Unpublished work

“ Moreover, as the genuine work was certainly in existence and widely diffused in the sixth century, no writer wishing to make such an attempt could think himself secure against the existence of some copies of the genuine work, which, if brought to light, would at once expose his own to contempt. ”

“ From selling photographs one may easily advance to the writing and illustrating of non-fiction. And your fame as a non-fictionist, together with the training you have gleaned, may cause you to forward a work of fiction to an editor acquainted with your name—and lo! ”

“ To sift and discriminate every paper, sketch, document, bearing on the society’s line of work, before the same is accepted and given official sanction, in order that its publication may be a guarantee of historical accuracy; to do its work without passion or prejudice, to view accomplished facts in the true scientific historical spirit, and, having reached the truth, to give it to the world. ”

“ If we resolve the enigma, by acknowledging that this learned and curious writer has not been the only critic who has proved himself to be the most woful of poetasters, this decision will not account for the mysterious silence of the writer in allowing an elaborate volume, the work of a great portion of a life, to be cast out into the world unnamed and unowned. ”

“ But finally, when several publishers offered to take the story as fiction, I cut short all negotiations and decided to publish it myself. Where I am known at all, it is my misfortune to be known as a writer of fiction. ”

“ If I touch various objects, and ride into miry places, it is to baffle any mischance befalling me as an author, to prevent my books getting into disrepute; in nine cases out of ten to prevent any expressions, thoughts, or situations in any work which I am writing from resembling the thoughts, expressions, and situations of other authors, for my great wish, as I told you before, is to be original. ”

“ It is evident that unknown authors have great difficulties to contend with, before they can succeed in bringing their works before the public. Can you give me any hint as to the way in which these difficulties are best met? For instance, in the present case, where a work of fiction is in question, in what form would a publisher be most likely to accept the MS.? Whether offered as a work of three vols., or as tales which might be published in numbers, or as contributions to a periodical?
“What publishers would be most likely to receive favourably a proposal of this nature? ”

“ They say that ‘if you publish a certain work, it will be your ruin’—hoping that it will, and by their tragical denunciations, bringing about this very event as far as it lies in their power, or at any rate, enjoying a premature triumph over you in the mean time. ”

“ It has been said that "diligence and accuracy are the only merits which a historical writer may ascribe to himself." Neither labor nor care has been spared in the collection of materials, and in endeavors to produce a work as free from grave errors as possible. ”

“ And a work becomes “fixed,” we learn, “when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.” ”

“ But all the more subjective forms of literature, such as the lyric and the essay, can hardly be studied intelligently without some biographical introduction. Still more obvious is the need in many instances of some accurate knowledge of the period in which a given work is produced. For all such writing as grows directly out of political or social conditions, as oratory, or political satire, or various forms of the essay, this is clearly necessary. ”

“ Possibly we are entering on an age in which the people care less for form, for phraseology, than for what seems to them true, real—for what, as they would express it, "takes hold of them." This is no plea or excuse for careless work, but rather a suggestion that the day of prolix, fine, flowery writing is passing. The immense number of well-written books in circulation has made success with careless, slovenly manuscripts impossible. Publishers and editors will not even read, much less publish them. ”

“ It is indeed necessary, in what claims to be an exact reprint of an old work, to imitate its orthography precisely, even at the expense of difficulty in apprehending at once the meaning, and of perpetuating errors of carelessness and ignorance. ”

“ Acceding to the force and propriety of these motives, yet aware of the suspicions to which a recital of important facts, by an anonymous writer, would naturally be exposed, and sensible, also, that a certain description of critics would gladly avail themselves of any opportunity for discouraging the circulation of a work which contained principles hostile to their own ”

“ But, now, granting that a work is by a good author, or contemporary with the events recorded, or healthily related to others that were contemporary, it remains to consider whether it has been well preserved and is likely to retain its original sense. ”

“ All fine original work, it may be safely said, represents severe intellectual labor on the part of the producer, not necessarily at the moment of achievement, but at least in a preparatory collection and partial elaboration of material. ”

“ If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly, or not at all. If I, become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres. ”

“ The dramatist in constructing his story is hedged in by a multitude of physical restrictions, of which he must make a special study in order to force them to contribute to the presentation of his truth instead of detracting from it. In this regard, again, the novelist works with greater freedom. Seldom is his labor subjected to merely physical restrictions from without. Sometimes, to be sure, certain arbitrary conditions of the trade of publishing have exercised an influence over the structure of the novel. ”

“ The evidence of culture, judgment, sagacity, energy, boldness, tact, skill, and whatever else goes to the building up of a publishing house known at home and abroad for its magnitude and the extent and variety of its ventures, is literally such that he who runs may read and see that it is beyond controversy. This is not extravagant praise or mere compliment; but simply the statement of the truth as made manifest by the facts.
“In this general reference to Messrs. Hunt, Parry, & Co., we must not, in passing, omit an allusion to their periodicals. ”

“ As the range of accurate information extends, as the dust heap of old records, private as well as public, is sifted more narrowly, as the antique habit of taking things readily for granted disappears, the novel becomes more and more an arrangement of genuine facts and circumstances, interleaved by such fiction as the skill and imagination of the author can produce. ”

“ No one can hold his own among his fellow-workers who cannot point to some discovery, however small, to some observation, to some decipherings, to some edition of a text hitherto unpublished, or, at least, to some conjectural readings which are, in the true sense of the word, his property. ”

“ To publish a novel, to analyse, to eulogise it, and recommend its perusal to the good and pious, will appear no doubt very extraordinary, and offend the prejudices of many who have agreed among themselves to consider a novel, whoever may be its author, and whatever may be its subject, form, and design, as a pestilent production. ”

“ He had learned, both from his own observation and from literary history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live, is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. ”

“ It has been the course, so far as three words may here serve, of his so multiplying his creators or, as we are now fond of saying, producers, as to make them almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves. We take for granted by the general law of fiction a primary author, take him so much for granted that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him. ”

“ The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. ”

“ If you don't want to publish it—though publication seems necessary to complete absolution—you can tie a stone to it and throw it into the lake, or do it up in a parcel and leave it for some one to find, just as boys used to do with neat parcels in which they placed pebbles on which they had rubbed their warts—hoping in that way to rid themselves of warts. I know there are some old-fashioned people who will be shocked at this levity in speaking of books, but they should waken up to the fact that since the coming of the wood-pulp era no particular merit attaches to writing a book. ”

“ The men who deal with manuscripts—editors, publishers' readers, and publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print—are even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary brilliance of the time. ”

“ The freedom and copiousness with which our most original writers, in former periods, availed themselves of the productions of their predecessors, frequently transcribing whole passages, without scruple or acknowledgment, may appear contrary to the etiquette of modern literature, when the whole stock of poetical common-places has become public property, and no one is compelled to trade upon any particular author. ”

“ There are others, on the contrary, to whom all the modern publications are anathema, a by-word—they get rid of this idle literature ‘at one fell swoop’—disqualify the present race from all pretensions whatever, get into a corner with an obscure writer, and devour the cobwebs and the page together, and pick out in the quaintest production, the quaintest passages, the merest choke-pear, which they think nobody can swallow but themselves. ”

“ But unless the whole mass of argument in these "Anticipations" is false, publishing is as much, or even more of a public concern than education, and as little to be properly discharged by private men working for profit. ”

“ We have reason once again to lament the perversity of literary or publishing enterprise which will produce and reproduce, ad infinitum, books of no real and permanent value to the world, and altogether neglect its true luminaries. ”

“ Here the evidence of authorship is as good as for most pieces of fifteenth-century production—a period at which literary rights did not exist, and when the scribe, if at all acquainted with the subject upon which the book he was copying treated, did not scruple to interpolate his own ideas, and that without any egotistical vanity, but merely from a feeling that all books being written for the good of men, and not from vanity in the author, it was a duty to improve them where possible. ”

“ How the Author came to be without his papers, is a story not proper to be told, and of very little use, being a private fact: of which the reader would believe as little, or as much, as he thought good. He had, however, a blotted copy by him, which he intended to have written over with many alterations, and this the publishers were well aware of, having put it into the Bookseller's Preface, that they apprehended a surreptitious copy, which was to be altered, &c. ”

“ Of the various sections into which the history of English literature is divisible, there is no one in which the absence of collective materials is more seriously felt—no one in which we are more in need of authentic notes, or which is more apt to raise perplexing queries—than that which relates to the authorship of anonymous and pseudonymous works. ”

“ The epoch of rules, of theories, poetics, criticisms in a nation, will add to their stock of authors in the same proportion as it diminishes their stock of genius: their productions will bear the stamp of study, not of nature; they will adopt, not generate; sentiment will supplant images, and narrative invention; words will be no longer the dress but the limbs of [104] composition, and feeble elegance will supply the want of nerves. ”

“ They know well that the public will not take the trouble to consult manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare biographies, but will content themselves with ready-made history; and they therefore go on unblushing to republish their old romance, leaving poor truth, after she has been painfully haled up to the well’s mouth, to tumble miserably to the bottom of it again. ”

“ What foundation then is there for the contrary assertion, which would degrade the immortal artist to the situation of a daily labourer for a rude multitude?—Merely this, that he himself published no edition of his whole works. ”

“ WE see sometimes appearing certain light little works connected either with literary history or ancient poetry, or manners and customs, which would be nothing but pretty and curious pamphlets, if the Appendix which follows them were not swelled out of all proportion with proofs and illustrations, annotated notes, documents with sidenotes, bibliographic bibliography, considerations and commentaries of all sorts, which put the reader to the torture. ”

“ In making up the volume I have drawn less on documents,—charters, messages, resolutions, declarations, instructions, statutes, and treaties,—than on those kinds of material in which the personality of the writer plays a greater part,—journals, letters, reports, discussions, and reminiscences. Whenever a piece could be found which is both characteristic and well written, it has been chosen over a piece which is equally accurate but has less literary merit. ”