COPYRIGHT.

23

his work. The rewards of authorship have been sufficiently doubtful and varying in times before our own. In older lands, the poet, like his predecessor the minstrel, was at least protected and nourished by the good or great to whom he dedicated his song. Happily this kind of support was from the first impracticable in a liberal republic. But it long was impossible, on material grounds alone, although enthusiasts might attempt to live upon love and fame - that any vigorous and prevailing flood of poesy should be sustained in toiling, practical, frugal Amer ica. We now know that in art, as in life, ideal pro- Law of ductiveness follows, and does not precede, material production. security and wealth. The most creative eras of historic lands were those when their cities were the richest, when their galleons sought out distant ports, and their nobles and burgesses, sure of life's needs, craved for the luxuries of taste and emotion. Literature thrives as a means of subsistence, nor is poetry an exception to the rule. The supply answers to the demand. Not long ago in this country, few books, except school-books, were required by the people; and how should poetry, that looked from the printed page for its welcome and sustenance, be naturally composed? We are speaking of an ethereal art, but quietly examining the law of its activity.

It is, moreover, in America that the popular instinct, which resists whatever is asserted to be a tax upon knowledge, has worked with peculiar force against the development of a home-school. So long as our purveyors could avail themselves without cost or hindrance of foreign master-works, they scarcely could be expected to risk their means in behalf of native authorship. Pure idealists, men like Poe and Hawthorne, are little able to push their own fortunes.

The copy

right question.

International

copyright.

Disastrous

American

Until a state of law shall exist that will induce American publishers, driven from their distant foraging-grounds, to seek for genius at home and make it available, the support of our authors will not be so assured as to tend "in the end to the advancement of literature." International copyright at least would have made it feasible for the poet to earn his living by general literary work, and to reserve some heart and thought for his nobler calling. Now, when an organized movement at last seems under way toward copyright reform, it still is so hampered with reservations and class-interests that many ask whether it were not better to have no change at all than to have one that is partial, and that may postpone indefinitely the one thing needful, to wit: honest recognition of an author's right of property in his own creations, without any more limits of space and time than those appertaining to other kinds of estate.

Literature verily has been almost the sole product effect upon of human labor that has not been rated as the lastliterature. ing property of the producer and his heirs or assigns. This want of permanent copyright has borne severely upon authors in all countries, but most severely upon those of America, who have had to await the formation of public taste, to create their audiences, and who, while willing to suffer in their own persons, are less ready to devote lifetimes to the production of what will be valueless to those whom they hold most dear. The want of international copyright has been a wrong to our brother-writers in Europe. Their complaints are just; their cry has gone up for years. Great as the spoliations have been which they have endured, the effect upon our native literature and authorship has been far more disastrous. Our authors themselves do not comprehend it. A few of the great

AMERICAN CRITICISM.

publishing houses, grown rich upon the system of free reprints, of late have felt this wrong, and the men of heart and culture who control them are generously atoning for it. We see them leaders in artistic and literary movements, the friends of authors and artists, receiving for their public and private humanities our warmest tributes of honor and affection. It is said that every wrong in this world is surely, if slowly, righted; and the wrongs of authors doubtless will be set right. But who shall pick up water spilled to the ground? The writers of a new generation will never realize how bitter was the bread eaten by those who went before them and made their paths straight.

tests of

25

Critical periods are sometimes uncreative, yet there Unsatisis little doubt that our poetry has suffered, also, from the lack of those high and exquisite standards of criti- merit. cism which have been established in older lands. The poet, the artist, alike need the correction of a fine censorship and the tonic of that just appreciation which is the promise of fame. American verse, within recent memory, has experienced, first, á popular favor gained by its weakest and most effeminate sentiment; and, secondly, a rude exaggeration of its defects, a refusal to acknowledge its value as compared with that of the foreign product, or to consider its higher aspirations as practicable and worthy of respect. The people at large have passed from sham emotion to irreverence, and to a relish for what is flippant and ephemeral. Then, too, our most sincere and painstaking authorities often seem at a loss to estimate the nature of art, and criticise it from metaphysical or doctrinarian points of view. The poet or painter feels the wrong and the error, and, though he makes no complaint, they tell upon his buoyancy and application. Only of late have we begun to look for criti

Criticism

as it should be.

These local

and primitive diffi

culties are

now suc

ceeded by

the gener

al restric

tions of the

new era.

cism which applies both knowledge and self-knowledge to the test; which is penetrative and dexterous, but probes only to cure; which enters into the soul and purpose of a work, and considers every factor that makes it what it is; — the criticism which, above all, esteems it a cardinal sin to suffer a verdict to be tainted by private dislike, or by partisanship and the instinct of battle with an opposing clique or school. Such criticism is now essayed, but often is too much occupied with foreign or recondite subjects to search out and foster what is of worth among ourselves.

IV.

THESE, it seems to me, have been the local and organic difficulties with which the American poet, wittingly or unwittingly, has had to contend. They are not figments of the brain; their force has been real; time and national development alone have lessened them; during the continuation of their serious pressure the rise of poetry was delayed. It is curious to note that, just as their adverse influence began to pass away, a new class of restrictions came in play throughout the enlightened world, affecting our own idealists in common with those of the mother-land. When I long since began to think of the present work, I saw that the modern intellectual change was so absolute that I was compelled to seek for the general conditions of the period, and to attempt a review of the poets of England before entering upon our home-field, in order to comprehend justly the effect of the new atmosphere upon the spirit of poetry itself. In the first chapter of the Victorian Poets, certain perplexing elements are considered which have made the recent time one to which a hackneyed word, "transitional,"

THE MODERN WORLD.

27

torian Po 7-21.

ets": pp.

is more correctly applied than to any former period. The new learning the passage from the childlike cp. "Vicand phenomenal way of regarding things to the absolute, scientific penetration of their true entities and relations has directly told upon the work of the poet, requiring new language, imagery, invention, as he adapts himself to a deeper purpose and the hope of a sublimer faith. I have pointed out, as well, the struggles, devices, defeats, and victories of the English minstrels under the stress of latter-day iconoclasm and the invincible demands of modern thought; taking into account, also, the minor and obvious forces antagonistic to a devoted pursuit of the ideal,- among the rest the world's material activity, displayed in labor, invention, construction, the world's realistic eagerness, that makes of the newspaper, the novel, and the bulletins of science the food and outlets of the imagination, and renders mankind intent alone. upon each day's labor, so to hasten on the golden year. Reluctant to confront these ceaseless and perturbing manifestations, until out of them the world shall have derived a more assured philosophy, many of the latest singers have ignored them altogether: the weaker busying themselves with mere dilettanteism and the technique of their vocation, the nobler being devoted to the worship of beauty pure and simple, and often going back to its early revelations and the antique forms.

V.

last.

THESE generic burdens of the age itself have borne Dawn at even more severely upon American idealists than upon their transatlantic brethren. Yet it was when they first began to have their weight, and not until then,