1G0 



THE POPULAR SCIEXCE M0XTHLY.-SUPPLE2IEXT. 



the capitalist side the production is purely a com- 

 mercial transaction ; but, on the labor side — i. e., 

 on the part of the author — it is not equally easy 

 to state the case as one of labor motived by 

 wages. Certainly authorship is a profession. 

 There are authors who are authors and nothing 

 more — men who live by their pen, as a counsel 

 lives by giving opinions, or a physician by pre- 

 scribing for patients. But this is only partially 

 the case with our literature. A large part of it 

 is not paid for ; the author's labor is not set in 

 motion by wages. Many other motives come in, 

 inducing men to address the public in print be- 

 sides the motive of wages. Disinterested enthu- 

 siasm ; youthful ardor of conviction ; egotism in 

 some one of its many forms of ambition ; vanity, 

 the desire to teach, to preach, to be listened to ; 

 mere restlessness of temperament ; even the hav- 

 ing nothing else to do — these things will make a 

 man write a book quite irrespective of being paid 

 for doing so. Did you ever hear of Catherinot ? 

 No ! Well, Catherinot was a French antiquary 

 of the seventeenth century — a very learned one, 

 if learning means to have read many hpoks with- 

 out understanding. Catherinot printed, whether 

 at his own cost or another's I cannot say, a vast 

 number of dissertations on matters of antiquity. 

 David Clement, the curious bibliographer, has 

 collected the titles of one hundred antl eighty- 

 two of those dissertations, and adds there were 

 more of them which he had not been able to 

 find. Nobody wanted these dissertations of Ca- 

 therinot. He wrote them and printed them for 

 his own gratification. As the public would not 

 take his paperasses, as Yalesius called them, he 

 had recourse to a device to force a circulation for 

 them. There was then no penny-post, so he 

 could not, like Herman Heinfetter, post his lucu- 

 brations to all likely addresses, but he used to go 

 round the quais in Paris, where the old book- 

 stalls are, and, while pretending to be looking 

 over the books, slip some of his dissertations be- 

 tween the volumes of the boutiqiiicr. In this way 

 the one hundred and eighty-two or more have 

 come down to us. Catherinot is a by-word, the 

 typical case of scribbleomania — of the insanabile 

 seribendi cacoethes — but the malady is not un- 

 known to our time, and accounts for some of our 

 many reams of print. And, even if pure scrib- 

 bleomania is not a common complaint, there are 

 very many other motives to writing besides the 

 avowed and legitimate motive of earning an in- 

 come by the pen. Why do men make speeches 

 to public meetings, or give lectures in public in- 

 stitutions? It is a great deal of trouble to do 



so. The motives of the labor are very various. 

 Whatever they are, the same variety of motives 

 urges men to write books. 



Notwithstanding these exceptions, the number 

 and importance of which must not be lost sight of 

 in our inquiry, the general rule will still hold that 

 books, being a commodity, are subject to the 

 same economic laws as all commodities. That 

 one which is of importance for us is the law of 

 demand and supply ; the law which says that 

 demand creates supply, and prescribes its quan- 

 tity and quality. You see at once how vital to 

 literature must be the establishment of this com- 

 mercial principle as its regulator, and how radical 

 must have been the revolution in the relation be- 

 tween writer and reader which was brought about 

 when it was established. In the times when the 

 writer was the exponent of universally-received 

 first principles, what he said might be true or 

 might be false, might be ill or well received, but 

 at all events he delivered his message ; he spoke 

 as one having authority, and did not shape his 

 thoughts so as to offer what should be accept- 

 able to his auditory. Authorship was not a 

 trade ; books were not a commodity ; demand did 

 not dictate the quality of the article supplied. In 

 England, at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, the transformation of the writer from the 

 prophet into the trading author was pretty well 

 complete. As we trace back our civilization to 

 the cave-man, so it is worth while casting a glance 

 at the ancestral authorape from whom is de- 

 scended the accomplished and highly-paid leader- 

 writer of 1877, who sits for a county, and the 

 " honor of whose company " dukes solicit. The 

 professional author of Queen Anne's time has 

 been delineated to us, by the master-hand of 

 Pope, as a disreputable being, starving in a gar- 

 ret " high in Drury Lane," on an occasional five 

 guineas thrown to him by the grudging charity 

 of one of the wealthy publishers, Tonson or Lin- 

 tot, or more likely Curll, " turning a Persian tale 

 for half a crown," that he might not go to bed 

 supperless and swearing. He was a brainless 

 dunce without education, a sneaking scoundrel 

 without a conscience. But you will notice that 

 in this his mean estate, now become a hireling 

 scribbler, he continued for long to keep up the 

 fiction that the author was a gentleman who 

 wrote because it pleased him so to do. When he 

 had finished his pamphlet in defense of the pres- 

 ent administration, a pamphlet for which he was 

 to get Sir Robert's shabby pay, he pretended, in 

 his preface, that he had taken up his pen for the 

 amusement of his leisure hours. When he had 



