3 - Property lines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Let us return to Carlyle for a moment. The hero as man of letters is a new phenomenon, he says, a man who rules from his grave. Why new? He tells us in the very first phrase of the passage I quoted in the last chapter, ‘He, with his copy-rights …’ The man of letters is not someone who simply interprets the ‘Divine Idea’, he has a secular legal existence as well. Two codes are at work here, and if we go back to 1759 we can see them cross one another in a manner that was to seem natural for later generations: ‘let not great examples, or authorities, browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence, as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor.’ This is Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition, and his message is plain: the true genius looks within for inspiration. No sooner are we directed inside ourselves, though, than we find ourselves returned to the market place. ‘The man who thus reverences himself, will soon find the world's reverence to follow his own. His works will stand distinguished; his the sole property of them; which property alone can confer the noble title of an author; that is, of one who (to speak accurately) thinks, and composes; while other invaders of the press, how voluminous, and learned soever, (with due respect be it spoken) only read, and write.’
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- Information
- Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property , pp. 70 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999