Calamities and Quarrels of Authors. Disraeli Isaac
sort among us: some of them have happily disappeared, and, whenever great authors obtain their due rights, the calamities of literature will be greatly diminished.
As for the phrase of “Authors by Profession,” it is said to be of modern origin; and Guthrie, a great dealer in literature, and a political scribe, is thought to have introduced it, as descriptive of a class of writers which he wished to distinguish from the general term. I present the reader with an unpublished letter of Guthrie, in which the phrase will not only be found, but, what is more important, which exhibits the character in its degraded form. It was addressed to a minister.
June 3, 1762.
“My Lord,
“In the year 1745–6, Mr. Pelham, then First Lord of the Treasury, acquainted me, that it was his Majesty’s pleasure I should receive, till better provided for, which never has happened, 200l. a-year, to be paid by him and his successors in the Treasury. I was satisfied with the august name made use of, and the appointment has been regularly and quarterly paid me ever since. I have been equally punctual in doing the government all the services that fell within my abilities or sphere of life, especially in those critical situations that call for unanimity in the service of the crown.
“Your Lordship may possibly now suspect that I am an Author by Profession: you are not deceived; and will be less so, if you believe that I am disposed to serve his Majesty under your Lordship’s future patronage and protection, with greater zeal, if possible, than ever.
“I have the honour to be,
“My Lord, &c.,
“William Guthrie.”
9
Unblushing venality! In one part he shouts like a plundering hussar who has carried off his prey; and in the other he bows with the tame suppleness of the “quarterly” Swiss chaffering his halbert for his price;—“to serve his Majesty” for—“his Lordship’s future patronage.”
Guthrie’s notion of “An Author by Profession,” entirely derived from his own character, was twofold; literary taskwork, and political degradation. He was to be a gentleman convertible into an historian, at—— per sheet; and, when he had not time to write histories, he chose to sell his name to those he never wrote. These are mysteries of the craft of authorship; in this sense it is only a trade, and a very bad one! But when in his other capacity, this gentleman comes to hire himself to one lord as he had to another, no one can doubt that the stipendiary would change his principles with his livery.[4]
Such have been some of the “Authors by Profession” who have worn the literary mask; for literature was not the first object of their designs. They form a race peculiar to our country. They opened their career in our first great revolution, and flourished during the eventful period of the civil wars. In the form of newspapers, their “Mercuries” and “Diurnals” were political pamphlets.[5] Of these, the Royalists, being the better educated, carried off to their side all the spirit, and only left the foam and dregs for the Parliamentarians; otherwise, in lying, they were just like one another; for “the father of lies” seems to be of no party! Were it desirable to instruct men by a system of political and moral calumny, the complete art might be drawn from these archives of political lying, during their flourishing era. We might discover principles among them which would have humbled the genius of Machiavel himself, and even have taught Mr. Sheridan’s more popular scribe, Mr. Puff, a sense of his own inferiority.
It is known that, during the administration of Harley and Walpole, this class of authors swarmed and started up like mustard-seed in a hot-bed. More than fifty thousand pounds 10 were expended among them! Faction, with mad and blind passions, can affix a value on the basest things that serve its purpose.[6] These “Authors by Profession” wrote more assiduously the better they were paid; but as attacks only produced replies and rejoinders, to remunerate them was heightening the fever and feeding the disease. They were all fighting for present pay, with a view of the promised land before them; but they at length became so numerous, and so crowded on one another, that the minister could neither satisfy promised claims nor actual dues. He had not at last the humblest office to bestow, not a commissionership of wine licences, as Tacitus Gordon had: not even a collectorship of the customs in some obscure town, as was the wretched worn-out Oldmixon’s pittance;[7] not a crumb for a mouse!
The captain of this banditti in the administration of Walpole was Arnall, a young attorney, whose mature genius for scurrilous party-papers broke forth in his tender nonage. This hireling was “The Free Briton,” and in “The Gazetteer” Francis Walsingham, Esq., abusing the name of a profound statesman. It is said that he received above ten thousand pounds for his obscure labours; and this patriot was suffered to retire with all the dignity which a pension could confer. He not only wrote for hire, but valued himself on it; proud of the pliancy of his pen and of his principles, he wrote without remorse what his patron was forced to pay for, but to disavow. It was from a knowledge of these “Authors by Profession,” writers of a faction in the name of the community, as they have been well described, that our great statesman Pitt fell into an error which he lived to regret. He did not 11 distinguish between authors; he confounded the mercenary with the men of talent and character; and with this contracted view of the political influence of genius, he must have viewed with awe, perhaps with surprise, its mighty labour in the volumes of Burke.
But these “Authors by Profession” sometimes found a retribution of their crimes even from their masters. When the ardent patron was changed into a cold minister, their pen seemed wonderfully to have lost its point, and the feather could not any more tickle. They were flung off, as Shakspeare’s striking imagery expresses it, like
| An unregarded bulrush on the stream, To rot itself with motion. |
Look on the fate and fortune of Amhurst. The life of this “Author by Profession” points a moral. He flourished about the year 1730. He passed through a youth of iniquity, and was expelled from his college for his irregularities: he had exhibited no marks of regeneration when he assailed the university with the periodical paper of the Terræ Filius; a witty Saturnalian effusion on the manners and Toryism of Oxford, where the portraits have an extravagant kind of likeness, and are so false and so true that they were universally relished and individually understood. Amhurst, having lost his character, hastened to reform the morals and politics of the nation. For near twenty years he toiled at “The Craftsman,” of which ten thousand are said to have been sold in one day. Admire this patriot! an expelled collegian becomes an outrageous zealot for popular reform, and an intrepid Whig can bend to be yoked to all the drudgery of a faction! Amhurst succeeded in writing out the minister, and writing in Bolingbroke and Pulteney. Now came the hour of gratitude and generosity. His patrons mounted into power—but—they silently dropped the instrument of their ascension. The political prostitute stood shivering at the gate of preferment, which his masters had for ever flung against him. He died broken-hearted, and owed the charity of a grave to his bookseller.
I must add one more striking example of a political author in the case of Dr. James Drake, a man of genius, and an excellent writer. He resigned an honourable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession for a party. As a Tory writer, he 12 dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded it by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MS. to the printer, who was never discovered, and was once saved by a flaw in the indictment from the simple change of an r for a t, or nor for not;—one of those shameful evasions by which the law, to its perpetual disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punishment. Dr. Drake had the honour of hearing himself censured from the throne; of being imprisoned; of seeing his “Memorials of the Church of England” burned at London, and his “Historia Anglo-Scotica” at Edinburgh. Having enlisted himself in the pay of the booksellers, among other works, I suspect, he condescended to practise some literary impositions. For he has reprinted Father Parson’s famous libel against the Earl of Leicester in Elizabeth’s reign, under the title of “Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1706,” 8vo, with a preface pretending it was printed from an old MS.
Drake was a lover