V. Writers As Money-Makers

It would be an interesting speculation how far the history of the world has been obscured, twisted, and falsified as a result of the fact that writers, historians, poets, and even philosophers have depended upon the bounty of the rich and powerful. The very first writers, in order to eat, had to please the king or some powerful patron. Apparently the very earliest writings among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians were upon clay tablets by public officials to be read by the king, the priests, the court. The authors of the Pharaohs’ day were attached to the temple. The first Chinese writers depended upon official appointments for their livelihood.

The audience of all ancient writers and even of modern ones up to a few hundred years ago was limited, since few had the art of reading. Even the circulation of the old Greek works was small and would have been impossible without the favor of certain rich men. Some philosophers in ancient Athens were paid incredible sums as teachers, some of them—Protagoras, Gorgias, Zeno—getting as much as 10,000 drachmas to educate a student. But these gentlemen were Sophists who taught the sons of wealthy Athenians how to get along, how to use their faculties to the end of success. There were no such rewards for the realistic searcher after truth. The Greek playwrights, however, had an audience and hence, in the free society of Athens, could command comparatively substantial sums for their work, while they enjoyed a corresponding freedom, discussed public affairs, discoursed on public and private morals, and did not hesitate to lampoon the head of the state himself. This was not altogether true in Rome when the state began to provide the populace with plays. Terence and Plautus could get for their plays sums which were not available to the poets and commentators, but they were paid public money by the aediles who were charged with providing dramatic productions for the people.

Men like Horace and Virgil got little or no money rewards from their works. Both depended upon the bounty of Maecenas. And Maecenas took up the role of the magnificent patron of letters as a means of fortifying the regime of Augustus. Horace speaks of his publisher, Socii, but laments that while the publisher made profit from his poems, Horace made nothing. But it is highly improbable that any publisher made very much in a world where books had to be written by hand and few of the people could read. Martial, the epigrammist, said that the sale of his poems brought him nothing. But he cultivated the friendship of the Emperor Domitian and became tribune. Quintilian, the rhetorician, had an income for a while of 100,000 sesterces from the Emperor. And, of course, in that ruthless dictatorship, there was no more place for the independent thinker or artist than there is in the tyrannies of Mussolini and Hitler. Before the empire dissolved all independent literary production had come to an end. And after that, the church succeeded to the role of literary dictator.

In the modern world the same thing held true for many centuries. It was perhaps worse than in certain periods of the ancient world, for there were times and places where even the wealthy and powerful could not read, when this faculty was limited to a handful of people. It is a singular fact that the authors of such universally famed productions as the Edda, the Cid, the Nibelungenlied, and the legends of King Arthur remain unknown, while various monarchs have come down to us as writers. Charlemagne is a case in point—a Frankish German of no education, who probably could neither read nor write, yet who is supposed to have composed a German grammar, poems, and even a work in medieval Latin on the worship of images. He did gather scholars around him and encouraged literature. But it is probable that his own compositions were the work of some of those shrinking persons with a passion for anonymity so dear to the hearts of rulers.

As writers appeared on the scene they might well be represented as grasping their pen in one hand and the king’s bounty in the other. In France, Colomby, original academician, drew 15,600 francs as the king’s orator and Jean Louis de Balzac 10,000 francs as the king’s general eulogist. In Italy Petrarch counted his patrons among several of the ruling houses of Italy and was an especial ward of the Colonna family. Boccaccio, who learned something of his art from Petrarch, learned from him also how to cultivate the good will of the prince. He enjoyed the special favor of King Robert of Naples, and the Decameron was written for the King’s family, as the Heptameron was written for the delectation of Francis I, possibly by his sister Margaret, but more likely by some anonymous spinner of yarns about the castle.

The dependence of the writer upon the political treasury and the favor of the lord or merchant continued to a late day. And some of them did quite as well for themselves as Horace and Virgil did in Rome. Jean Chapelain, author of a dreary and forgotten poem called La Pucille, died at the age of seventy-nine, leaving a fortune of 1,450,000 francs, which he got in gifts from Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV; and Boileau, famous satirical poet, who died in 1711, left an estate of $236,000 which he owed to the munificence of the crown.

In time, profits from publishing did make their appearance, but they were meager. The writer still had to look for his security to reliance on the government or a patron. Milton received but sixty-three pounds for Paradise Lost, but he got a thousand pounds from Parliament for a political treatise. Gay, the author of The Beggar’s Opera, James Thomson, Scottish poet, author of The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts, like the more important Addison, Steele, and Swift, were the recipients of royal and noble favor. Gay got a job as secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, tried his hand at the South Sea speculations, lost what he had, and became a dependent of the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury. Thomson, a very poor youth, began his career as the beneficiary of a noble Maecenas, got a sinecure at 300 pounds a year from the Lord Chancellor, and, when the Chancellor died, got another from the Prince of Wales at 100 pounds. Young, who started a school of graveyard verse, began life with a poem of disgusting flattery of George Granville upon his elevation to the peerage, and followed this with several others dedicated to one wealthy patron after another until he knocked off one to Walpole, celebrating his investiture with the Order of the Garter, and was rewarded with 200 pounds a year. He finally attained the heaven of army officers, ministers, and professors by marrying the daughter of an earl.

Addison, before he was thirty, got a pension of 300 pounds a year, and when the government wished to exploit the popular value of the victory at Blenheim, Addison obliged with his poem, The Campaign, which pleased his patrons so much that he got an appointment as Commissioner of Appeals. He held various offices and sinecures and, like Young, annexed as a wife a dowager countess. Thackeray said of this trio—Addison, Steele, and Swift—that “the profession had made Addison a minister, Steele a commissioner of stamps, and Swift almost a bishop.” The sharp-tongued Swift felt that his services with his pen had merited something better than an Irish deanery.

But it was precisely when these men were drawing their sustenance from their political and social sponsors that another writer was demonstrating that England had come upon an audience which was willing to pay for what it read and that a man might earn a living as an author without putting on any man’s collar. This was Alexander Pope. He had some small means of his own, but he made a decent living throughout his life from his own labors. Samuel Johnson says he received 5320 pounds for the translation of the Iliad, from which he bought and enlarged the country estate at Twickenham where he lived until his death. After this period writers became more and more dependent upon the public that bought their books rather than the noblemen, businessmen, and statesmen who hired their pens and bought their souls. Even poor Bobby Burns could get between five and six hundred pounds for an edition of his works.

For some reason the playwright in France and England seems to have been as much at the mercy of the rich sponsor as the writer of poems and essays. Molière made money out of the stage, but he was playwright, actor, and producer. Shakespeare, too, made enough to leave a decent competency to his family at his death, but it was apparently as playwright, actor, and manager that he, like Molière, made his money. He did not seem interested at all in his plays as subjects for publication. He probably could have made little out of them.

But Ben Jonson, who was a mere writer for the stage, declared he had never made more than 200 pounds out of all his plays. In France both Corneille and Racine sought and got benefits from various patrons. Racine tried to make his plays pay. He met with a resistance that reveals a curious ethical attitude toward this whole subject at the time. He had got 40 francs a night from the theater for the use of his plays. But plays seldom went through many nights of performances. He demanded a thousand francs. Instantly there was a bitter protest from the stage. Madame Beaupré, an actress, complained that whereas with the smaller payment the theater could make money for all, now with Racine’s extortionate demand it could not. The whole town echoed her resentment. Racine, it murmured, was attempting to trade on his poetic talents. How the poet could live they apparently did not consider. Nor did they suppose that he had but two choices, either to trade upon his talents with the audiences or with the politicians and the nobility. What did they suppose he was merchandising and to whom and for what when he got 140,000 francs for following the king during the royal military campaigns, or when he got 14,000 francs as royal historiographer or when he was granted a pension of 6900 francs by Richelieu? What was Corneille trading upon when he dedicated Cinna to the unscrupulous financier Montrauon?

Yet this curious moral notion persisted. It can be explained upon no other ground than that the emoluments of the writer were meager, that by abandoning them in favor of the sweeter viands of the patron the author was losing nothing, and that the ethical pretension that his gifts must not be prostituted by the outright sale of his product supplied him with a convenient defensive rationalization of his pension.

Even Voltaire, whose earnings might well have been large, and who was rich, did not acquire his riches from his works. He gave away the rights of his plays. He presented some of his works to his publishers, asking merely some author’s copies beautifully bound. He presented his secretary with 12,000 francs, the proceeds of an edition of his works. His wealth he got through business adventures not unlike those carried on by our own Hetty Green. He loaned money to princes and to cities and bought national bonds. He speculated in lotteries, in grain, in foreign securities. He invested in contracts for army supplies, and is reputed to have had at one time an income of 350,000 francs a year.

It was Jean Jacques Rousseau who in France did what Alexander Pope had done in England. He disdained the generous offers of the wealthy. Instead he drove the best bargains he could for his works. Like many another author since, he wrote much inferior but popular material in order to obtain the means of devoting time to his more serious work. He got $2300 for the libretto of an opera which he turned out in a few weeks, which was something more than he got for Émile upon which he expended twenty years of thought and writing.

From this time forward the art of reading came into the possession of an ever-increasing number of people. And, with the new guarantees of freedom or at least the widening tolerances, the writer was able to find a larger market for his wares—a market that could afford to pay for them. The time came when all sorts of writers, emancipated from the clutch of the rich patron, could earn a good living, while some of them became as rich as some of the former Maecenases. Walter Scott got $20,000 for The Lady of the Lake, and Lord Byron collected $13,000 for three cantos of Childe Harold. From his novels Scott earned a princely income of around $75,000 a year. Victor Hugo was paid 40,000 francs ($8000) for each of ten volumes of Les Misérables. Disraeli got $60,000 each for Endymion and Lothair, and George Eliot got $40,000 for Middlemarch. Alphonse Daudet collected $200,000 for a single novel, Sappho. And Charles Dickens was perhaps the largest earner of all.

The great sums collected by successful novelists and playwrights in our own day are too well known to be repeated here. If they earn these sums it is because almost universal literacy, rapidly spreading secondary and higher education, and an ever-increasing population furnish them with an enormous market, while their ability to collect their incomes from the whole public rather than a handful of powerful patrons is the guarantee of the highest form of freedom of expression.