LITERATURE and LIFE

Otago Witness, Issue 3714, 19 May 1925, Page 68

LITERATURE and LIFE

PRIZES OF THE PEN. AUTHORS WHO ACQUIRED GREAT WEALTH. While some nlen draw little but blanks from the literary lottery-wheel, others, more favoured of the gods, are rewarded with prizes calculated to make the mouths of the envious water (writes W. Greenwood, in the Weekly Scotsman). By his translation of Homer, Pope added £BOOO to his fortune; and for 11 novels and nine volumes of ‘‘Tales of my Landlord” Sir Walter Scott was paid £llo,ooo—a much .larger sum than a dozen of his great predecessors made by a life of toil with the pen. Scott’s moneyearning power was, indeed, so exceptional that he has had few rivals in any age or country. For “Marmion” he was offered by Constable 1000 guineas before the poem had been well begun. Ten thousand was the value placed on a single novel; in 20 golden months of labour, from November 1825 to June 1827, he coined money at the rate of 50 guineas a day; and before the pen at last dropped from his weary hand it had enriched him by t something like £300,000. Although Byron was a shockingly bad man at making bargains, even for a poet, his Muse brought him nearly £20,000 as her dower, for much of which he had to thank a conscientious publisher. Messrs Longman bought Moore’s Lai la Rookh for £3OOO without seeing a line of it; and an eztenent bargain it proved to be, for within' six months as many editions had been sold. On the other hand, Thomas Campbell was quite pleased to dispose of his “Pleasures of Hope” for a miserable £6O. The historian seems to have fared better financially than the poet, for Smollett received £2OOO for a very inferior work; Robertson was paid £4500 for his “Charles I”; Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” yielded £10,000; and a single cheque ot £20,000 represented only three-quarters of Macaulay’s profits from his “History of England.” It is thus clear that it is not only in recent times that a clever pen has proved a veritable gold-mine, although at the best its yield has been scarcely commensurate with the labour of digging. For several years before his death Charles Dickens was drawing from his pen the official income of a L/ord Chancellor; and though, like most men of letters, he was not distinguished by providence, he was able to leave nearly £IOO,OOO behind him. “Pickwick” brought him £2500 and a sliaTe in the copyright for five years. “Nicholas Nickleby” was worth £4500 to him; and “Barnaby Rudge,” £3OOO for the copyright till six months after p:blication. * It is interesting in view of the 300,000 copies sold of “The Master Christian,” the 100,000 of “The Eternal City,” the 500,000 of “Richard Carvel,” and the 80,000 of ‘The History of Sir Richard Calmady,” to note that the original sale of “Great Expectations” was 30,000 copies! Thackeray was less fortunate than his great rival as a money-maker; and yet e did exceptionally well with his pen. It is true that he only made 1000 guineas out of the periodical issue of “Vanity Fair,” but “The New comes” yielded nearly four times this sum; and he is said to have made £4OOO a year out of his editorial connection with the Cornhill. Bulwer Lytton’s fiction brought him £BOOO, although the price of his earlier books ranged only from £6OO to £looo— remuneration which a dozen living novelists would consider contemptible if offered to them. In 1853, it is interesting to note, Messrs Rout ledge offered Lytton £20,000 for a ten years’ copyright of the cheap edition of his novels; and two further sums of £SOOO in later years for an extension of the privilege. Anthony Trollope’s returns from fci first two years’ work with the pen only reached £32 - y but when the tide turned in his favour he could rely on making an income of from £2OOO to £4OOO a year. The prices mid lor several of his novels exceeded £3000; and 20 years of work, which to him was his favourite recreation, showed the gratifying return of £70,000. George Eliot waited long and struggled hard before Fortune deigned to smile on her efforts and her patience; but her reward outstripped her most extravagant hopes. “Romola” brought her £7OOO from the Cornhill: and “Middlemarch” was still more profitable, the American edition alone being worth £I2CO to the authoress; while, it is said, although the statement should perhaps not be accepted quite literally, that “Adam Bede” enriched her to the extent of £4o,ooo—a by no means contemptible return for a whole lifetime of writing. Mr Fronde’s “Oceana” paid its author at the rate of nearly £IOO for eaflh thousand words ; for a single poem Longfellow drew 3000 dollars; and Lord Tennyson point-blank refused to accept £SOOO a year for the exclusive copyright of his poems. All these payments, however, pale into insignificance compared with the £IOO,OOO which General Grant’s widow is credited with receiving as her share of the ** profits of her distinguished husband’s ■•Memoirs.”

Rich as was the harvest of these fortunate writers of the past, it is surpassed by that reaped by several authors of today. It is naturally impossible to state the earnings of the modern writer with accuracy; but/ an approximate estimate is not difficult. Thus, for a single book, “The Little Minister,” Mr Barrie is said to have p already made at least £50,000 —a magnificent return to which the stage has very largely contributed. This sum, it is startling to discover, represents payment at the rate Yif over £4OO a thousand words. Although this is probably the largest amount ever made by an author for one book, the rate per word has been far exceeded—and by a woman. Mrs Rice’s immensely popular story, “Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patcli f r contains only 20,000 words—an industrious writer might in fact have produced it in a week; and yet, at a royalty of 20 per cent, it has already yielded £2o,ooo—or a sovereign for every word —to its authoress. A novel by Miss Corelli is said to have brought at least £2o,ooo—a figure which is also probably reached bv some of the books of Mr Kipling and Sir Hall Caine. Even assuming that such a book represents a year’s hard work, and this is probably an outside estimate, it cannot be denied that these fortunate authors find in literature a very gratifying road to jolies. What Mr Kipling’s income from his pen is we are not privileged to know, but we doubt whether he would be prepared to exchange it for the revenue of the Archbishop of Canterbury. How rapidly it mounts up may be gathered from the following facts. Some years ago Mr Kipling received £240 for the English rights of each of eight short stories. In addition to this Amount the author received a similar sum from American, Indian, and Colonial publishers, with a further £4OOO from royalties for book publication. Thus it is easy to calculate that the eight stories must have yielded approximately £BOOO. For a short poem, Collier's Weekly once paid Mf Kipling £2OO, and from Maclure’s he received £SOOO, or is 6d a word, for the English and American rights to “Kim.” The late Edward Noyes Westcott (or rather his heirs) drew the enormous sum of £25,000 from the sales and covpright of “David HarumMessrs Macmillan paid £BOOO down to Mr Winston Churchill for the clever life of his father; £IO,OOO came to Lord Morley for his life of Gladstone; and Mr J. J. Bell has made £4OOO out of his tiny book “Wee Macgregor,” a story, which, at one time, when it was being refused by publisher after publisher, he would have sold outright for a £lO note. Nor must we forget that the late Mr Seton Merriman left the comfortable fortune of over £50,000, as the fruits of a dozen years’ fiction-writing, although his public could scarcely compare in number with that of many of his rivals in popular favour. While admitting that such payments as these are quite exceptional, it is no exaggeration to say that there are at least a dozen living authors in England who make, or have made, by their pen, as large an income as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ROSE COLOURED ROMANCE. “The Carillon of Scarpa.” By Flora Klickmann, editor of “The Girls Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine.” London : G. P. Putnams. Here is a pleasant tale combining homeliness and romance, with attractive and novel local colouring, which may be recommended for family reading, and which will please readers who like rose-coloured presentations of life with a blend of religious sentiment of not too obtrusive quality. “Scarpa” corresponds geographically with Montenegro, but as the royal family of “Scarpa” plays a leading part in the plot its personnel is discreetly altered. The Patriarchical Montenegrin Sovereign, King Nicholas, of whom one used to hear attractive reports in pre-war days, wedded a Russian princess and had many daughters, whom he married off dogmatically, one becoming of Italy. King Raphap.l of the story had an English mother, and has married an English wife, who has died, leaving him with four charming daughters and one son, who, to complete the English connections of the family, fought as a private in a British regiment during the Great War. Ho is believed to have fallen in battle—but, thereby hangs a tale. The Great War has so impoverished the royal family of t Scarpa that the muchneeded repair of the royal armchair is a matter beyond the financial resources of the household. So the eldest princess and the English governess-companion put their heads together and devise a plan to bring something into the domestic exchequer. As a sequence, Mrs Potter-Poggs, an American nouvelle riche who has come to England with her daughter Gladsome, and, with the latter, is wearied of society climbing, hears that the royal family of Scarpa will .accord hospitality to suitablyrecommended summer visitors. Mrs Poggs is a good-natured woman: Gladsome, who has done war nursing, is an agreeable, capable young person; and both are captivated with the novelty' of their surroundings in the primitive litle capital of Scarpa and with the friendliness of the royal family, including the invalid English grandmother. Mrs Poggs plays the fairy godmother, taking the princesses for pleasure jaunts and shopping expeditions to

Sant Arvena, the commercialised frontier town of ths State, and working magic in Mignon’s poultry yard, while Gladsome goes to hefp at the hospital, and loses her heart to “Dr John.” An unpleasant prince, the heir presumptive, makes a mild sort of villain for the story, which ends dramatically with adventures with brigands—not very sensational, however — and a startling revelation which brings happiness to the royal household and provides a wonderfully satisfactory solution of Gladsome’s love troubles. Some musical scores are given of the strains played by the cathedral be l Is of Scarpa. Who, asks the author, “can ever describe the music of the carillon of Scarpa, or, indeed, of any of the great carillons of Europe? The very making of such bells is a lost art. One may liken the sounJ to silver rain, or the silt of moonlight through trees; one may speak of it as rivers of melody poured forth by a gigantic seolian harp. No, no! not in the very least like the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral, or poor, cracked Big Ben! The carillon of Scarpa* no more resembles our English bells than an Erard grand piano resembles a hurdygurdy.” THE LURE OF HISTORY. “ The Thirtieth Piece of Silver.” By Lilian Hayes. London: T. Fisher Unwin. The authoress, apparently a novice in novel production, has hit on a good motive as foundation for the series of romantic tales in historical settings. An old legend tells that when the remorsestricken Judas brought back the 30 pieces of silver to Annas and the elders of the Sanhedrim, and threw them, on the ground, one piece rolled away, and could not be recovered. But later someone picked it up, to be a curse throughout the ages, for its possessor was impelled to deeds of avarice and treachery, which finally brought retribution on his head. But if he lost it his better nature reasserted tself, and this sometimes happened—as to Balthasar, of the Netherlands story—in time for reparation and a happy ending to the tale. The scene of the first story is Rome, in the days of the persecution of the Christians under Domitian. Then there is a story of Anglo-Saxon days in England. Later the malign talisman, set as a jewel, finds its way into the hands of the Venetian Doge, Marine Faliere, whose story Byron has dramatised in his poem of that name, and impels him to the vindictive and ambitious schemes for which he was brought to the scaffold. Peru in the days of Bizarre, and the Netherlands in those of Philip II and the Prince of Orange, are the scenes of the next two stories, while for the concluding one the authoress goes into the future and shows Bolshevist plotters at work in England, while the mother of the heroine is no other than Tatiana, the youngest daughter of the hapless Nicholas, who was supposed to have been rescued insensible by a peasant when the Czar and his family were so barbarously murdered. The atmosphere of the tales belong to melodrama rather than serious historical fiction, but they are readable, and iikely to please many readers. It may be owing to some confusion with the bloody sacrifices of the Aztecs of Mexico that the authoress pictures an annual sacrifice of 50 children in the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. The Peruvian civilisation was much milder than that of the Aztecs, and it has commonly been represented that under it human sacrifices were very rare. Prescott says that Peruvian sacrifices generally consisted of animals and gram, flowers and sweet-scented ' gums; only occasionally, to celebrate some signal event, “a child or a beautiful maiden ■was selected as the victim.” MATRIMONIAL COMPLICATIONS. “The Marriage Handicap.” By Ruby M. Ayres. London: Hodder and Stoughton. . The authoress, who, as a flyleaf shows, has a very long list of novels and tales to her credit, nere gives her readers a fairly constructed story of a husband’s and wife’s misunderstandings and final reconciliation. One would not expect a very worldly-minded young man, accustomed to smart society and ambitious of social success, to marry a countrified young girl, daughter of a poor clergyman, whose chief delight is to roam the countryside in thick boots and woollen skirt and jumper, accompanied by “ Holy Joe,” her pet dog. But in a brief infatuation, as it afterwards seems to him, Martin Hackworth has married Rachel two years before the opening of the story, and they have long been drifting further and further apart. Rachel was repelled by the fast and Bohemian people to whom her husband introduced her in London, and would make no effort to adapt herself to her new surroundings, or to arrive at a compromise between Martin’s social tastes and her own. So Martin soon took her a house in the country, where she passed her time according to her own ideas, while he spent his time mainly in London, visiting her for week-ends. But, so contrary are human beings, no sooner does Martin come to think he has grounds for jealousy than the wife he was regarding as a handicap gains value in his eyes, and before long all the attraction she ever had for him revives in doubled force. Rachel meanwhile has always loved hef husband, but forms the foolish filan of awaking him from his indifference >y making him jealous, and she pursues her plan to perilous extremes. Complications between them result in her going to live with her father’s, sister, who really derives her income from keeping a night club and gaming house, the unsophisticated Rachel, ot course, being quite unRiispiciov\s of the nature of her new surroundings. Martin’s cousin, who is in love with him, does her best by anonymous letters and other contrivances to separate Rachel and her husband irretrievably, but rescue is found for Rachel through* a motor accident and the death, in what does not seem at all a probable manner, of the young man whom Rachel

was using as an instrument in her jealousy plot, and with whom she was running away at the time of the accident. The story is naturally told, and some of ihe characters are well devised. AN ISLAND STORY. “ Cock of the Walk.” By J. K. Pulling, author of “In Leading Strings. ’ Ixmdon: Hodder and Stoughton. Ibis is a slight but agreeable story, he scene of which is a semi-tropical island, apparently in the West Indies, here named Belle Foret. To it conies Mr Lovatt, a wealthy retired American jammaker, with his wife and son. He tries, with very considerable success, to make himself “ cock of the walk,” while Mr Lorraine, the Governor, a very agreeable specimen of an English gentleman, naturally withstands him. Though “ retired,” Mr Lovcitt opens up a great provision shop in the little town, first underselling the local retailers and driving them out oi business, and then raising his prices, and proposes to furnish the inhabitants with electric lighting and other modern conveniences. Soon the people are divided into two factions, the more powerful maintaining that Lovatt is a public benefactor, while the other opposes him as a scheming interloper. But the chief bone of contention between the Governor and the capitalist is the old fort of St. Etienne, a relic of the days of blench occupation, and the oldest building on the island. It had lately been the property of a recluse, who greatly desired that'it should be permanently preserved, but owing to his sudden death it is to be sold by public auction. The members of the Governor’s council fix a limit of £3OO as the highest price the island can afford for an old relic dangerously out of repair, that few people besides the Governor care to preserve. Lovatt desires to pull down the fort, which stands on a commanding headland, and make its stones the foundation of a church, and naturally he has his way. Young Lovatt, a good sort of young fellow, though, as one would expect, rather underbred, falls in love with tl e Governor’s daughter, a pretty, but conventional and limited young person, who for long snubs Bill, even alter he has saved her life, but who finally comes round The story, however, is not in the least sentimental, and the two young peonle are meant to be very ordinary. Humorous sketches of the society "of the island, joined to the progress of the contest between Governor and capitalist, make up an entertaining story, and there is a really delightful little boy, the Governor’s small son. The scenes which show him and his father, who has the rare gift of sympathetic comprehension of a child’s fancies and feelings, are the most attractive feature of a brightly-told story. LITERARY WANDERINGS. “A London Book Window.” By James Milne. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head. Mr Milne, in his introduction to this collection of delightful sketches, suggests that he is a pilot, guiding whomever will fellow, into some of the less known paths of literature. He is full of enthusiasm, and the by-ways and queer alleys which he traverses gives a number of totally fresh aspects of the subjects. He follows no definite plan, but moves at random, pausing only when the mood seizes him, and then giving a discursive and entertaining chat on whatever has seized his fancy. The result is therefore a collection of very wide interest. Some of them—“ Best Sellers,” “The Decay of Heroes,’’"“The Problem Novel,” r ‘Literary Trifles,” “First Novels and Novelists,” “Lives of Great Men,” “Epistles of Married Love,” “Byron and tlie Murrays,” “Were the Victorians Dull?” “The Diary of English Letters,” “Short Stories of Quality,” and “All the King’s English”—will serve to show the cosmopolitan range of the author’s wanderings. The book will fill an empty hour with pleasant and profitable reading. ENGLISH BOOKS AT ENGLISH PRICES. Hitherto the sale of books in New Zealand has been severely handicapped by the fact that English publishers were unable to supply their books (excent novels) to the booKsellers at a price which would enable them to be retailed here without a considerable increase on the English published price. This difficulty has at last been overcome by Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd., of 3 Henrietta street, Covent Garden, London, the publishers of “The Roadmender” and of many works by such authors as Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, Belloc, Elinor Glyn, G. P. Robinson, Walt Mason, etc., who have arranged to supply th# trade with copies of all such books on terms which will enable them to be offered for sale hero at the same prices as in England. This effort of Messrs Duckworth to encourage the reading of English books has the fullest support of the booksellers, and every encouragement will be given to the public to take advantage of it. 4 PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. Messrs Hodder and Stoughton, whose •Fiist, Second, and Third Crossword Puzzle Books have found such a ready sale with interested “puzzlers,” have now published the fourth of the series. The book opens with “A Word About the Puzzles,” which explains their mode of solution to beginners, and gives advice to those who are already adepts at the game. In addition, there are directions telling one how to procure the correct solutions on application to the publishers. The book, which contains orthodox cross-word puzzles, has one or two quite easy ones, one or two looking easier than they are, and some not easy at all.