THE CONDITION-OF-AUTHOR QUESTION.
Ma. MACKERAY wound up his admirable series of fashionable lec- tures with a moral, stern, eloquent, and incomplete. It often hap- pens thus : the author who most beautifully illustrates a truth cannot always analyze it. Scott, who transcended rivals in inven- tion, was poor in criticism ; Johnson, whose own fiction was a di- dactic effort, supplied the explanation which Goldsmith could not give of the well-known line—" Remote, nnfriended, melancholy, slow."
Mr. Thaekeray's peroration was an emphatic denial that the profession of authorship is looked down upon, and that authors are not received in society with enough consideration. The mien whose characteristics he had sketched, and sketched
with the suggestive hand of a master, served to illustrate this position e converso : all of them, he said, had enjoyed the consideration they deserved, where it was not abated' by their own misconduct or foible ; and in our own day, he contend- ed, the profession of authorship is held in esteem; the author is received with kindness and attention apportioned to his personal merit. Even if this assertion, taken as it stands, were strictly accurate, it would not meet the case on the other side ; but it is not accurate. The consideration which the humorists of the eighteenth century enjoyed, according to the lecturer's own ac- count, was far from being uniformly in proportion to their merits : the loose-moraled Sterne—whose picture was somewhat over- drawn—luxuriated in a social consideration wholly unknown to the innocent but eccentric Goldsmith ; Dick Steele, the charming and original inventor of "light literature" in England, played fag to the cold, self-seeking, commonplace, and fuddled Mr. Addison, whose powers Mr. Thackeray preposterously overrated. The best illustra- tion to favour thelecturer is that of Pope, whose appearance in public, like Voltaire's, was a triumph, and whose Dunciad originated " the Grub Street tradition." Mr. Thackeray glanced in a very skilful and graceful manner at the estimation in which popular authors of our own day are held ; and if there are disappointments, he argued, is not neglect equally the fate of the soldier, the sailor, the lawyer, the tradesman—of all ? But the two points here raised are not the points in question. The question is, not whether an individual, being an author, may not attain much social consideration by means not literary, but whether he attains that consideration as an au- thor, and in proportion to his merits ; and secondly, not whether all men are not liable to disappointment in the struggles of life, but whether that which is peculiar to authorship is not peculiarly sub- ject to neglect ?
Mr. Thackeray spoke as if the author, the lawyer, and the tradesman, stood on the same ground, and must be content to share the same chances : a position, indeed, in which he goes far beyond " society." The tradesman devotes himself to the acqui- sition of certain profits ; intelligence and prudence are tolerably certain of reward; and the tradesman secures precisely the thing for which he had laboured—his return is at least equal to his outlay. The object for which the lawyer works, qua lawyer, is successful practice ; and his success is exactly in proportion to his natural capacity at starting and his exertion. If all do not get the fixed prizes, all get an exact return for what they give. The author has this peculiarity in common with all artists—that, while he is at work, the thing for whose sake he works is art. He gives to society something more than can be the subject of payment—the labour of lore ; and the question is, whether so- ciety repays him in kind, videlicit, with love ? No ; the return to him as author is made to him by the bookseller; and even then it is suede not according to the artistic merit of the work but ac- cording to the law of "supply and demand "—demand, too, de- pending far less on the capacity of the author than on the capacity of the public. " How well," said Thackeray of Goldsmith, " how well the world has paid back all the love he had for it !"—Paid, however, in a very abstract sense. The world has felt the delight- ful emotion to which he moved it, and has luxuriated therein ; but when did that love reach Goldsmith ? That is just the whole case : the love has been enormous, and all of it the gift of that great artist ; but what proportion of that got back to him ? Un- less, indeed—But Mr. Thackeray did not mean any sacrificial allusion to the manes of the genius. The practical truth goes further yet : the first lawyer in the land takes precedence next after the Royal Family ; the tradesman who has received the exact quid pro quo for his exertions shall, when he has accumulated good store of that same quid, revel in boundless consideration ; and "the tenth transmitter of a foolish face," though he shall be as improvident as Dick Steele, as fuddled as Mr. Addison, as foul-tongued as Swift, as loose as Sterne, shall be more considered than an angel. Survey the table of social pre- cedency and say where the author stands, as author. Some tire received, half on sufferance, at great houses ; but if you find one really high on the social scale, it is for some condition extraneous to his art—he sits there, not as author of the Cosmos, but as Cham- berlain to his Majesty ; not as the poet of Italy, but as banker. The hardship to the author does not constitute the gravamen of this truth—art is its own solace : the worst mischief befals so- ciety, whose treatment of the artist on extraneous grounds not only tends to encourage inferior art of a trading tufthunting qua- lity, and so even to debauch students who might do higher things; but it is a confession that society has not altogether risen since the day when Petrarch was recognized as noble by his works, or Ra- phael walked as a prince for the palette in his hand.
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