Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

AUTHORS AS SUPPRESSORS OF THEIR BOOKS

BY W. H. OLDING, LL.B

Alike in the annals of forgery – State forgery of “real” evidence – and in the annals of the British drama, “The Golden Rump” has a history very well known. It was a farce, the representation of which was made the excuse for the passing of the Act whereunder the licensing of theatrical performances was established. At the same time it was a farce which those in power had directly induced its author to compose. That there was no one to imagine or tolerate a play sufficiently rampant to justify the proposal to fetter, which Party Government imagined it well to execute – that this was believed, becomes a testimony to the potency of customary self-regulation. Now conversely, and carrying the analogy to all branches of literature, it may be asserted that the suppression of books by authors themselves is likely to be comparatively frequent just in those countries in which the State does not much concern itself with suppression by its authority. If this analogy have force it must, to Englishmen, be peculiarly gratifying – though the elements of restraint have prevailed in our history to an extent far beyond general belief – at a time when Dr. Reusch’s excellent Index of books prohibited by the authority of Pope, Archbishop, or Continental University is extracting from the competent critics of all countries the homage which untiring assiduity, monumental learning, and rich moderation compel.

However, into the measurement of this comparative frequency, causes essentially enter. These, in England, as in other realms, have abounded. Now, of all the motives which have led authors to consign their compositions to the flames, one of the most frequent, if one of the least seductive, has been the ridicule and elaborate discouragement with which parents have received the knowledge of their offspring’s first essays. The feeling which prompts this is not one to be altogether blamed: it has its partial justification even in the distaste with which the recipient children lay open their treasure-house to those who in days of feebleness have guarded them. For there is, as Tom Tulliver felt, a “family repulsion which spoils the most sacred relations of our lives,” and which is only broken down by some community of art levelling with the sense of a universality wherein all distinction of discipleship is lost, or else by dire circumstance shattering into shapelessness beyond disguise. This, perhaps, rather than quicker sensitiveness, is why it is that young Mozart met response, but the little Burney girl did not. Only to Susanna, her sister, would Fanny breathe her secret, and anxious was she because her mother gained sufficient inkling to induce her periodically to tell the evils of a scribbling turn of mind. But, as with Petrarch centuries before, some time in her fifteenth year the promptings of obedience gained the day. “She resolved,” says Charlotte, her niece and editor, “to make an auto da fé of all her manuscripts, and, if possible, to throw away her pen. Seizing, therefore, an opportunity when Dr. and Mrs. Burney were from home, she made over to a bonfire in a paved play-court the whole stock of her compositions, while faithful Susanna stood by, weeping at the conflagration. Among the works thus immolated was one tale of considerable length, the ‘History of Caroline Evelyn,’ the mother of ‘Evelina.’”

As if further to justify the halting or rebuking posture which at first is apt to prove provocative of indignation, remarkable diffidence in maturer life has pushed its way into sight where early publications have been due to parental sympathy. The historian of Greece, Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, was taught Latin at the age of three: at four could “read Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him,” and at seven began the composition of didactic homilies. Now to this precocity was allied a taste for verse, especially as shown in Dryden and in Pope; and the result was the issue of a work, edited and prefaced by the father, entitled “Primitiæ: or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral and Entertaining; by Connop Thirlwall, eleven years of age.” But not only did these effusions lead to no riper verse, but it is understood the Bishop disliked the little book, and by no means enjoyed seeing copies of it. That he went to the length of Thomas Lovell Beddoes we are not prepared to say. He, when a freshman at Oxford, first owned himself an author by sending to the press the “Improvisatore.” “Of this little memento of his weakness, as he used to consider it,” says his biographer, “Beddoes soon became thoroughly ashamed, and long before he left Oxford he suppressed the traces of its existence, carrying the war of extermination into the bookshelves of his acquaintance, where, as he chuckled to record, it was his wont to leave intact its externals (some gay binding perhaps of his own selection), but thoroughly eviscerated, every copy on which he could lay his hands.”

Gymnasiarch as well as poet, it was natural that Pehr Henrik Ling, the Swede, should do whatever he did with energy. Still, the burning of eleven volumes by the time the age of twenty-one was reached must be allowed to show as much vigor and striving after excellence in the language of the gods as in what has been humorously termed “the language of nudges.” Indeed, the author of the epic “Asar” does not seem to have thrown any work into general circulation until he arrived at thirty, and then only on the pressure offered by some friends, without his knowledge, having got up a subscription for the publication of one of his poems, when, says he, “I could not honorably refuse.” Yet there must have been much of interest in these now perished volumes, for not only had their author, early as school-days, experienced something of the bitterness of life – of a political life, which was shared by the people – in being driven from Wexio because he would not betray innocent youngsters who had been comrades, but in the wandering outcast career which for some years following he had strange and drear experience, which, acting on a nature poetic and passionate, can hardly but have expressed itself now in soothing verse, now in melancholy, but ever in rich and true. It could at least be wished, if but for the purpose of forwarding that life-resulting interchange of matter which men of science assure us ceaselessly proceeds, that some of those who compose under feeble inspiration, or under inspiration which has lost its fire with lapse of time and change of circumstance, and which, though a spiritless yeast, tempts to use as a ferment, would be as little sparing in their sacrifices, so that it should not be held up as a thing for boast, as we perceive it of late to have been in the case of the Rev. Dr. Tiffany, that some five hundred pages of sermons have been delivered to the irrevocable pyre.

There is the semblance of a common motive inducing men to destroy their early work, and give over the labor of their hands to consumption on approach of death. But in the latter case there is usually more concentration and intensity of purpose. The purpose unquestionably may have this added intensity merely in meanness; but there is also scope for more valorous self-judgment. The argument is clearly seized by Dugald Stewart thus: —

It is but seldom that a philosopher who has been occupied from his youth with moral or political inquiries succeeds completely to his wish in stating to others the grounds upon which his own opinions are founded; and hence it is that the known principles of an individual who has approved to the public his candor, his liberality, and his judgment, are entitled to a weight and an authority independent of the evidence which he is able, upon any particular occasion, to produce in their support. A secret consciousness of this circumstance, and an apprehension that by not doing justice to an important argument the progress of truth may be rather retarded than advanced, have probably induced many authors to withhold from the world the unfinished results of their most valuable labors, and to content themselves with giving the general sanction of their suffrages to truths which they regarded as peculiarly interesting to the human race.

This finely balanced observation – kind, penetrating, lacking warmth, that it may appear more general, more forcible – was made apropos of Adam Smith. It appears from a letter to Hume that as early as 1773 Smith, who died in 1790, had determined that the bulk of the literary papers about him should never be published. And he would in after-life seem carefully to have separated, as he esteemed it worthy or not, whatever work he did. Among the papers destined to destruction one may guess – for though Smith, to the end a slow composer, had the habit of dictating to a secretary as he paced his room, the contents of his portfolios were not certainly known to any – were the lectures on rhetoric which he read at Edinburgh in 1748, and those on natural religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow. But his anxiety to blot out the trace of even these, which he was too conscientious not at one time to have deemed sound, so increased as his last painful illness drew the threads of life out of his willing hand, that Dr. Hutton says he not only entreated the friends to whom he had entrusted the disposal of his MSS., to destroy them with some small specified exceptions, in the event of his death; but at the last could not rest satisfied till he learnt that the volumes were in ashes; and to that state, to his marked relief, they were accordingly reduced some few days before his death.

This anxiety of Smith’s, who had justly confidence in his executors, has frequently been entertained very reasonably indeed with regard to reminiscences, the spicy character of which often requires the publication to be long posthumous, but tempts the graceless to make it not so. Rochefoucauld’s “Mémoires,” which have, however, more of the chronicle and less of the journal than is generally relished, were certainly delayed, as the event turned out, long enough after his death, in appearing in any tolerable form. But it had been like not to be so. While he was still living he found that at the shop of Widow Barthelin, relict of a printer of Rouen, his work had been secretly put to press by the orders of the Comte de Brienne. The Count had furtively made a copy from the manuscript borrowed from Arnaud d’Andilly, to whom Rochefoucauld had submitted it for the purposes of correction – “Particulièrement pour la pureté de la langue.” Measures as furtive were necessary to recover it. The Duke accordingly pounced on the printer, gave Widow Barthelin twenty-five pistoles, carried off the whole of the edition, and stored it in a garret of the Hôtel de Liancourt at Paris. We doubt if it is generally known that this edition, wherein the widow had shown few signs of care, was entitled, “Relation des guerres civiles de France, depuis août 1649 jusqu’à la fin de 1652.” In curious contrast is the fact that sometimes a relative destroys what the author has shown no vigilant scrupulousness in suppressing. It was perhaps esteemed by the “very devout lady of the family of St. John,” who was mother to the notable Rochester, on whose death Bishop Burnet has so improvingly written, that the final scenes of her son made it unsuitable that any of his papers should be kept – especially the history of the intrigues of the court of Charles II. reported by Bolingbroke to have been written by him in a series of letters to his friend Henry Saville.

Nor let it be supposed that this would have been so adverse to the desires of Rochester himself. The late James Thompson, author of the “City of Dreadful Night,” destroyed before his death all that he had written previous to 1857, though he has been very virulent against a sample king who of malice prepense with gross ingratitude thus treated the donor of a priceless if imaginary gift: —

A writer brought him truth;And first he imprisoned the youth;And then he bestowed a free pyreThat the works might have plenty of fire,And also to cure the painOf the headache called thought in the brain.

Pierius Valerianus tells us that Antonius Marosticus, when held in high esteem and loved of all men, enjoying the dainties of life at the court of some Cardinal, and dallying with existence which he had rooted hopes would henceforth be peaceful, was carried off within three days by a sudden epidemic. The doleful deed, Pierius says, was made more distressful by the fact that sanitary considerations required the cremation of all the dead man’s books with the dead man’s body. How far the sense of tragedy may lie in this melancholy incident, the death of Shelley helps one to appreciate. His corpse was washed ashore near the Via Reggio, four miles from that of his friend Williams, which lay close to the tower of Migliarino, at the Bocca Lericcio. The attitude was memorable. His right hand was clasped in his heart. Bent back and thrust away, as if in haste, was in a side pocket the last volume of the poet Keats. It had been lent by Leigh Hunt, who had told the borrower to keep it till he should return it by his own hands. This impossible, and Hunt refusing to receive it through others, it was burnt with the body amid frankincense and myrrh.

It was fit that the pathetic in death should spring from a cause so troublous in life. Again and again was Shelley wounded by the forced suppression of his work. Doubtless merit is not extreme in the two-act tragedy of “Œdipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant.” But its fate was as subtle and sure as that of Œdipus himself. Written abroad, it was transmitted to England, printed and published anonymously, and stifled at the very dawn of its existence by the “Society for the Suppression of Vice,” who threatened a prosecution upon it, if not immediately withdrawn. The friend who had taken the pains of bringing it out did not deem it worth the cost, to pocket and nerve, of a contest, and it was laid aside – only to be revived in Mrs. Shelley’s second edition. It is said, indeed, that but seven copies are extant, one of which Mr. Buxton Forman, the industrious and intelligent editor to whom the best students of Shelley feel themselves the most beholden, secured, by search through the vast stores of Mr. Lacy, the dramatic publisher of the Strand – one of the very last plays in the very last boxes – a mere paper pamphlet, devoid of a wrapper, carried away at the cost of a six-pence, proving to be the treasure. And far was the Œdipus from being the sole cause of trouble in respect of the works of its author. Posthumous Poems of Shelley were suppressed on the application of Sir Timothy, his father. The Posthumous Letters, which excellent forgers had contrived to manufacture from articles written after the decease of the poet, exercising an amount of ingenuity described as “most extraordinary,” and receiving the reward of the labor of their hands from Sir Percy Shelley, or from Mr. Moxon, were called in on the discovery of the fraud. “Laon and Cythna” was cancelled to make way for the “Revolt of Islam.” “Queen Mab,” which had been written when Shelley was eighteen, though completed only when in his twenty-first year, was surreptitiously published while its author was in Italy – copies having been distributed among his friends – and though adjudged by the Court of Chancery, from which an injunction was sought for restraint of this irregular edition, to be disentitled to privilege on the futile score of an immorality shocking to the British constitution, it and its notes were, so late as 1840, the subject of prosecutions and convictions to all who openly, being men of fair fame, ventured to publish it, as Mr. Moxon experienced.

The poets, indeed, of Shelley’s time were peculiarly unfortunate. It is a sound enough deduction of law that what is evil – is filthy, or blasphemous, or scandalous – cannot be for the benefit of the public to learn of, nor therefore an object of the law, which is built on the needs of society, to extend its protection to – a protection which has in view the advantages of private individuals only as members of society. But in this refusal of the active bestowment of privilege the guardian of public morals in an individual man, in no sense a representative of his country – a judge of the old Court of Chancery. Now in active suppression, in punishment for enticing the public to things contaminating and none the less subtle because presented in intellectual form, there is indeed the benefit of the presence of a judge, but the issue is with a jury. And the unfortunate interval, or breach, through which public morals are so roughly assailable is measured (usually at least) by the sum of the differences between a publication disentitled to privilege or worthy of punishment, and the judgment of an individual or the opinion of the country. In this vast moral interval, to say nothing of the interval of time which rapidity in administration, on the one hand, and slowness in administration on the other, scarcely ever fail to involve, there is an enticement to the indifferent part of the population, or to that bold and heroic part which dares to set up its private and painfully honest judgment against the judgment of a Chancery judge – to trade upon the bruited knowledge of a suspected well of evil, unchecked by unpalatable astringency in consumption of the draught. With the narrowness of men like Lords Eldon and Ellenborough, and the rebellious attitude held by a nation consciously approaching to the dawn of an age of a freedom of thought greater because more nobly and wit-wisely sanctioned, this breach was disastrously great, and beckoned the way to a flood of mischances directly or affectively extensive.

Now, a highly curious result of the working of these doctrines was seen in cases in which – not as with Shelley, nor as with Byron, who vainly sought in February 1822 to suppress the edition of “Cain” which the pirate, Benbow, had printed, and who in the same year saw his “Vision” first refused by the publishers of the Row, then given to John Hunt, then placed by John and his brother in the first number of the Liberal, and then made the subject of a true bill returned by a Middlesex grand jury on an indictment preferred by the “Constitutional Association” – in cases in which, I say, the authors, from change of opinion, were opposed to any publication of their earlier works. The most prominent instance of this occurs, of course, in the “Wat Tyler” of Laureate Southey. In the height of his pantisocratic schemes, and full of Socialist feelings, Southey had written this dramatic poem, and placed the manuscript in the hands of his brother-in-law, Robert Lovell; he took it to Mr. Ridgway, the London publisher. When Southey visited the Metropolis shortly afterwards, the year was 1794, Mr. Ridgway was in Newgate. Thither Southey went, and either found incarcerated in the same apartment with his publisher, or took with him, the Rev. Mr. Winterbottom, a dissenting minister. It was agreed that “Wat Tyler” should be published anonymously. The piece, however, appears to have been forgotten, and wholly to have escaped the memory of both publisher and Southey. But it had crept – so Cottle, Hone, and Browne may best be reconciled – into the hands of Mr. Winterbottom, who taking it with him, when years had passed, while on a visit to friends at Worcester, beguiled some dull hour by reading the piece for the amusement of the company, who were well pleased to pamper their dislike to Southey by chuckling at his ratting in political opinions. But generosity clearly demanded that this pleasant spirit of carping should have a sphere extended far beyond a Worcestershire company. So thought two of the guests, who, obtaining the manuscript, with great devotion sacrificed the long hours of night by transcribing it, being careful the while to preserve the privacy which attends the most highly charitable actions. Through their hands the transcription reached the publisher, and no sooner had his edition appeared than Southey became naturally anxious to lay the ghost of his former beliefs. For that purpose, with the advice of his friends, he applied for an injunction. Lord Eldon refused to grant it, on the plea that “a person cannot recover damages upon a work which in its nature is calculated to do injury to the public.” The decision of the Court encouraged the vendors to redouble their efforts, and not fewer than 60,000 copies are said to have been sold during the excitement the case created. As for poor Southey, he defended himself as best he could in the Courier, and underwent the further suspense of seeing a prosecution urged against him by turbulent spirits in the legislature – Lord Brougham first, and Mr. William Smith after. The ridicule was all the more increased by the fact that Southey had recently published in the Quarterly Review an article in most striking contrast. And it is noticeable that in his American Quarterly Review Dr. Orestes A. Brownson printed opinions destructive of his early views, which had also been in sympathy with Socialistic and transcendental movements, as well as with Unitarianism, and threw cold water upon, and indeed endeavored in his own country altogether to suppress, the work by which in this country he is best known, “Charles Elwood; or, the Infidel Converted.”

Certainly few authors have had better justification for a change of opinion than Adrian Beverland. In a work quite unfit for general reading, which purported to be issued “Eleutheropoli, in Horto Hesperidum, typis Adami, Evæ, Terræ filii, 1678,” he had maintained with nasty nicety that view of original sin which Henri Corneille Agrippa in his “Declamatio de originali Peccato” had nearly as undisguisedly maintained before him. For this performance he was cast into prison at Leyden, and would have fared badly enough had he not found means of escape. His work, however, was sufficiently thought of to provoke from Leonard Ryssenius a “justa detestatio libelli sceleratissimi,” just as a previous work had called from Allard Uchtman a “Vox clamantis in deserto, ad sacrorum ministros, adversus Beverlandum.” Passing these by, Beverland himself was contented to write stinging libels against the Leyden magistrates and professors, and then to flee to London, where he engaged himself principally in collecting odious pictures. But after a time came a measure of repentance, and though no excessive purity can be claimed for an “Admonition” published by Bateman, of London, in 1697, yet the preface or “advertisement” does certainly contain a strong condemnation of his “Peccatum originale.” Fifteen years after, he died in a state of deep poverty, a madman – impressed with the horrible idea that he was pursued by two hundred men allied by oath to slay him.

A state more interesting that either stanch advocacy or loud condemnation of a position once relied on is that of hesitation. It is one peculiarly unlikely to express itself, because the tendency of hesitation is to refrain; or if expressing itself to arrest attention, because subtile or feeble qualifications refer their interest to the themes they hedge and do not centre in themselves. But when a mind throws itself with force into a posture of racked doubt, and bids us be aware that the struggle, not the issue, is of utter worth, or when with yet greater fervor of expectancy a revelation, we know not whence, we know not whither, is awaited with every nerve full-strained, the world more surely than by either other mood becomes a gallery rocked with hearkening spectators. I think there is something of this earnest hesitation in a career it is not difficult, at this distance of time, to futilize – Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s. There is a very human weakness in his self-debate upon the publication of the “De Veritate,” but there is a very human need – and, moreover, a need made personal (as are all needs), though founded in philanthropy. Truly the more sacred experience is – unless it can reach to that intensity and presentness which thrills all who stand enclosed in the thin line of its horizon – the more clearly it is desecrated by the common tread, and seems a thing to mock at. So is it with the scene which Herbert himself describes.

Being thus doubtful in my chamber, one fair day in the summer, my casement being open towards the sun, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring, I took my work, “De Veritate,” in my hand, and kneeling on my knees, devoutly said these words: “O Thou eternal God, Author of the light which now shines upon me, and Giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech Thee, give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall suppress it.” I had no sooner spoken these words, but a loud, though yet gentle noise, came from heaven (for it was like nothing on earth), which did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded; whereupon also I resolved to print my book.