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Pay of American Authors —
Synopsis
of the International
Copy-Right Question.
A day or two since we spoke of the
pay afforded our
literary men by the publishers of Magazines. These gentlemen may have
every
inclination to be liberal; but what can they well do in the face of all
the periodical literature of Europe, reprinted here at no father cost
than
that of the mechanical execution? Any American, for eight dollars,
may
receive any four of the British periodicals for a year.
The immediate advantage to our
people, so far as
the pocket is concerned, is of course sufficiently plain. We get more
reading
for less money than if the International Law existed; but what we mean
to say is, that the more remote disadvantages are of infinitely greater
weight. In brief they are these: — First we have injury to our
national
literature by repressing the efforts of our men of genius: — for
genius,
as a general rule, is poor in worldly goods and cannot write for
nothing.
Our genius being thus repressed, we are written at only by our
"gentlemen
of elegant leisure," and mere gentlemen of elegant leisure have been
noted,
time out of mind, for the insipidity of their productions. In general,
too, they are obstinately conservative, and the feeling leads them into
imitation of foreign, especially of British models. This is the true
source
of the imitativeness with which as literary people, we have been justly
charged.
In the second place, irreparable ill
is wrought by
the almost exclusive dissemination among us of foreign, that is to say
of monarchical or aristocratical sentiment, in foreign books: nor is
this
sentiment less fatal to Democracy because it reaches the people
themselves, directly, in the gilded pill of the poem or the novel.
We have next to consider the impolicy
of our committing,
in the national character, an open and continuous wrong, on the
frivolous
and altogether untenable pretext of expediency. Of this point we have
spoken
before.
The last, and by far the most
important consideration
of all, however, is that sense of insult and injury to which, also, we
have already alluded — the animosity aroused in the whole active
Intellect
of the world — the bitter and fatal resentment excited in the
universal
heart of Literature — a resentment which will not, and which cannot,
make
nice distinction between the temporary perpetrators of the wrong, and
that
Democracy in general which not only permits but glories in its
perpetration. |
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