Sir Thomas More. — And yet you talked of the improvement of the age, and of the current literature as exceeding in worth that of any former time
Montesinos. — The portion of it which shall reach to future times will justify me; for we have living minds who have done their duty to their own age and to posterity.
Sir Thomas More. — Has the age in return done its duty to them?
Montesinos. — They complain not of the age, but they complain of an anomalous injustice in the laws. They complain that authors are deprived of a perpetual property in the produce of their own labours, when all other persons enjoy it as an indefeasible and acknowledged right. And they ask upon what principle, with what equity, or under what pretence of public good they are subjected to this injurious enactment? Is it because their labour is so light, the endowments which are required for it so common, the attainments so cheaply and easily acquired, and the present remuneration in all cases so adequate, so ample, and so certain?
The act whereby authors are deprived of that property in their own works which, upon every principle of reason, natural justice, and common law, they ought to enjoy, is so curiously injurious in its operation, that it bears with most hardship upon the best works. For books of great immediate popularity have their run and come to a dead stop: the hardship is upon those which win their way slowly and difficultly, but keep the field at last. And it will not appear surprising that this should generally have been the case with books of the highest merit, if we consider what obstacles to the success of a work may be opposed by the circumstances and obscurity of the author, when he presents himself as a candidate for fame, by the humour or the fashion of the times; the taste of the public, more likely to be erroneous than right at any time; and the incompetence, or personal malevolence of some unprincipled critic, who may take upon himself to guide the public opinion, and who if he feels in his own heart that the fame of the man whom he hates is invulnerable, lays in wait for that reason the more vigilantly to wound him in his fortunes. In such cases, when the copyright as by the existing law departs from the author’s family at his death, or at the end of twenty-eight years from the first publication of every work, (if he dies before the expiration of that term,) his representatives are deprived of their property just as it would begin to prove a valuable inheritance.
The last descendants of Milton died in poverty. The descendants of Shakespeare are living in poverty, and in the lowest condition of life. Is this just to these individuals? Is it grateful to the memory of those who are the pride and boast of their country? Is it honourable, or becoming to us as a nation, holding — the better part of us assuredly, and the majority affecting to hold — the names of Shakespeare and Milton in veneration?
To have placed the descendants of Shakespeare and Milton in respectability and comfort — in that sphere of life where, with a full provision for our natural wants and social enjoyments, free scope is given to the growth of our intellectual and immortal part, simple justice was all that was required, only that they should have possessed the perpetual copyright of their ancestors’ works, only that they should not have been deprived of their proper inheritance.
The decision which time pronounces upon the reputation of authors, and upon the permanent rank which they are to hold in the estimation of posterity, is unerring and final. Restore to them that perpetuity in the property of their works, of which the law has deprived them, and the reward of literary labour will ultimately be in just proportion to its deserts.
However slight may be the hope of obtaining any speedy redress, there is some satisfaction in earnestly protesting against this injustice. And believing as I do, that if society continues to improve, no injustice will long be permitted to continue after it has been fairly exposed, and is clearly apprehended, I cannot but believe that a time must come when the rights of literature will be acknowledged and its wrongs redressed; and that those authors hereafter who shall deserve well of posterity, will have no cause to reproach themselves for having sacrificed the interests of their children when they disregarded the pursuit of fortune for themselves.
COLLOQUY XV. — THE CONCLUSION.
Montesinos. — Here Sir Thomas is the opinion which I have attempted to maintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in a proper position, and inexpugnably entrenched here according to the rules of art, by the ablest of all moral engineers.
Sir Thomas More. — Who may this political Achilles be whom you have called in to your assistance?
Montesinos. — Whom Fortune rather has sent to my aid, for my reading has never been in such authors. I have endeavoured always to drink from the spring-head, but never ventured out to fish in deep waters. Thor, himself, when he had hooked the Great Serpent, was unable to draw him up from the abyss.
Sir Thomas More. — The waters in which you have now been angling have been shallow enough, if the pamphlet in your hand is, as it appears to be, a magazine.
Montesinos.—”Ego sum is,” said Scaliger, “qui ab omnibus discere volo; neque tam malum librum esse puto, ex quo non aliquem fructum colligere possum.” I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, for examining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage which elucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of the third and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a great deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they are to taste and public feeling, and the public before deeply injurious to the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found to compensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are now become the staple commodities of such journals. This number contains Kant’s idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and that Kant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him to be, this little treatise would fully convince me, if I had not already believed it, in reliance upon one of the very few men who are capable of forming a judgment upon such a writer.
The sum of his argument is this: that as deaths, births, and marriages, and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be in themselves, are nevertheless reduceable upon the great scale to certain rules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history a steady and continuous, though slow development of certain great predispositions in human nature, and that although men neither act under the law of instinct, like brute animals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan, like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in a regular stream of tendency toward this development; individuals and nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory purposes, following the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thus promoting a process which, even if they perceived it, they would little regard. What that process is he states in the following series of propositions: —
1st. All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed by nature, are destined in the end to develop themselves perfectly and agreeably to their final purpose.
2nd. In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencies which have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtain their perfect development in the species only, and not in the individual.
3rd. It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself alone everything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animal existence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness or perfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, through his own reason.
4th. The means which nature employs to bring about the development of all the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of those tendencies in the social state, no farther, however, than to that point at which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements founded in law.
5th. The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice.
6th. This problem is, at the same time, the most
difficult of all, and the one which is latest solved by man.
7th. The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution of society depends upon the problem of a system of international relations, adjusted to law, and apart from this latter problem cannot be solved.
8th. The history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and as the condition of that, by the last proposition, in its external relations also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed.
Sir Thomas More. — This is indeed a master of the sentences, upon whose text it may be profitable to dwell. Let us look to his propositions. From the first this conclusion must follow, that as nature has given men all his faculties for use, any system of society in which the moral and intellectual powers of any portion of the people are left undeveloped for want of cultivation, or receive a perverse direction, is plainly opposed to the system of nature, in other words, to the will of God. Is there any government upon earth that will bear this test?
Montesinos. — I should rather ask of you, will there ever be one?
Sir Thomas More. — Not till there be a system of government conducted in strict conformity to the precepts of the Gospel.
Montesinos.
“Offer these truths to Power, will she obey?
It prunes her pomp, perchance ploughs up the root.”
Lord Brooke.
Yet, in conformity to those principles alone, it is that subjects can find their perfect welfare, and States their full security. Christianity may be long in obtaining the victory over the powers of this world, but when that consummation shall have taken place the converse of his second proposition will hold good, for the species having obtained its perfect development, the condition of society must then be such that individuals will obtain it also as a necessary consequence.
Sir Thomas More. — Here you and your philosopher part company. For he asserts that man is left to deduce from his own unassisted reason everything which relates not to his mere material nature.
Montesinos. — There, indeed, I must diverge from him, and what in his language is called the hidden plan of nature, in mine will be the revealed will of God.
Sir Thomas More. — The will is revealed; but the plan is hidden. Let man dutifully obey that will, and the perfection of society and of human nature will be the result of such obedience; but upon obedience they depend. Blessings and curses are set before you — for nations as for individuals — yea, for the human race.
Flatter not yourself with delusive expectations! The end may be according to your hope — whether it will be so (which God grant!) is as inscrutable for angels as for men. But to descry that great struggles are yet to come is within reach of human foresight — that great tribulations must needs accompany them — and that these may be — you know not how near at hand!
Throughout what is called the Christian world there will be a contest between Impiety and Religion; the former everywhere is gathering strength, and wherever it breaks loose the foundations of human society will be shaken. Do not suppose that you are safe from this danger because you are blest with a pure creed, a reformed ritual, and a tolerant Church! Even here the standard of impiety has been set up; and the drummers who beat the march of intellect through your streets, lanes, and market-places, are enlisted under it.
The struggle between Popery and Protestanism is renewed. And let no man deceive himself by a vain reliance upon the increased knowledge, or improved humanity of the times! Wickedness is ever the same; and you never were in so much danger from moral weakness.
Co-existent with these struggles is that between the feudal system of society as variously modified throughout Europe, and the levelling principle of democracy. That principle is actively and indefatigably at work in these kingdoms, allying itself as occasion may serve with Popery or with Dissent, with atheism or with fanaticism, with profligacy or with hypocrisy, ready confederates, each having its own sinister views, but all acting to one straightforward end. Your rulers meantime seem to be trying that experiment with the British Constitution which Mithridates is said to have tried upon his own; they suffer poison to be administered in daily doses, as if they expected that by such a course the public mind would at length be rendered poison-proof!
The first of these struggles will affect all Christendom; the third may once again shake the monarchies of Europe. The second will be felt widely; but nowhere with more violence than in Ireland, that unhappy country, wherein your government, after the most impolitic measures into which weakness was ever deluded, or pusillanimity intimidated, seems to have abdicated its functions, contenting itself with the semblance of an authority which it has wanted either wisdom or courage to exert.
There is a fourth danger, the growth of your manufacturing system; and this is peculiarly your own. You have a great and increasing population, exposed at all times by the fluctuations of trade to suffer the severest privations in the midst of a rich and luxurious society, under little or no restraint from religious principle, and if not absolutely disaffected to the institutions of the country, certainly not attached to them: a class of men aware of their numbers and of their strength; experienced in all the details of combination; improvident when they are in the receipt of good wages, yet feeling themselves injured when those wages, during some failure of demand, are so lowered as no longer to afford the means of comfortable subsistence; and directing against the government and the laws of the country their resentment and indignation for the evils which have been brought upon them by competition and the spirit of rivalry in trade. They have among them intelligent heads and daring minds; and you have already seen how perilously they may be wrought upon by seditious journalists and seditious orators in a time of distress.
On what do you rely for security against these dangers? On public opinion? You might as well calculate upon the constancy of wind and weather in this uncertain climate. On the progress of knowledge? it is such knowledge as serves only to facilitate the course of delusion. On the laws? the law which should be like a sword in a strong hand, is weak as a bulrush if it be feebly administered in time of danger. On the people? they are divided. On the Parliament? every faction will be fully and formidably represented there. On the government? it suffers itself to be insulted and defied at home, and abroad it has shown itself incapable of maintaining the relations of peace and amity with its allies, so far has it been divested of power by the usurpation of the press. It is at peace with Spain, and it is at peace with Turkey; and although no government was ever more desirous of acting with good faith, its subjects are openly assisting the Greeks with men and money against the one, and the Spanish Americans against the other. Athens, in the most turbulent times of its democracy, was not more effectually domineered over by its demagogues than you are by the press — a press which is not only without restraint, but without responsibility; and in the management of which those men will always have most power who have least probity, and have most completely divested themselves of all sense of honour and all regard for truth.
The root of all your evils is in the sinfulness of the nation. The principle of duty is weakened among you; that of moral obligation is loosened; that of religious obedience is destroyed. Look at the worldliness of all classes — the greediness of the rich, the misery of the poor, and the appalling depravity which is spreading among the lower classes through town and country; a depravity which proceeds unchecked because of the total want of discipline, and for which there is no other corrective than what may be supplied by fanaticism, which is itself an evil.
If there be nothing exaggerated in this representation, you must acknowledge that though the human race, considered upon the great scale, should be proceeding toward the perfectibility for which it may be designed, the present aspects in these kingdoms are nevertheless rather for evil than for good. Sum you up now upon the h
opeful side.
Montesinos. — First, then. I rest in a humble but firm reliance upon that Providence which sometimes in its mercy educes from the errors of men a happier issue than could ever have been attained by their wisdom; — that Providence which has delivered this nation from so many and such imminent dangers heretofore.
Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey Page 242