Lord Chesterfield once remarked that a thoroughly vulgar man could not
speak the most common-place word, nor perform the most ordinary act,
without imparting to the one and the other a portion of his own inborn
vulgarity. And exactly so is it with the Yankees; not a question can
arise, no matter how great its importance, nor how trivial its bearings,
upon which, the moment they express an opinion, they do not completely
invest with their own native coarseness, insolence, and vulgarity. The
boundary question was made a matter of violent invective and ruffian
abuse; the right of search was treated with the same powers of ribaldry
towards England; and now we have these amiable and enlightened citizens
defending the wholesale piracy of British authors, not on the plausible
but unjust pretext of the benefit to be derived from an extended
acquaintance with English literature; but, only conceive! because, if
“English authors were invested with any control over the republication
of their own books, it would be no longer possible for American editors
to alter and adapt them as they do now to the American taste.” However
incredible this may seem, the passage formed part of a document actually
submitted to congress, and favourably received by that body. This is not
the place for me to dwell on the unprincipled usurpation by which men
who have contributed nothing to the production of a work, assume
the power of reaping its benefits, and profiting by its success. The
wholesale robbery of English authors has been of late well and ably
exposed. The gifted and accomplished author of “Darnley” and “The Gipsy”
has devoted his time and his talents to the subject; and although the
world at large have few sympathies with the wrongs of those who live to
please them, yet the day is not distant when the rights of a large and
influential body, who stamp the age with the image of their own minds,
can be no longer neglected, and the security of literary property
must become at least as great as of mining scrip, or the shares in a
rail-road.
My present business is with the Yankee declaration, that English
authors to be readable in America must be passed through the ordeal
of re-writing. I scarcely think that the annals of impertinence and
ignorance could equal this. What! is it seriously meant that Scott and
Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers, Bulwer, James, Dickens, and a host
of others, must be converted into the garbage of St. Giles, or the
foetid slang of Wapping, before they can pass muster before an American
public? Must the book reek of “gin twist,” “cock tail,” and fifty
other abominations, ere it reach an American drawing-room? Must the
“bowie-knife and the whittling-stick” mark its pages; and the coarse
jest of some tobacco-chewing, wildcat-whipping penny-a-liner disfigure
and sully the passages impressed with the glowing brilliancy of Scott,
or the impetuous torrent of Byron's genius? Is this a true picture of
America? Is her reading public indeed degraded to this pass? I certainly
have few sympathies with brother Jonathan. I like not his spirit of
boastful insolence, his rude speech, or his uncultivated habits; but I
confess I am unwilling to credit this. I hesitate to believe in such
an amount of intellectual depravity as can turn from the cultivated
writings of Scott and Bulwer to revel in the coarseness and vulgarity
of a Yankee editor, vamping up his stolen wares with oaths from the far
west, or vapid jests from life in the Prairies. Again, what shall I say
of those who follow this traffic? Is it not enough to steal that which
is not theirs, to possess themselves of what they have no right or claim
to? Must they mangle the corpse when they have extinguished life? Must
they, while they cheat the author of his gain, rob him also of his
fair fame? “He who steals my purse steals trash,” but how shall I
characterise that extent of baseness that dares to step in between an
author and his reputation--inserting between him and posterity their own
illiterate degeneracy and insufferable stupidity?
Would not the ghost of Sir Walter shudder in his grave at the thought
of the fair creations of his mind--Jeanie Deans and Rebecca--Yankeefied
into women of Long Island, or damsels from Connecticut? Is Childe Harold
to be a Kentucky-man? and are the vivid pictures of life Bulwer's novels
abound in, to be converted into the prison-discipline school of manners,
that prevail in New York and Boston, where, as Hamilton remarks, “the
men are about as like gentlemen, as are our new police?” What should we
say of the person who having stolen a Rembrandt or a Vandyke from its
owner, would seek to legalise his theft by daubing over the picture
with his own colours--obliterating every trace of the great master, and
exulting that every stroke of his brush defaced some touch of genius,
and that beneath the savage vandalism of his act, every lineament of the
artist was obliterated? I ask you, would not mere robbery be a virtue
beside such a deed as this? Who could compare the sinful promptings to
which want and starvation give birth to, to the ruffian profligacy of
such barbarity? And now, when I tell you, that not content with this,
not satisfied to desecrate the work, the wretch goes a step farther and
stabs its author--what shall I say of him now, who, when he had defaced
the picture, marred every effect, distorted all drawing, and rendered
the whole a chaotic mass of indistinguishable nonsense, goes forth to
the world, and announces, “This is a Rembrandt, this is a Vandyke: ay,
look at it and wonder: but with all its faults, and all its demerits,
it is cried up above our native artists; it has got the seal of the old
world's approval upon it, and in vain we of younger origin shall dare
to dissent from its judgments.” Now, once more, I say, can you show the
equal of this moral turpitude? and such I pledge myself is the conduct
of your transatlantic pirates with respect to British literature. Mr.
Dickens, no mean authority, asserts that in the same sheet in which
they boast the sale of many thousand copies of an English reprint, they
coarsely attack the author of that very book, and heap scurrility and
slander on his head.
Yes, such is the fact; not satisfied with robbery, they murder
reputation also. And then we find them expatiating in most moving terms
over the superiority of their own neglected genius!