Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/83

Rh the fervour of the projecting imagination is required to carry through a long piece of editorial work. This more constant motive was supplied to Johnson by necessity. He did not pretend to write for pleasure. In a letter to his friend Hector, announcing the new edition of Shakespeare, he says: ‘The proposals and receipts may be had from my mother, to whom I beg you to send for as many as you can dispose of, and to remit to her the money which you or your acquaintances shall collect.’ In January, 1759, his mother died, and he wrote Rasselas in the evenings of one week, to defray the expenses of her funeral and to pay some little debts which she had left. The famous saying, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ may thus be regarded as the voice of his own hard experience, but it is something more than that. It is Johnson’s brief and epigrammatic statement of the unvarying relation between author and publisher. Though it has been cried out against as a wilful paradox, it is the creed of the professional author in all countries and at all times. Young poets may be satisfied with fame, rich amateurs with elegance, missionaries and reformers with influence. But the publisher who should depend for his livelihood on the labours of these three classes would be in a poor way, and indeed, if publishers would communicate to the world an account of their intimate transactions, they could tell how the author who is content with reputation for his first book talks of nothing but money when he comes to proffer his second. He has learnt wisdom. The vanity of authors, encouraged by the modesty of their employers and the superstition of the public, has imposed a kind of religious jargon on a purely commercial