AUTHOR. In its widest sense the word means an originator; in practice it connotes a writer of original books or articles. The author's calling, as distinct from the scribe's, was recog nized from very remote times in the community. There is a reference in the Apocrypha (II. Maccabees) to "the first author of the story," and Egyptian and Chinese literature takes the record an era farther back. The status of the author or, as Dr. Johnson has it, "the first writer of a book," in the sense of an originator or creative agent, is not always clear, as compared with the scribe's or copyist's, but his higher function and fuller responsibility are distinctly indicated. In China, towards the end of the 3rd cen tury B.C., Huang-ti, "the Napoleon of China," not only ordered all books without exception to be destroyed, but all authors of books to be put to death. This was not, however, a reactionary step. It came of the intense conservatism of the scholars and authors who were the depositaries and the rigid maintainers of the ancient tradition. They had resisted Huang-ti's reforms, and he swept them away, and the caste of the literati perished with them. But the cult of the past was too ingrained to be destroyed. The Sacred Books were recovered from men's memories, and rewritten; and the name of Huang-ti became an author's byword in China. The story of this massacre in the 3rd century B.C. may have reached these shores and helped to foster the legend of Edward I.'s massa cre of the Welsh bards, as recited in Gray's poem.
Among the Celtic peoples the official recognition of the bards was partly based on their service as rhyming chroniclers and keepers of the old tradition, or of the family or tribal records, quite apart from their more original function. As a class, jealous of their rights, they even sought legal powers in Wales to put down any irregular followers of their art, with a touch of the jealousy shown by Shakespeare's contemporary, who spoke of him as "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers." But the honour paid to the scholars and bards and even the scribes in ancient Britain and Ireland marks an implicit reverence for learning and a sense of a high tradition to be observed and reinforced by the old writers, as is shown in the title, The Book of the Four Masters.
The author's rights and his pride in his craft, with a suspicion of caste feeling in the background, were vigorously asserted on the Elizabethan stage. Ben Jonson's play The Poetaster, under the disguise of the Latin poets, and with his rival Dekker satirized as the literary cobbler Crispinus, turns from "poet apes" to the true authors whom "envy" wishes to put down. In this satire occurs what is probably the first use of the phrase "to damn the author." In what is sometimes called the Augustan age of English litera ture, when poet or proseman had to resort to a titled patron for the backing needed to produce a book, he was apt to sink his corpo rate sense in his individual need and personal ambition. We catch echoes of this petitioner's suit and self-assertion in the prefaces and dedications of Dryden, in Swift and in Pope, in the allusions to my lord's ante-chamber and to Grub street (now Milton street by a strange conversion). Among the writers who mark the signs of a coming change were Daniel Defoe and Dr. Johnson. The change was when the patronal gave way to the popular support of the author. That came with the enlarging of the audience, when at the end of the i8th century Burns's songs won a national hearing; when at the opening of the i 9th century Walter Scott and Byron captured the fashionable public ; when again the Waverley Novels prepared the way for the Victorian novelists, Dickens and Thack eray. Dickens himself was a stout maintainer of the author's rights and legal sanctions. He was one of the first to insist on international copyright.
Dickens reminds us that the novel, which is not the highest form of the author's art, has done more than any other to win him both his market price and his public honour. But the full recognition was not won without a struggle, the evidences of which are to be traced in the corporate activity of such bodies as the Society of Authors (q.v.), the P.E.N. Club and the Royal Society of Literature. (E. RH.)