Correspondence
American Copyright
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—In the second number of The London Mercury I note a reference in an Editorial Note to the status of the copyright relations between America and Great Britain.
You emphasize the unsatisfactory status of the American copyright law. It is the case, as you point out, that the provision inserted in the original International Act which went into effect in 1891, and in the amended Act which became law in 1909, makes it a condition that any book, whether by an American or an English author, must, in order to secure copyright protection in the United States, be published in an edition “wholly manufactured” within this country. It has also been the law up to within the past fortnight that the American edition must be brought into the market within a term of not less than sixty days from the date of publication in Great Britain.
This Act, as amended in 1912 and again in December, 1919, represents the largest measure of copyright protection that it has thus far been found practicable to secure for transatlantic authors. The fight to secure any measure of recognition for the property rights of foreign authors had continued from 1837 (when my father organised the first Copyright League) to 1891, when a provision for international copyright first found place in the American statute. I succeeded my father as the Secretary and executive of the International Copyright League.
As a representative of this League (which at that time comprised authors as well as publishers) I took to Washington in 1886 the draft of a Bill which, if enacted, would have enabled the United States to become a member of the Convention of Berne. After four years of effort with two successive Congresses, I was obliged to report to the Copyright League that there was no possibility of securing favourable attention for any international copyright measure that did not make provision for American manufacture.
The Book Manufacturing Union, comprising typesetters, printers, binders, etc., had made clear to Congress that they would block the enactment of any measure that did not include the manufacturing requirement. In this position they were supported by the other unions which had no direct interest in, and in fact no knowledge of, the matter at issue. The unions have, wisely, probably for their own interests, held increasingly to the policy of giving a general support to a claim made by any one union or group.
Our League took the position that it was wiser to secure such measure of recognition for literary property as was then practicable rather than to leave without protection the books of transatlantic authors, and the authors and publishers of Great Britain were in full accord with this decision.
We are obliged to report that the unions have to-day a stronger influence over Congress, and as a rule over the executive, than they had in 1890. There is no possibility of securing the cancellation of the manufacturing requirement unless, or until, the book manufacturing unions can be persuaded to give their assent. There has been an increasing effort to this end, and we hope yet to be able to make clear to the book manufacturing trade that the American printers and binders are now quite strong enough to secure their full share of the work done, and that they do not need this special restriction in their favour.
We have just succeeded in securing the enactment of an amendment, a copy of which is enclosed.
This amendment has two purposes:
First:—The extension of the ad interim term of copyright from sixty to 120 days.
An English author now has four months’ time within which to complete the arrangements for his American edition, and there is no reason why any book having value for American readers should not secure the full protection of American copyright.
Second:—The Bill has the further purpose of giving protection to the books of transatlantic authors which, under the special conditions of the years of war and the dislocation of transatlantic mails, had failed to fulfil the requirements of the copyright law. These books, as far as they may not already have been appropriated, are now placed in a position to meet these requirements and to secure copyright for the full term. It is, however, a condition of this special protection that the British authorities shall give reciprocal protection to books by American authors which, under the same war conditions, have failed to meet the requirements of the English statute and have, therefore, forfeited the protection of the British Copyright Act.
The American authors have here a fair ground for complaint against Great Britain.
The British Act of 1912 provides that copyright protection will be accorded only to a book which has been brought into bona-fide publication, and the Courts take the ground that this means placing “adequate supplies” of the book in the market within the term specified, fourteen days. This term is, you will note, very much smaller than the sixty-day term granted in the earlier American Act, or the 120 days which are now available.
In 1916 books were included under the heading of luxuries, the importation of which into Great Britain was prohibited by the embargo Act. Great Britain had, therefore, granted copyright with one hand and with the other, under this embargo Act, had made it impossible for American authors to meet the requirements of the Copyright Act. The copyright arrangement between the United States and Great Britain that went into effect in 1891, and that was confirmed by the Act of 1912, carried with it the obligations of a treaty, and the embargo Act constituted, therefore, as far as copyright was concerned, a violation of the treaty obligation.
I found, in bringing this matter in 1918 to the attention of the Comptroller-General, that this consideration had not occurred to the British authorities at the time of the embargo Act.
I pointed out to the Comptroller-General that as a result of this embargo provision property rights had been lost not only for American authors, but for a certain group of British authors who, not being able under the manufacturing difficulties of the war period to secure prompt publication of their books in Great Britain, had made first publication in the United States. In so doing they had forfeited their British copyright, although it had been their impression that they would be able when the war had come to an end to secure protection for British editions. The Comptroller-General agreed that the condition was unsatisfactory, and agreed further that if the United States would do what was now practicable to protect the publications of the war period a similar protection of books of American authors would be arranged for by the British authorities.
A fortnight back, on the day on which the President signed the Bill, I cabled the report to the Comptroller-General that books by British authors issued during the war period would be protected in America as soon as the British authorities were prepared to grant reciprocal protection. I hope to hear that prompt measures have been taken to such effect. Lord Askwith has, I may mention, interested himself in the matter and will, I understand, take prompt action to initiate the necessary legislation.
I can but think that those who are critical of the present status of the American copyright law should understand that the unsatisfactory provisions in the law do not represent the opinion of the American people, but the disproportioned influence of the manufacturing unions. It would be in order also to give some measure of appreciation to the American publishers and authors who have for many years been doing what was in their power to secure adequate recognition for literary property on both sides of the Atlantic.—Yours, etc.,
Geo. Haven Putnam.
The American Publishers’ Copyright League,
Office of the Secretary, 2 West 45th Street, New York, January 3rd.
[Major Putnam’s news, which we briefly recorded in our Editorial Notes last month, is excellent hearing. In congratulating him on his work in connection with copyright we must also mention the Authors’ League of America and our own Authors’ Society, with their respective indefatigable secretaries, Mr. Eric Schuler and Mr. G. Herbert Thring.—Editor.]
Mr. Sturge Moore and Flaubert
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—In the review of Mr. W. K. Seymour’s Miscellany of Poetry—1919 (London Mercury, February) the best thing in the book is said to be “a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his Micah so peculiarly rich a poem.” This is, of course, a very just remark, but it is a curious thing about Micah that the particular piece of imagery which struck one reader at any rate can be paralleled almost verbatim from Salammbo. I intend no discourtesy to Mr. Sturge Moore when I say that I consider the parallel should have been acknowledged in the text. He has written much about Flaubert and much also about the virtues of joint authorship, and I think nothing but praise for what is apparently a verse translation in Micah would have resulted from the acknowledgment. As the matter stands it seems that an explanation of some sort is wanting, and I suggest that when Micah is published in a collection of Mr. Moore’s poetry the point should surely not be overlooked.
The following are the lines referred to:
Salammbo:
“Le toit de la haute maison s’appuie sur de minces colonnettes, rapprochées comme les bâtons d’une claire-voie, et par ces intervalles le maître, étendu sur un long siége, aperçoit toutes ces plaines autour de lui, avec les chasseurs entre les blés, le pressoir où l’on vendange, les bœufs qui battent la paille.”
Mr. Sturge Moore:
“The roof of that tall house lightly was raised
On slender colonnettes set nigh as close
As palings. Micah through these intervals
Had oft at leisure from his couch surveyed
The plain stretched round him; slingers in the corn
The wine-press whither they bring in his grapes.
Unmuzzled and well fed, slow oxen trod
The terrace threshing-floor.”
Yours, etc.,
H. W. Crundell.
Prose and Mortality
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—There is a good example of the recurrence of that “one music and one speech” so richly instanced in your article “Prose and Mortality” (January’s London Mercury) in Keats’s letter to Brown written on board the Maria Crowther off the Isle of Wight—good because, though the music is not full nor the harmony flawless, it is yet heard unmistakably in a familiar letter, where it rises from the midst of an invalid’s colloquial writing. Here it is:
“Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind I may say the bitterness of death is passed.”—Yours, etc.,
S. P. J.
Llangollen, February 8th.
[This is a perfect example, as it comes not from a set composition but from a familiar letter.—Editor.]
Tamhtab
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—There is an example of the “Moor Eeffocist” language which is not open to “A. P.’s” very just objection.
When I was very young and had a vivid imagination I was taken into a Chinese Restaurant, where I saw TUO YAW writ large on a glass door. For a long time I thought I knew at least two words of Chinese.—Yours, etc.,
Donald J. Wardley.
25 Elgin Crescent, W.11, February 7th.
The Song of the Mandrake
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Will you allow me to point out a curious slip in Mr. Walter de la Mare’s most wonderful little story, The Creatures, in the current (January) number?
On page 281, eight lines from the bottom, he gives a list of birds—“Gull, mandrake, plover, wagtail, finch, robin.” Does Mr. de la Mare really mean his readers to understand that the mandrake is a bird? If so, surely the root must cry aloud as it is dragged from the ground to be hurled into a different Natural Order.—Yours, etc.,
W. Walmesley White.
Ellergarth, Budleigh Salterton, January 28th.
The Verb to Do
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Will no one protest against and endeavour to check the ugly and quite unnecessary modernism of “as it does”? I give an example of a sentence, adequate and harmonious as written, which would be spoiled were the favourite journalese “as it does” inserted after the word “embracing.”
“The glorious view from this spot, embracing the valley of Ville d’Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance, was a delight to Balzac.”—Martin, Stones of Paris, II., 69.—Yours, etc.,
R. Owen.
Belmount Hall, Outgate, Ambleside, January 12th.
John Donne
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Mr. Robert Lynd in his very readable essay on Donne in your last number has inadvertently fallen into the old error of saying that Donne was in 1612 “making use of his legal knowledge in order to help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her first marriage.” It is true that Donne wrote an Epithalamium for the Countess’s second marriage, and that is mortifying enough without any further charge. But Professor Grierson pointed out some time since that it was Dr. Daniel Donne (or Dun) who drew up the paper referred to (Grierson’s Donne, ii. 94). If further evidence were needed, it might be supplied from MS. Rawlinson 1386 in the Bodleian. On page 201 is the autograph Daniel Dun, and someone, probably Rawlinson, has added “Sr. Daniel Dr of Civil Lawes concern’d in Somerset’s Divorce.”
Mr. Lynd very rightly insists that John Donne is “the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets.” But he implies that the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy is not quite consistent with Platonism. What is Platonism? It is customary to develop a system of philosophy of love from a few famous pages of the Symposium, ignoring the rest, and this more or less hypothetical or mythical Platonism has caused many people to forget Plato’s real teaching. A careful study of the Symposium will, I think, show Donne to be much more truly in the genuine Platonic tradition than were some of the poetical Platonists who preceded him. Mr. Lynd is quite right on this point, and I think he might have put it even more strongly.—Yours, etc.,
Ben Crocker Clough.
Oxford, February 13th.
Dogs
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Your reviewer in his notice of that interesting book Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish, referring to the “dog-whipper,” says, “But why did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition?” I would remind him that the dog-whipper’s office was not created in the seventeenth century, but in those remoter times when no gentleman appeared anywhere in public without his hawk on his wrist and his hound at his heel. In Barclay’s Shippe of Fools (1509) he writes:
One time the hawkes bells jangleth hye
And now the houndes barking strikes the skye
They make of the Church for their hawkes a mewe,
And canell for their dogges, which they shall after rewe.
It was the custom to supply a pew (or pen) for the dogs of the Lord of the Manor—the hall-dogs’ “pew”—and as people worshipped (in their hats) with the church doors standing open, I suppose the hounds of the lesser gentry and inimitative yeomen would run in and fight and distract attention.
Though in the seventeenth century the hawk had ceased to be an integral part of a gentleman’s equipage, the dogs had inherited the tradition of taking their masters to church, maybe. And as the worshipper, even in the seventeenth century, went from Divine service to a bull or bear-baiting, he would like to have his dogs on the spot. And no doubt all the curs of the village would want to follow them into church and ask the news of high life.—Yours, etc.,
G. I. Whitham.
Lyneham Cottage, Chudleigh, S. Devon, February 13th.