It will readily be seen that this great number of copyrights does not represent books alone. Many thousands of entries are daily and weekly periodicals claiming copyright protection, in which case they are required by law to make entry of every separate issue. These include a multitude of journals, literary, political, scientific, religious, pictorial, technical, commercial, agricultural, sporting, dramatic, etc., among which are a number in foreign languages. These entries also embrace all the leading monthly and quarterly magazines and reviews, with many devoted to specialties—as metaphysics, sociology, law, theology, art, finance, education, and the arts and sciences generally. Another large class of copyright entries (and the largest next to books and periodicals) is musical compositions, numbering recently some 20,000 publications yearly. Much of this property is valuable, and it is nearly all protected by entry of copyright, coming from all parts of the Union. There is also a large and constantly increasing number of works of graphic art, comprising engravings, photographs, photogravures, chromos, lithographs, etchings, prints, and drawings, for which copyright is entered. The steady accumulation of hundreds of thousands of these various pictorial illustrations will enable the government at no distant day, without a dollar of expense, to make an exhibit of the progress of the arts of design in America, which will be highly interesting and instructive. An art gallery of ample dimensions for this purpose is provided in the new National Library building.
It remains to consider briefly the principles and practice of what is known as international copyright.
Perhaps there is no argument for copyright at all in the productions of the intellect which is not good for its extension to all countries. The basis of copyright is that all useful labor is worthy of a recompense; but since all human thought when put into material or merchantable form becomes, in a certain sense, public property, the laws of all countries recognize and protect the original owners, or their assigns to whom they may convey the right, in an exclusive privilege for limited terms only. Literary property therefore is not a natural right, but a conventional one. The author's right to his manuscript is, indeed, absolute, and the law will protect him in it as fully as it will guard any other property. But when once put in type and multiplied through the printing-press, his claim to an exclusive right has to be guarded by a special statute, otherwise it is held to be abandoned (like the articles in a newspaper) to the public. This special protection is furnished in nearly all civilized countries by copyright law.
What we call "copyright" is an exclusive right to multiply copies of any publication for sale. Domestic copyright, which is all we formerly had in this country, is limited to the United States. International copyright, which has now been enacted, extends the right of American authors to foreign countries, and recognizes a parallel right of foreign authors in our own. There is nothing in the constitutional provision which restrains Congress from granting copyright to other than American citizens. Patent right, coming under the same clause of the Constitution, has been extended to foreigners. Out of over 20,000 patents annually issued, about 2,500 (or 12 per cent.) are issued to foreigners, while American patents are similarly protected abroad. If we have international patent right, why not international copyright? The grant of power is the same; both patent right and copyright are for a limited time; both rights during this time are exclusive; and both rest upon the broad ground of the promotion of science and the useful arts. If copyright is justifiable at all, if authors are to be secured a reward for their labors, they claim that all who use them should contribute equally to this result. The principle of copyright once admitted, it cannot logically be confined to State lines or national boundaries. There appears to be no middle ground between the doctrine of common property in all productions of the intellect—which leads us to communism by the shortest road—and the admission that copyright is due, while its limited term lasts, from all who use the works of an author, wherever found.
Accordingly, international copyright has become the policy of nearly all civilized nations. The term of copyright is longer in most countries than in the United States, ranging from the life of the author and seven years beyond, in England, to a life term and fifty years additional in France and Russia. Copyright is thus made a life tenure and something more in all countries except our own, where its utmost limit is forty-two years. This may perhaps be held to represent a fair average lifetime, reckoned from the age of intellectual maturity. There have not been wanting advocates for a perpetual copyright, to run to the author and his heirs and assigns forever. This was urged before the British Copyright Commission in 1878 by leading British publishers, but the term of copyright is hitherto, in all nations, limited by law.
Only brief allusion can be made to the most recent (and in some respects most important) advance step which has been taken in copyright legislation in the United States. This act of Congress is aimed at securing reciprocal protection to American and foreign authors in the respective countries which may comply with its provisions. There is here no room to sketch the hitherto vain attempt to secure to authors, here and abroad, an international protection to their writings. Suffice it to say that a union of interests was at last effected, whereby authors, publishers and manufacturers are supposed to have secured some measure of protection to their varied interests. The measure is largely experimental, and the satisfaction felt over its passage into law is tempered by doubt in various quarters as to the justice, or liberality, or actual benefit to authors of its provisions. What is to be said of a statute which was denounced by some Senators as a long step backward toward barbarism, and hailed by others as a great landmark in the progress of civilization?
The main features added to the existing law of copyright by this act, which took effect July 1, 1891, are these:
1. All limitation of the privilege of copyright to citizens and residents of the United States is repealed.
2. Foreigners applying for copyright are to pay fees of $1 for record, or $1.50 for certificate of copyright.
3. Importation of books, photographs, chromos or lithographs entered here for copyright is prohibited, except two copies of any book for use and not for sale.
4. The two copies of books, photographs, chromos or lithographs deposited with the Librarian of Congress must be printed from type set, or plates, etc., made in the United States. It follows that all foreign works protected by American copyright must be wholly manufactured in this country.
5. The copyright privilege is restricted to citizens or subjects of nations permitting the benefit of copyright to Americans on substantially the same terms as their own citizens, or of nations who have international agreements providing for reciprocity in the grant of copyright, to which the United States may at its pleasure become a party.
6. The benefit of copyright in the United States is not to take effect as to any foreigner until the actual existence of either of the conditions just recited, in the case of the nation to which he belongs, shall have been made known by a proclamation of the President of the United States.
One very material benefit has been secured through international copyright. Under it, authors are assured the control of their own text, both as to correctness and completeness. Formerly, republication was conducted on a "scramble" system, by which books were hastened through the press, to secure the earliest market, with little or no regard to a correct re-production. Moreover, it was in the power of the American publisher of an English book, or of a British publisher of an American one, to alter or omit passages in any work reprinted, at his pleasure. This license was formerly exercised, and imperfect, garbled, or truncated editions of an author's writings were issued without his consent, an outrage against which international copyright furnishes the only preventive.
Another benefit of copyright between nations has been to check the relentless flood of cheap, unpaid-for fiction, which formerly poured from the press, submerging the better literature. The Seaside and other libraries, with their miserable type, flimsy paper, and ugly form, were an injury alike to the eyesight, to the taste, and in many cases, to the morals of the community. More than ninety per cent. of these wretched "Libraries" were foreign novels. An avalanche of English and translated French novels of the "bigamy school" of fiction swept over the land, until the cut-throat competition of publishers, after exhausting the stock of unwholesome foreign literature, led to the failure of many houses, and piled high the counters of book and other stores with bankrupt stock. Having at last got rid of this unclean brood, (it is hoped forever) we now have better books, produced on good paper and type, and worth preserving, at prices not much above those of the trash formerly offered us.
At the same time, standard works of science and literature are being published in England at prices which tend steadily toward increased popular circulation. Even conservative publishers are reversing the rule of small editions at high prices, for larger editions at low prices. The old three-volume novel is nearly supplanted by the one volume, well-printed and bound book at five or six shillings. Many more reductions would follow in the higher class of books, were not the measure of reciprocal copyright thus far secured handicapped by the necessity of re-printing on this side at double cost, if a large American circulation is in view.
The writers of America, with the steady and rapid progress of the art of making books, have come more and more to appreciate the value of their preservation, in complete and unbroken series, in the library of the government, the appropriate conservator of the nation's literature. Inclusive and not exclusive, as this library is wisely made by law, so far as copyright works are concerned, it preserves with impartial care the illustrious and the obscure. In its archives all sciences and all schools of opinion stand on equal ground. In the beautiful and ample repository, now erected and dedicated to literature and art through the liberal action of Congress, the intellectual wealth of the past and the present age will be handed down to the ages that are to follow.
Footnotes:
[2] G. H. Putnam, "Books and their makers in the Middle Ages," N. Y. 1897, vol. 2, p. 447.
CHAPTER 24.
Poetry of the Library.
1.
He sat at night by his lonely bed,
With an open book before him;
And slowly nodded his weary head,
As slumber came stealing o'er him.
And he saw in his dream a mighty host
Of the writers gone before,
And the shadowy form of many a ghost
Glided in at the open door.
Great Homer came first in a snow-white shroud,
And Virgil sang sweet by his side;
While Cicero thundered in accents loud,
And Caesar most gravely replied.
Anacreon, too, from his rhythmical lips
The honey of Hybla distilled,
And Herodotus suffered a partial eclipse,
While Horace with music was filled.
The procession of ancients was brilliant and long,
Aristotle and Plato were there,
Thucydides, too, and Tacitus strong,
And Plutarch, and Sappho the fair.
Aristophanes elbowed gay Ovid's white ghost,
And Euripides Xenophon led,
While Propertius laughed loud at Juvenal's jokes,
And Sophocles rose from the dead.
Then followed a throng to memory dear,
Of writers more modern in age,
Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died the same year,
And Chaucer, and Bacon the sage.
Immortal the laurels that decked the fair throng,
And Dante moved by with his lyre,
While Montaigne and Pascal stood rapt by his song,
And Boccaccio paused to admire.
Sweet Spenser and Calderon moved arm in arm,
While Milton and Sidney were there,
Pope, Dryden, and Molière added their charm,
And Bunyan, and Marlowe so rare.
Then Gibbon stalked by in classical guise,
And Hume, and Macaulay, and Froude,
While Darwin, and Huxley, and Tyndall looked wise,
And Humboldt and Comte near them stood.
Dean Swift looked sardonic on Addison's face,
And Johnson tipped Boswell a wink,
Walter Scott and Jane Austen hobnobbed o'er a glass,
And Goethe himself deigned to drink.
Robert Burns followed next with Thomas Carlyle,
Jean Paul paired with Coleridge, too,
While De Foe elbowed Goldsmith, the master of style,
And Fielding and Schiller made two.
Rousseau with his eloquent, marvellous style,
And Voltaire, with his keen, witty pen,
Victor Hugo so grand, though repellent the while,
And Dumas and Balzac again.
Dear Thackeray came in his happiest mood,
And stayed until midnight was done,
Bulwer-Lytton, and Reade, and Kingsley and Hood,
And Dickens, the master of fun.
George Eliot, too, with her matter-full page,
And Byron, and Browning, and Keats,
While Shelley and Tennyson joined youth and age,
And Wordsworth the circle completes.
Then followed a group of America's best,
With Irving, and Bryant, and Holmes,
While Bancroft and Motley unite with the rest,
And Thoreau with Whittier comes.
With his Raven in hand dreamed on Edgar Poe,
And Longfellow sweet and serene,
While Prescott, and Ticknor, and Emerson too,
And Hawthorne and Lowell were seen.
While thus the assembly of witty and wise
Rejoiced the librarian's sight,
Ere the wonderful vision had fled from his eyes,
From above shone a heavenly light:
And solemn and sweet came a voice from the skies,
"All battles and conflicts are done,
The temple of Knowledge shall open all eyes,
And law, faith, and reason are one!"
From his glorious dream the librarian woke.
That place that does contain my books,
My books, the best companions, is to me,
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels.
Beaumont and Fletcher.
Of genius fruitful and of soul sublime,
Who from the glowing mint of fancy pours
No spurious metal, fused from common ores,
But gold to matchless purity refined,
And stamped with all the Godhead in his mind.
Juvenal.
Are a substantial world, both pure and good;
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
Wordsworth.
The Bokeworme sitteth in his celle,
He studyethe all alone,
And burnethe oute the oile,
'Till ye midnight hour is gone
Then gethe he downe upon his bedde,
Ne mo watch will he a-keepe,
He layethe his heade on ye pillowe,
And eke he tryes to sleepe.
Then swyfte there cometh a vision grimme,
And greetythe him sleepynge fair,
And straighte he dreameth of grislie dreames,
And dreades fellowne and rayre.
Wherefore, if cravest life to eld
Ne rede longe uppe at night,
But go to bed at Curfew bell
And ryse wythe mornynge's lyte.
In torrid heats of late July,
In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly,—
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,
And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees,—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.
He turns o'er tomes of low degrees,
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies;
Each tract that flutters in the breeze
For him is charged with hopes and fears,
In mouldy novels fancy sees
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.
Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees,
In dismal nooks he loves to pry,
Whose motto evermore is Spes!
But ah! the fabled treasure flees;
Grown rarer with the fleeting years,
In rich men's shelves they take their ease,—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!
Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, jeers and tears,
What are they but such toys as these—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?
Andrew Lang.
Of all perfections to be plain and brief.
Samuel Butler.
Nature's chief master-piece is writing well.
Buckingham.
For wisdom, piety, delight, or use.
Sir John Denham.
Oh, happy he who, weary of the sound
Of throbbing life, can shut his study door,
Like Heinsius, on it all, to find a store
Of peace that otherwise is never found!
Such happiness is mine, when all around
My dear dumb friends in groups of three or four
Command my soul to linger on the shore
Of those fair realms where they reign monarchs crowned.
To-day the strivings of the world are naught,
For I am in a land that glows with God,
And I am in a path by angels trod.
Dost ask what book creates such heavenly thought?
Then know that I with Dante soar afar,
Till earth shrinks slowly to a tiny star.
J. Williams.
Speak low! tread softly through these halls;
Here genius lives enshrined;
Here reign in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind.
From every age and clime;
Above the buried wrecks of years
They breast the tide of time.
Their sweetest, loftiest lays,
And prophets wait to guide thy steps
In Wisdom's pleasant ways.
Be thou companion here;
And in the mighty realm of mind
Thou shalt go forth a peer!
Anne C. Lynch Botta.
Give me that book whose power is such
That I forget the north wind's touch.
Forgetfulness of what I be.
In seeming far from all its strife.
Destroys my sense of creeping age.
John Kendrick Bangs.
Give me a nook and a book,
And let the proud world spin round;
Let it scramble by hook or by crook
For wealth or a name with a sound.
You are welcome to amble your ways,
Aspirers to place or to glory;
May big bells jangle your praise,
And golden pens blazon your story;
For me, let me dwell in my nook,
Here by the curve of this brook,
That croons to the tune of my book:
Whose melody wafts me forever
On the waves of an unseen river.
William Freeland.
And all the sweet serenity of books.
H. W. Longfellow.
Eyther in door or out,
With the greene leaves whispering overhead,
Or the streete cryes all about:
Where I maie reade all at my ease
Both of the newe and olde,
For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
Is better to me than golde!
(From the Latin of Ménage.)
What do I see! Oh! gods divine
And Goddesses—this Book of mine—
This child of many hopes and fears,
Is published by the Elzevirs!
Oh Perfect publishers complete!
Oh dainty volume, new and neat!
The Paper doth outshine the snow,
The Print is blacker than the crow,
The Title-page, with crimson bright,
The vellum cover smooth and white,
All sorts of readers to invite;
Ay, and will keep them reading still,
Against their will, or with their will!
Thus what of grace the Rhymes may lack
The Publisher has given them back,
As Milliners adorn the fair
Whose charms are something skimp and spare.
The pride of dead and dawning years,
How can a poet best repay
The debt he owes your House to-day?
May this round world, while aught endures,
Applaud, and buy, these books of yours.
May purchasers incessant pop,
My Elzevirs, within your shop,
And learned bards salute, with cheers,
The volumes of the Elzevirs,
Till your renown fills earth and sky,
Till men forget the Stephani,
And all that Aldus wrought, and all
Turnebus sold in shop or stall,
While still may Fate's (and Binders') shears
Respect, and spare, the Elzevirs!
Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares!
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
Wordsworth.
But books, old friends that are always new,
Of all good things that we know are best;
They never forsake us, as others do,
And never disturb our inward rest.
Here is truth in a world of lies,
And all that in man is great and wise!
Better than men and women, friend,
That are dust, though dear in our joy and pain,
Are the books their cunning hands have penned,
For they depart, but the books remain.
Richard Henry Stoddard.
I'm strange contradictions; I'm new and I'm old,
I'm often in tatters, and oft decked with gold.
Though I never could read, yet lettered I'm found;
Though blind, I enlighten; though loose, I am bound.
I'm always in black, and I'm always in white;
I am grave and I'm gay, I am heavy and light.
In form too I differ,—I'm thick and I'm thin;
I've no flesh and no bone, yet I'm covered with skin;
I've more points than the compass, more stops than the flute;
I sing without voice, without speaking confute;
I'm English, I'm German, I'm French, and I'm Dutch;
Some love me too fondly, some slight me too much;
I often die soon, though I sometimes live ages,
And no monarch alive has so many pages.
Hannah More.
The more I drink, the more they seem divine;
With joy elate my soul in love runs o'er,
And each fresh draught is sweeter than before:
Books bring me friends where'er on earth I be,—
Solace of solitude, bonds of society.
All round the room my silent servants wait,—
My friends in every season, bright and dim
Angels and seraphim
Come down and murmur to me, sweet and low,
And spirits of the skies all come and go
Early and late;
From the old world's divine and distant date,
From the sublimer few,
Down to the poet who but yester-eve
Sang sweet and made us grieve,
All come, assembling here in order due.
And here I dwell with Poesy, my mate,
With Erato and all her vernal sighs,
Great Clio with her victories elate,
Or pale Urania's deep and starry eyes.
Oh friends, whom chance or change can never harm,
Whom Death the tyrant cannot doom to die,
Within whose folding soft eternal charm
I love to lie,
And meditate upon your verse that flows,
And fertilizes wheresoe'er it goes.
Bryan Waller Procter.
A Song, for the Lover of Curious and Rare Books.
Come, boys, fill your glasses, and fill to the brim,
Here's the essence of humor, the soul, too, of whim!
Attend and receive (and sure 'tis no vapour)
A "hap' worth of wit on a pennyworth of paper."
Are felt and acknowledged by Dukes and by Lords!
And the finest estate would be offer'd in vain
For an exemplar bound by the famed Roger Payne!
But our senses we yield to a double command;
The dear frenzy in both is first rous'd by fair looks,—
Here's our sweethearts, my boys! not forgetting our books!
Growing wiser and better, till life itself ends:
And may those who delight not in black-letter lore,
By some obsolete act be sent from our shore!
While others are asking for beauty or fame,
Or praying to know that for which they should pray,
Or courting Queen Venus, that affable dame,
Or chasing the Muses the weary and grey,
The sage has found out a more excellent way—
To Pan and to Pallas his incense he showers,
And his humble petition puts up day by day,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
And crave from the fire on his stithy a ray;
Philosophers kneel to the God without name,
Like the people of Athens, agnostics are they;
The hunter a fawn to Diana will slay,
The maiden wild roses will wreathe for the Hours;
But the wise man will ask, ere libation he pay,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
(As mortals count pleasure who rush through their day
With a speed to which that of the tempest is tame)
O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.
They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:
Their aid they yield to all: they never shun
The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:
Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud,
They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;
Nor tell to various people various things,
But show to subjects, what they show to kings.
To stamp a lasting image of the mind!
These are the lasting mansions of the dead:—
"The dead!" methinks a thousand tongues reply;
"These are the tombs of such as cannot die!
Crown'd with eternal fame, they sit sublime,
And laugh at all the little strife of time."
And mighty folios first, a lordly band;
Then quartos their well-order'd ranks maintain,
And light octavos fill a spacious plain:
See yonder, rangèd in more frequent rows,
A humbler band of duodecimos;
While undistinguished trifles swell the scene,
The last new play and fritter'd magazine.
And rival zealots rest like bosom friends:
An Athanasian here, in deep repose,
Sleeps with the fiercest of his Arian foes;
Socinians here with Calvinists abide,
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide;
Here wily Jesuits simple Quakers meet,
And Bellarmine has rest at Luther's feet.
George Crabbe.