Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

went on at great length to attack copyright in general, making points that now form the heart of the anti-copyright case. Though modern intermediaries actually apologize for Macaulay’s style, it is this that chiefly recommends him. Despite his grievous faults, he writes as gracefully and fluidly as Cicero. Nonetheless, as rhetorically pretty as it is, his famous speech begs for evisceration by any semiconscious passerby.

Starting at the edges, consider the following from Professor Boyle, writing for the Financial Times web site: “Thomas Macaulay, another brilliant thinker whom Mr. Helprin would doubtless think naive, made the case just as eloquently for copyrights [he means against extension: no matter] as Jefferson did for patents…. Would Dr. Johnson have wanted a copyright term to last more years after his death? ‘Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago…he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground.’ Readers, by all means send a shin of beef to Mr. Helprin. Let us hope he prefers it to his current argument.”56

A shin of beef is a very large piece, which is why no doubt Macaulay spoke of a plate of it, in cuts. Saying “Send a shin of beef,” is comparable to saying, “Send a redwood” to someone building a redwood deck. We have the word some to buffer such inexactitude. But that’s what you get when, because you are writing for an English publication, you want to get both flouncy and ruthless, using the language like a decorated cudgel. The English style of debate rewards ruthless wit, but only if it is coupled with coherent argument and is itself effective and precise. Absent that, there is very little. Rather than wit, what is apparent here is a desire to appear almost English, an embarrassing phase some insecure colonials enter never to exit. It was what, when I was a boy, we used to call “hoity-toity.” People who were hoity-toity named their children Chauncey, Gaylord, and Marmaduke rather than Satchmo, Izzy, and Paisan. The names they chose were not a problem. But what was a problem was that they would pronounce hoity-toity “hwa-tie twa-tie.”

It is Macaulay, however, who must be addressed, and not his clumsy admirers. I do not, in fact, think him naïve, but, rather, spiteful, duplicitous, vengeful, cruel, and part of the forever enduring tragedy that those who should have the least self-doubt have the most, and those who should have the most have the least, a subject addressed with unsurpassed eloquence by William Butler Yeats, who was just an Irishman. Macaulay displays himself to greatest disadvantage not in regard to copyright, where he merely fails in logic and prediction, but in regard to his deliberately distorted treatment of the Duke of Marlborough, even in the face of evidence that Macaulay cloaked lest it impeach his case and choke off his self-indulgent and easy-flowing bile. Churchill’s handling of this in Marlborough is a virtually airtight case against Macaulay as a judge of character and circumstances, and brings to light a suspect integrity. What else can one reasonably conclude about someone who unfairly represented Marlborough based on the misinterpretation of evidence; evidence that he knew to be false; and the evidence, contradicting his findings, of which he was aware and that he ignored?

But, character aside, in the pompous quotation pompously offered by Professor Boyle, Macaulay is wrong. Johnson, in Macaulay’s presentation a kind of nineteenth-century romantic high-mindedly indifferent to money, was the one who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”57 This was because he was not only a multifaceted genius but also an intensely practical man who lived most of his life either suffering himself or witness to the suffering of others in Hogarthian poverty: “Ah, Sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit.”58 And by Boswell’s account, “No royal or noble patron extended a munificent hand to give independence to the man who had conferred stability on the language of his country.”59 When finally he exited abject poverty, Johnson was certainly aware that he might not have, and that a steadier and more dependable source of income, linked directly to one’s efforts and talents and available to a wider range of persons, would have been preferable to rare royal largesse or the pity of strangers.

Given that he lived so much of his life in Grub Street, where he once attended a dinner and ate behind a screen, so ashamed was he of his ragged clothing; where his friend John Hawkins wore paper cuffs, pawned the pages of his books as he wrote them, and literally sold the shirts off his back and wrote naked, in the hope but not always the success of staving off his hunger; and given that all Johnson’s adult life he extended his charity to a succession of waifs that he took in and supported, how could he not have appreciated the prospect of a more stable estate for the benefit of his heirs, and for the family he might have had, had writers been better protected, and for those whom he made his family despite their misfortune and distress? Even a cursory reading of Johnson’s life would suggest this. That Macaulay, whose knowledge of Johnson went so far beyond this would come to such a different conclusion is indicative of a failure of understanding that would be amplified in his more general arguments.

Unlike many who cite him, Macaulay was in favor of copyright during the author’s life, a “privilege, which I should…be prepared to defend strenuously against any assailant.”60 It