The Captain's Death Bed & Other Essays. Virginia Woolf

Most writers, to hear them talk, believe in the existence of a spirit, called, according to the age they live in, the Muse, Genius or Inspiration; and it is at her command that they write. Unfortunately the historian is bound to perceive that the lady is not altogether single and solitary. She conceals behind her robes a whole bevy of understrappers—great ladies, earls, statesmen, booksellers, editors, publishers and common men and women, who control and guide no less surely than the Muse. Change is of their nature, and as ill-luck will have it they grow steadily less picturesque as time draws on. Sidney’s Lady Pembroke, dreaming over her folios in the groves of Wilton, was no mean symbol of the goddess of poetry; but her place has been taken not by one man or woman but by a vast miscellaneous crowd, who want—they do not know exactly what. They must be amused and flattered; they must be fed on scraps and scandals and, finally, they must be sent sound asleep. And who is to be blamed if what they want they get?

The patron is always changing, and for the most part imperceptibly. But one such change in the middle of the eighteenth century took place in the full light of day, and has been recorded for us with his usual vivacity by Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself one of its victims:—

When the great Somers was at the helm [he wrote] patronage was fashionable among our nobility. … I have heard an old poet of that glorious age say, that a dinner with his lordship had procured him invitations for the whole week following; that an airing in his patron’s chariot has supplied him with a citizen’s coach on every future occasion….

But this link [he continues] now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, poet, or man of virtue…. He is called an author, and all know that an author is a thing only to be laughed at. His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company. At his approach the most fat unthinking face brightens into malicious meaning. Even aldermen laugh, and revenge on him the ridicule which was lavished on their forefathers….

To be laughed at by aldermen instead of riding in the chariots of statesmen was a change clearly not to the liking of a writer in whom we seem to perceive a spirit sensitive to ridicule and susceptible to the seduction of bloom-coloured velvet.

But the evils of the change went deeper. In the old days, he said, the patron was a man of taste and breeding, who could be trusted to see “that all who deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it”. Now in the mid-eighteenth century young men of brains were thrown to the mercy of the booksellers. Penny-a-lining came into fashion. Men of originality and spirit became docile drudges, voluminous hacks. They stuffed out their pages with platitudes. They “write through volumes while they do not think through a page”. Solemnity and pomposity became the rule. “On my conscience I believe we have all forgot to laugh in these days.” The new public fed greedily upon vast hunks of knowledge. They demanded huge encyclopaedias, soulless compilations, which were “carried on by different writers, cemented into one body, and concurring in the same design by the mediation of the booksellers”. All this was much to the disgust of a man who wrote clearly, shortly and outspokenly by nature; who held that “Were angels to write books, they never would write folios”; who felt himself among the angels but knew that the age of the angels was over. The chariots and the earls had winged their way back to Heaven; in their place stood a stout tradesman demanding so many lines of prose to be delivered by Saturday night without fail or the wretched hack would go without dinner on Sunday.

Goldsmith did his share of the work manfully, as a glance at the list of his works

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