The Profligate Indency of Authors
The Scourge; or Monthly Expositor, of Imposture and Folly, January 1811.
The retainers of literature have long been remarkable for the laxity of their morals, and the irregularity of their habits; every unfortunate scribbler who is able, after a fortnight’s study to manufacture a Lloftian sonnet, or whose assumption of a Roman name has procured him admittance to the columns of a weekly newspaper, conceives himself at once emancipated from those restraints of decorum, and morality which circumscribe the ideas of the common orders of mankind, and launches out into all the extravagances of profligate indecency. To palliate the wickedness, or excuse the folly of such a man it is only necessary that he should be an author: the morbid sensibility of genius, the enthusiasm of a vivid imagination superior to the grovelling cautiousness of petty minds, and the generous indignation of conscious superiority glowing with shame for the guilt, and pity for the weakness of human nature, but willing to drown its own reflections in the cup of pleasure, are the forms of verbal sophism by which the advocate of every literary profligate, from Savage to Dermody, has endeavoured to efface the outlines of distinction between vice and virtue. Actions that would have deserved in any other man the epithets of mean, and infamous; and modes of external deportment which would have been stigmatised as indecent and detestable, are, when related of a Burns or a Morland, ascribed to an exuberance of virtuous feeling, or accompanied with a slight memento of consolation, “that the eccentricities of the object of their biography, were the eccentricities of genius.” The cant of critical sensibility is not only of all others the most disgusting but the most dangerous: it teaches the young aspirant after fame that the portrait of a man of genius never appears so amiably interesting as when arrayed in the drapery of vice, and it impresses the sons of mediocrity with an involuntary persuasion that libertinism is one of the characteristics of intellectual greatness, and that the fervour of literary enthusiasm, is always accompanied by the warmth of sensual passion, and the inconstancy of mental restlessness.
Of the numberless dependants on the press who crowd the taverns, and distract the opinions of this metropolis, how few are there who have any care beyond the moment of immediate pleasure! who have any rule of abstinence from licentious enjoyment but the scantiness of their pecuniary resources! The dollar that has been gained on the Saturday morning by the prostitution of their talents, is squandered in the evening in gratifications that habit has rendered necessary to their existence, but that the anxieties of mental contest between prudence and inclination will not permit them to enjoy. The life of those who make literature their profession is in general a continued struggle between want and temptation; between the dictates of reason, and the allurements of habit. Their first errors are the result of romantic ambition: as they proceed in the career of licentiousness they learn to be in love with vice for her own attractions, and when experience has shewn them the folly of their ambition, and the miseries that attend in the train of dissipation; it is no longer in their power to recede:
He that once sins, like him that slides on ice,
Goes swiftly down the slippery ways of vice;
Though conscience checks yet these rubs once gone o’er,
He glides on smoothly, and looks back no more. Dryden.
(From the Internet Archive)
