The Express.
London, England, 1860-09-08 00:00:00

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPT. 8.

THE letter from a French dramatic author which
has recently come under the public notice was
curiously well timed. With a tenderness and
courtesy worthy of all respect it pointed out ono
of the most flagrant and ludicrous instances of that
" cleptomania " which Mr. CHARLES READI has
riddled through and through with the sharpest
arrows of a literary quiver, inexhaustibly rich in
arguments and illustrations. No reader of that
powerful and attractive fiction, " /t is ,roar too
late to mem'," will be surprised at the occasional
eccentricity and the thorough nobleness and gene-
rosity of Mr. CHARLES READE'S commentaries on
"The Eighth Commandment," as it is inter-
preted by our legislators, and obeyed by our
playwrights, under cover of a certain proviso
smuggled into the International Copyright Act
of that famous millennial year 1851. " For
" in that year," writes Mr. CHARLES RIAD; "the
" chief nations of Europe agreed that intellectual
" property should pass frontiers and sheets of !
" water, yet still be property." We must do Mr.
READE the justice to say that he takes no pains to
conciliate the good will of that class of writers
which, to distinguish from the "independent" and
the " inouortal," he defines as salaried and ephe-
meral, a class to which, we fear, most journalists
(unless they happen to be novelists or dra-
matists into the bargain) must belong. Perhaps
we ought to despair of persuading so ardent and
eloquent an admirer of the present Exesaoa of
the FRVO'H, that even an English journalist, though
" salaried and ephemeral," need not, therefore, be
" incapable of a noble action or of a noble senti-
ment,"
or " the enemy not only of the country but
of the human race." These harmless amenities
belong naturally enough to a page devoted to the
glorification of that eminent patron of " indepen-
" dent " and " immortal " literature, NAPOLEON
; but whether they assist the cause of an
English author, jealous of his country's legislative
and literary honour, s a question we leave to the
calmer reflections of Mr. Rases. At any rate,
no ebullition of an " inkster," whom we delight to
reckon among the " Immortals," shall prevent us
from thanking Mr. READE in the name of na-
tional honour and international justice for having
written a volume which is something better than a
good book, for it is a good action. It is not the
fault of the author of " Christie Johnstone" that he
cannot make even "The Eighth Commandment"
dull as fact, and unsaleable as a syllogism. He
has fought like a Paladin ; but you forget his
sufferings and his dangers when he caracole
through nearly four hundred pages clad in a suit
of dazzling armour of art, scholarship, logic,
irony, science, anecdote, and sarcasm. No doubt
Mr. READS has learnt in suffering what he sings
in such inimitable prose. He tells us that his
chivalrous enterprise has coat him heartache, head-
ache, and heavy lees ; but the British public who
think that authors ought to be pillaged for the
public good will revel in the Cervantic humour of
the sermon, and lose sight of the brilliant
preacher's text. We cannot find it in our hearts
to count among Mr. Resna's sufferings this ad-
mirable performance. "The Eighth Command-
" meat" becomes, under his hand, quite as amus-
ing and infinitely more instructive than a batch of
" novels of the season," and he may be very well
content if it is its own reward.

Who was it, then, that invented the shameful
proviso in the act of 1851, according to which
the protection accorded to the works of foreign
dramatic authors is "not intended to prohibit
" fitip ittiit(ifi..ms attreplationa of dramatic
" works to the stage in England and France
" respectively, but is only meant to prevent piratical
" translations" t By this proviso, as Mr. READS
proves exhaustively, and beyond the possibility
of cavil, " the protection sold so dear to the
" dramatist in the heart of the statute is all
" juggled back, together with the heavy expenses
" the promised protection inveigles him into."
The iiien who " earwigged" the legislature into an
act of fraud were "the stupidest of all the literary
" pirate•s that filch under false colours," "the
" smallest dunces of the century,"--in other
words, the playwrights who live on "adaptations"
and " imitations" from the French stage. The result
of this iniquitous and contemptible proviso has
been tie destruction of ■ national drama in a
country which once hail the finest national
drama in the world, and the assimila-
tion I.f the trade of playwright to the
busines • of one of those establishments
where rags, and bones, and " tripping," are bought
and sob!. Mr. Reiman qu.ot.•s, chapter and verse,
the playbills of the principal London theatres
during a single year ; Mintenths of the pieces
are "adapted" from the French. It is notorious

that within the last year or two plays written by
English authors of repute and described as "ori-
"ginal" have been "adapted," scene by scene,
from the French. There are English "dramatists"
who have lived for years at the expense of the
French inventors. No man who lives and moves
habitually between Fleet-street and Pall mall
would hesitate to name the probable authors of
• proviso which has clasped the market to dra-
=tic genius at home, starved all but the chiefs
of the piratical crew, flooded the stage with exotic
representations utterly and absurdly false to Eng-
lish life and nature, and, last but not least, sanc-
tioned the robbery of the French dramatist under
cover of a treaty supposed to protect him. No
one who is fortunate enough to have a French
dramatic author among his friends can be insen-
sible to the deep stain which this miserable
" adaptation " proviso has inflicted upon our
national honour ; and where the good opinion of a
body so influential in the formation of public
feeling and popular opinion as the French
dramatic authors is concerned, an act of mere bad
faith, involving damage to particular interests, be-
comesan act of grievous national impolicy as well as
of grave international injustice. There is no alliance,
as we have repeatedly insisted, between two such
nations as France and England, so hopeful and
enduring as a moral and intellectual alliance ; but
no such alliance can subsist on deliberate dishonesty
on the one aide, and • contemptuous sense of in-
jury on the other. Mr. Citsates READE has
completely annihilated the impudent sophistries of
the piratical interest, who presume to hoist the
banner of Free Trade, as if "duty free" meant
" purchase free." Sometimes, indeed, Mr.
READE appears to be pointing a sixty-
eight pounder at a " bluebottle," so inane are
the pretensions of his enemy. For instance,
when he undertakes to prove that English
genius is dramatic, that great novelists may be
great dramatists, and that stolen French inven-
tion drives English dramatic inventors from the
stage, and starves all but the leaders of the shame-
less gang, we feel that he is wasting excellent
powder and shot. ALPHONSE KARR, years
ago, drew up a law of copyright in a
single clause, declaring that intellectual
property is property. It will take a long
time yet to convince a mechanical, indus-
trial, and sporting Legislature that brainwork is
work, and that intellectual produce is property.
Mr. Rr.anz shows how in the United States, where
patent rights are strictly asserted, mechanical
invention is in advance of all the world ; whilst,
in default of international copyright, American
national literature may be said to exist
only by favour of the occasional chivalry
of a few English publishers. In France,
' though dramatic literature is by no means
in the high moral and intellectual condition which
Mr. CHARLER RIAD; u an admirer of the Second
Empire, loves to imagine, it is certainly flourish-
ing enough, in a commercial sense, to pay the
playwrights who adorn the Second Empire, and
to pay them handsomely. But if we look at home,
we find an English playwright described in the
bills of one of the most respectable of our theatres
as the author of CASIIETZ DaLaviosz's best play,
and of a famous drama by ALEXANDRE Deltas.
Mr. CHASM RILADIE, armed with poignant per-
sonal experiences, spurns the preposterous theory
that "adaptation " is not less difficult than inven-
tion, for he has himself achieved conspicuous success
in both. Only ; when he proposed to adapt a
French drams he bought the right first, and was
driven to law to defend the same from wholesale
pillage. We believe that the evil is slowly cor-
recting itself ; and if our National Drama revives,
it will thank the author of " It is never too late to
" moot" for having saved it from suicide.