by Ouida
The number of volumes which pour annually from the English press is, at the present hour, appalling. One house alone produces, in number, enough volumes for the whole trade. Why are these volumes, usually worthless, ever produced? Why do the circulating libraries accept them? Who reads them? Who buys them? Why does one see in the lists of London ‘remainders’ the announcement of volumes originally published at six, eight, ten, twelve shillings, to be sold second-hand, perfectly new and uncut, at the miserable prices of two shillings, eighteen-pence, one shilling, and even sixpence? Amongst these is sometimes a work of real and scholarly worth, which it is painful to see thus sacrificed, but rarely; for it is rarely that such a work is now issued in London. Where is this to end? With whom does the fault of it lie? Someone, I suppose, must gain by such an insane method of over-production, but I cannot see who it can possibly be. One well-known publisher tells me that he must issue books thus, or starve. He is not in danger of bodily starvation, but the public is mentally starved by such a system.
When the three-volume novel was abolished (a course which I urged long before it was taken) great things were expected by many from its abolition. I myself hoped that London would adopt the Paris method, and issue novels and all other works, except éditions de luxe, at small prices and in paper covers; not the gaudy, hideous, pictorial, paper cover, but the pale smooth grey or cream-coloured paper, so easily obtainable, with the title of the book clearly printed on its flank. Instead of this result, some unwritten law, as violently despotic as that which used to compel the three-volume issue, has decreed that the London romance shall always appear in a cloth-bound volume at six shillings; the most foolish price that could be selected, too dear to be suitable for private purchase, too low to allow of a handsome edition being issued. There is something grotesquely ludicrous, as well as extremely painful, in seeing the lists of ‘ten new six-shilling novels,’ or ‘a dozen new six-shilling novels,’ whereby some publishers’ advertisement lists are disfigured in the newspapers with every new season. It makes a commerce of fiction in a manner most injurious and deplorable.
Again, no sooner has the six-shilling novel been a year before the public, than the publisher issues the self-same book at two-and-sixpence. Why does he cut his own throat thus? It is to me as inexplicable as why the London drapers sell you a stuff at six shillings a yard in February, but, if you wait till June, sell it you at two-and-sixpence a yard at the clearance sales. Either the stuff is sold at a price unjust and unfair to the purchaser in February, or it is sold at a price unjust and unfair to the vendor in June. From this proposition there seems to me no escape.
It is the same with the six-shilling book as with the draper’s stuffs. If the first price be correct, why alter it to the second in a year’s time? If the second price be sufficient to pay expense of production, why not start with it.
The draper, moreover, has an advantage over the publisher. If I want a stuff whilst it is a novelty, and when its like has not been worn by shop girls and servant girls, I must buy it at its high price in February; but if I want to read a novel whilst it is at its highest price, I can read it in that form, taking it from the libraries, and wait for a year to buy it at its lower price, if I then care to do so, which it is improbable that I shall do.
Now, why not have from first to last, in London, an edition of a novel similar to that French form which is good enough for Pierre Loti, for Gyp, for Anatole France, for the brilliant Frères Margueritte? Why?
I suppose because our masters, the librarians, will not have it so; or because some other unwritten law lies like lead on the souls of London publishers.
I read few English books for pleasure myself, I prefer the literatures of other countries; but it pains me to see such a deluge of worthless verbosity pour from London lanes and London streets where printing presses of yore worked for Addison and Goldsmith, Thackeray and Arthur Helps.
If this stream of pseudo-literature be not stopped, it will carry away and swamp all true English literature under it, as a moving bog covers flocks and pastures, cottages and country seats.
I have asked several London publishers why it is allowed to go on; their answers are evasive and contradictory. They assert that most of the volumes published are paid for by the authors; that they themselves must publish something, or cease to exist as a trade; and that the public does not know good from bad, so it does not matter what is printed. Yet, surely to them, as to the drapers, the apparently insensate system must be lucrative, or it would not be pursued?
There was a comical lamentation in the London Press the other day for what was called ‘the death of the novel’; not the approaching death which I expect for it by suffocation under the dust-storms of verbosity and imbecility, but of death by its own suicide, through its own curtailed proportions. It was indignantly asked why it was not as long as it used to be in the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, and why novelists now wrote short stories which in that period would have found no sale, would not, indeed, have even found the preliminary necessary to a sale-publication.
Surely we remember some short stories called The Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes, and others telling the adventures of the Great Hoggarty Diamond and of one Barry Lyndon? As for the length of novels nowadays, my own Massarenes, published in 1897, contains precisely the same number of words as Esmond, and, I think, Mr Mallock’s novels, and those of Mrs Humphry Ward, must surely be quite as long, whilst Mr Hall Caine’s marvellous narratives appear as endless as ‘the thread of Time reel’d off the wheel of Fate.’ The critic who grieves over the brevity of present-day volumes, thinks that Thackeray and Dickens wrote at such length because they were obliged to fill their monthly numbers! It seems to me far more likely that they were in love with their characters, as every writer of true talent is, and lingered tenderly over many needless details and dialogues out of sheer pleasure in their creations; and it must be admitted that both of them had naturally a discursive style, which would have been the better for some excision. But were it true that there is an unwritten law which limits or expands the length of romances according to the public caprice or taste, surely nothing could be more harmful to fiction than such limitation? Every story, if it be worth the telling, has its own natural length, which cannot be stretched or shortened arbitrarily without hurt. The sculptor knows that the form which he creates has its own natural proportions, its own inherent symmetry according to natural rules, which he must obey. The painter knows that, according to the nature of his subject, and of his intended treatment, he must take for his picture, either a small panel, a kit-kat, or a large canvas; and that if he force its dimensions, either by over-compression or over-extension, his work will be a failure.
Why is the author not bound by the same canon of art? Artistically, he certainly is so bound. Intellectually, he certainly is so bound. That this obligation is continually defied and broken through by many English writers, proves only that the great majority of these writers are not artists in any sense of the word.
The brevity or length of a literary work can have nothing to do with its beauty or excellence. If it be beautiful, if it be excellent, its proportions will be those which naturally grew out of its subject; and the writer who is an artist will know, as the painter knows, that he cannot alter the unwritten law which prescribes to him those proportions. What has either length or brevity to do with either excellence or beauty? What give both excellence and beauty are qualities not to be measured by a publisher’s counting up of words, or a printer’s enumeration of pages.
A sketch of a few pages of Maupassant’s is worth all the volumes put together of Georges Ohnet; one of the Sonnets of Proteus is worth the whole swagger of the Seven Seas.
There seems to be, unhappily, an unwritten law in English literature that cheapness must of necessity be allied to ugliness. A cheap book is in England an inferior and unlovely thing. But it need not be so. It is not so everywhere. I have now before me a book of Pompeo Molmenti’s, issued by Bemporad, of Florence; its cost
is two francs twenty-five centièmes; less than one-and-sixpence in your money. It is bound in thick cream-coloured paper; it is called Il Moretto di Brescia, being a brief study of the life and works of the great artist of whose pure and noble work the city of Brescia is full. That the text is of rare scholarly excellence, and of the finest critical and appreciative qualities, there can be no question, since it is written by the President of the Accademia delle Arte of Venice. The type is large, the paper fine, the illustrations (phototyped) are of extreme delicacy and beauty, rendering worthily the works of the Moretto; the size of the book is Imperial 8vo.
Will you tell me where I should find anything equal to it at its price in London?
Your books are all ill-stitched, and fall to pieces as soon as one handles them. Your type is usually ugly, even at its best; all foreign readers complain of its clumsiness and confusing effect on the eyes. Compare a page of a Parisian book at three francs and a half with a page of a six-shilling English novel. The former is incomparably the superior. Your cheap illustrated books are still more scandalously treated. I have before me a book priced four-and-sixpence, more than double the price of Il Moretto. It is a book for children; its illustrations have been reproduced from earlier works, and they are not even all of the same method or the same size; some are printed from old wood-blocks, some are photographed; in one a child is represented the size of a fly, in another a dog is drawn bigger than a man; anything is thought good enough, it seems, for children. Artistic beauty is entirely lacking in the illustrations of English juvenile books; and there is nothing so irritating as the sight of illustrations of various qualities bound up in the same volume.
Even certain illustrated periodicals and journals are not above using up their old wood-blocks in their new numbers. It is a very disgraceful and unworthy practice. When the illustrations are fresh, the designer frequently does not attempt to adapt them to the text; a gentlemen is drawn like a cad, and a Newfoundland dog is drawn like a poodle; a peasant of the Romagna is drawn like a loafer in Shoreditch, and so on continually, without the slightest attention to accuracy.
There is also, beyond all doubt, an unwritten law which has been so universally observed that it has become, properly, as binding as a written law. I mean the law that when once a romance, or a story, or a poem have been published they cannot be altered.
What should we think of the painter who repainted his picture after sale, or of a sculptor who sawed off an arm from his statue, and affixed another? Both picture and statue may have many faults; they probably have; but such as they went out from the studio they must remain. This is the common morality, the elementary honour, of art, and a similar canon should certainly lie upon literature.
Yet some writers have of late presumed that they had a right to change the ending of their romances when these were already well known to their readers. They would urge, I suppose, that they have a right to do what they like with their own. But your work once given to the public is no more your own than your daughter is when you have married her, and she has become the Gaia of her Gaius.
Besides, there is an unspoken good faith on the part of the author which should be observed in his relations towards the public. He should give them nothing which is incomplete; nothing, at least, which is not as harmonious as it is in his power to create. Every work of fiction requires to be long dreamed of, long thought of, clearly seen in the mind before written; it ought to be no more susceptible of change than a conclusion in Euclid. To the writer, as to the reader of a story, it should seem absolutely true; the actors in it should appear absolutely real. The illusion of reality is only strong in the reader according to the strength of that illusion in the writer; but some such illusion must always exist whilst the reader reads fiction, or fiction would have no attraction for anyone. The writer who alters his romance after it has once appeared destroys this illusion, and says effectively to his public, ‘What fools you are to take me seriously!’ Moreover, he insults them, for he tells them that he has set before them a half-finished and immature thing, about which he has entirely changed his mind. He is like a cook who should snatch off the table a dish just placed on it because he wished to alter the flavour. A Vätel or a Soyer would not do that: if he had made a mistake he would abide by it, though he might kill himself in despite at it.
In the course of a literary or artistic life, or any other life from which the blessing of privacy has been lost, there are many wrongs met with which are real and great wrongs, yet which must be endured because they cannot be remedied by law suits, and there is no other kind of tribunal open; nothing analogous, for instance, to the German Courts of Honour in military matters.
There is, for example, a habit amongst some editors of seeking the expression of opinion, on some political or public question, of some well-known writer; printing this expression of opinion, and, before it is published, showing the proof to some other writer, so that an article of contrary views and opinions may be written in readiness for the following number. Now this seems to me an absolutely disloyal betrayal of trust. In the first place, the proof of an article is of necessity entirely dependent on the good faith of the editor. It is an understood thing, a tacit, unwritten law, that no one except the editor is to see it until the public does so. It is never considered necessary to stipulate this. To show it to a third person to obtain a refutation, or a burlesque, of it before the article is published, seems to me a distinctly incorrect thing to do; an extremely unfair thing to do. Yet it is becoming a common practice; and a writer has no redress against it. It is manifestly not the kind of offence which can be taken into a tribunal, yet it is a very genuine and very annoying injury, and it is one against which I think that authors, whose names are of value, should be protected in some manner.
What redress, moreover, is there for the innumerable thefts from which a writer suffers during his career? I doubt if we, any of us, know the extent to which we are robbed by bookmakers, who are not of the turf, but are quite as unscrupulous as those of the turf.
A few years ago I saw, in the pages of one of the highest class of London periodicals, a story, contained in one number, which was nothing more or less than the reproduction of the Derbyshire part of my well-known novel of Puck: the narrative of Ben Dare and his love for his worthless sister Anice. It was far more than a plagiarism; it was a monstrous theft. The name of a lady was put at the end of it, as that of the author; of course, I wrote to the editor, expecting, despite previous experiences, to receive apology and reparation. I misunderstood my generation. The editor wrote back, with airy indifference, that the lady who had produced this shameless piracy had never read Puck. To my citation, in reply, of the words of the Emperor Julian, ‘If it be sufficient to deny, who will ever be found guilty?’ and to my objection that an appropriation of an entire section of a novel could not by any possibility be otherwise than an intentional theft, this model of editors replied not at all. I ought, perhaps, to have sued the publisher, who was doubtless quite innocent, but had I done so it is more than probable that I should have obtained no apology or redress. To begin a law suit is a very serious thing, and all these grievances and piracies are so incessant, though few are quite as impudent as was this, that if one pursued them as they merit one would spend all one’s life and substance in Courts of Law.
Moreover, in the case of the plaintiff in any suit residing out of England, a large sum for costs must be deposited at the English tribunal into which the suit is brought; a kind of foregone conclusion that the plaintiff has no valid case, which seems to me very prejudicial to that person.
What, then, is to be done in such circumstances?
Nothing at all. You must endure the injury, leave unpunished the plagiarism; and the offender escapes scot-free.
I do not think that anyone should sue another for any mere expression of opinion, however hostile or rudely expressed, as Mr Whistler sued Mr Ruskin, for the liberty of the Press is of more importance than the annoyance of individuals.
But
some protection is required against swindling in literature; and at the present moment none exists. Practically none exists either against libel. I saw, a few years ago, three very gross and libellous English newspaper articles upon myself, and sent them to a high personage in the law, who is always kind enough to give me his advice, and asked him if he considered it worth while for me to prosecute them. He wrote me in answer: ‘All three articles are foully slanderous, yet one only, perhaps, would come within the grip of the law; upon this one you would most certainly obtain damages, but prosecution entails so much expense, trouble, worry, and insult, to the aggrieved party, that I would always say to any friend of mine what I say now to you: Do not do that which you have a perfect right to do.’
I followed the advice, for if one asks counsel of a person whom one respects, one ought to submit to it; but the fact remains that, for the most offensive social libels, there is, neither in law nor in society, any means of obtaining redress which a great lawyer can honestly recommend to a friend. For such matters, why cannot there be a tribunal set apart from other tribunals; one having the attributes of a Court of Honour, and without the odious publicity of Courts of Law?
Against libel, even of the grossest character, what can one do, as the law stands, which is not more disagreeable than silently to ‘grin and bear’ it? The great preliminary cost; the extreme uncertainty and irritation involved, the odious publicity necessarily incurred; the chatter, the comments, the cross-examination; the insolence and the jeers of the counsel for the defence, are all punishments which fall upon the plaintiff. What consolation is it for them that he may perhaps be awarded a thousand pounds damages, though it is more probable that he will receive only a farthing, and be left to the enjoyment of paying his own costs? In either result, is the game worth its very costly candle? Is the injury made less an injury? Is the combat not in every sense most unjust and unequal, being less a combat indeed than an assassination by a bravo? To what can we ever look for any remedy of this except from the unwritten law of opinion? But as the world is at present constituted it delights far too greatly in this garbage for it ever to rebuke the providers of it. Hogs do not rend the man who carries the swill-tub.