that,
in a properly constituted cosmogony, it ought to support you to the end of
your days; but is the publisher to blame because, in spite of its manifest
genius, he can sell no more than 500 copies?
Then, to take another point of view, it is, I think, quite demonstrable
that, compared with the men of many other callings, a poet who can get his
verses accepted is very well paid. Take a typical instance. You spend an
absolutely beatific evening with Clarinda in the moonlit woodland. You go
home and relieve your emotions in a sonnet, which, we will say, at a
generous allowance, takes you half an hour to write. Next morning in that
cold calculating mood for which no business man can match a poet, you copy
it out fair and send it to a friendly editor. Perhaps out of Clarinda
alone you beget a sonnet a week, which at £2, 2s. a week is £109, 4s. a
year--not to speak of Phyllis and Dulcinea. At any rate, take that one
sonnet. For an evening with Clarinda, for which alone you would have paid
the sum, and for a beggarly half-hour's work, you receive as much as many
a City clerk earns by six hard days' work, eight hours to the dreary day,
with perhaps a family to keep and a railway contract to pay for.
Half-an-hour's work, and if you can live on £2, 2s. a week, the rest of
your time is free as air! Moreover, you have the option of going about
with a feeling that you are a being vastly superior to your fellows,
because forsooth you can string fourteen lines together in decent
Petrarcan form, and they cannot. And to return for a moment to Clarinda:
it seems to me that your publisher, with all his ill-gotten gains,
compares favourably with you in your treatment of your partner in the
production of that sonnet What about the woman's half-profits in the
matter? For, remember, if the publisher depends on the brains of the poet,
the poet is no less dependent on the heart of the woman. It is from woman,
in nine cases out of ten, that the poets have drawn their inspiration. And
how have they, in eight cases out of this nine, treated her? The story is
but too familiar. Will it always seem so much worse to pick a man's brains
than to break a woman's heart?
We touched just now on the arrogance of the poet. It is one of the most
foolish and distasteful of his faults, and one which unfortunately the
world has conspired from time immemorial to confirm. He has been too long
the spoiled child, too long allowed to think that anything becomes him,
too long allowed to ride rough-shod over the neck of the average man.
Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, while celebrating the poet, sneers at
'your common men' who 'lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap,
dine.' But why? All these--with, perhaps, the exception of reigning--are
very proper and necessary things to be done, and any one of them, done in
the true spirit of work, is every bit as dignified as the writing of
poetry, and often, I am afraid, a great deal more so. This scorn of the
common man is but another instance of the poet's ignorance of the facts of
life and the relations of things. The hysterical bitterness with which
certain sections of modern people of taste are constantly girding at the
_bourgeois_--which, indeed, as Omar Khayyám says, heeds 'as the sea's self
should heed a pebble-cast'--is one of the most melancholy of recent
literary phenomena. It was not so the great masters treated the common
man, nor any full-blooded age. But the torch of taste has for the moment
fallen into the hands of little men, anæmic and atrabilious, with neither
laughter nor pity in their hearts.
Besides, how easy it is to misjudge your so-called 'common man'! That fat,
undistinguished-looking Briton in the corner of the omnibus is as likely
as not Mr. So-and-So, the distinguished poet; and who but those with the
divining-rod of a kind heart know what refined sensibility and nobility of
character may lurk under an extremely _bourgeois_ exterior?
We live in an age of every man his own priest and his own lawyer. At a
pinch we can very well be every man his own poet. If the whole
supercilious crew of modern men of letters, artists, and critics were
wiped off the earth to-morrow, the world would be hardly conscious of the
loss. Nay, if even the entire artistic accumulation of the past were to be
suddenly swallowed up, it would be little worse off. For the world is more
beautiful and wonderful than anything that has ever been written about it,
and the most glorious picture is not so beautiful as the face of a spring
morning.