This editorial from the American Harper's New Monthly Magazine describes W. S. Gilbert's famous irascibility, this time in a copyright dispute. The "Editor's Easy Chair" from February 1886 takes a much more positive stand on Gilbert's worth in the literary and nonliterary world.

"The Editor's Easy Chair" was a several-page assemblage of thoughts, broken into sections. I reprint here only the fourth section from the April issue.

The full citation is

• "Editor's Easy Chair." Harper's New Monthly Magazine April 1886 (Vol. LXXII [72], No. CCCCXXXI [431]): 804-805.

When, a month or two since, the Easy Chair playfully spoke of erecting a statue to the authors of the Gilbert-Sullivan opera as public benefactors, it had little thought that Mr. Gilbert himself would so soon pose himself upon a pedestal. Punch used to make great fun of the statue of the Duke of Wellington in London. But, at least, the Duke was not his own sculptor. Mr. Gilbert, however, has chosen to make so comical a figure of himself that it is impossible not to laugh at it. He has written the libretto of several comic operas which Mr. Sullivan has set to music, and which have been justly very popular in this country, to the great emolument of Mr. Gilbert and his associate. The verses of Mr. Gilbert are very amusing, and although he could sell no right to their publication in this country, and no publisher who should issue them could have the least protection, or be sure that the fact of the publication would not attract a dozen competing editions the next day, yet the publishers who chose to issue them at this risk also chose to show their good-will to Mr. Gilbert, the author, which is all that they could do under the existing law, by sending him a draft for a small amount.

It was a simple act of courtesy, which showed that the publishers were disposed to recognize the claim of the author to his own work, although the law did not acknowledge it, and in fact the publishers had been actively engaged for some years in securing such a legal acknowledgment for the foreign author. But the courtesy of this particular foreign author led him in hot wrath to send the letter of the publishers to the newspapers, and to take the air of holding them up in some way to public reproof for assuming to send to him for the republication of his verses money which the law did not require them to send. This author's courtesy rested this extraordinary conduct upon the plea that he was not a beggar, and that other publishers in this country had pillaged him right and left. His courtesy selected as proper objects of public opprobrium the publishers who had not pillaged him, but who, on the contrary, had sent him a perfectly fair consideration for issuing his work without any kind of security against competing issues. There is really no situation in any comic opera of Mr. Gilbert's so farcical as this. He has chosen to surpass in his own conduct the utmost absurdities of Sir Joseph Porter and Pooh-Bah and Bunthorne.

There is no international copyright. Mr. Gilbert may properly think that there ought to be such a copyright. He may hold that American publishers have no moral right to issue his verses without his authority. But since he can not confer such authority, and if he could, the object of conferring it would be to receive compensation, and since, although he can not confer it, nor secure any advantage to the publisher, the publisher chooses nevertheless to acknowledge the claim which Mr. Gilbert asserts, but which the law does not allow nor protect, and chooses also to send him compensation, is there off the deck of the Pinafore, or out of the streets of Titipu, a being who would gravely and defiantly shout, "Sirs, I am not a beggar, and I scorn your gift; I have been outrageously robbed by somebody, and therefore I kick your money into a poverty-stricken hospital"? It is a situation which moves pity. The best advice to give to a man overtaken by such a whim of melancholia as this would be to go and see one of Gilbert's operas. -- What does he say? Alas! alas! I am Gilbert!

This is a case in which Doctor Charles Lamb would have called for candles to examine the bumps of the patient. If the sufferer were not plainly for the nonce beyond the pale of common-sense, he might be asked why, if he be not a beggar, he does not promptly toss back money which he stigmatizes as alms, or how it is that, if sending the money be so gross an outrage, keeping it is not equally outrageous, and giving it to a hospital simply absurd. Or, again, in the absence of an international copyright law, and consequently of any protection to the American publisher who issues an English book would it seem to anybody but Ko-Ko an abominable iniquity for that publisher to prove in a substantial way that, law or not law, he recognizes the author's right? If Mr. Gilbert were resolved never to touch an American penny until the great wrong of the copyright should be rectified, very well; but why, then, does he take the money which he so publicly disdains? and why does he pocket the dastardly American receipts from the performance of his operas?

There are other English authors, and of a larger and somewhat different renown from that of Mr. Gilbert, who, pending an international copyright, have hitherto made such arrangements with American publishers, each for his own interest, as the situation permitted, and with mutual satisfaction. Recently such arrangements have become impossible, and less compensation has been paid to English authors than for many years before, and American authors and publishers are now actively co-operating in the most friendly spirit to secure by law an equitable adjustment for the authors of both countries. This is the felicitous moment that Mr. Gilbert has chosen for sneering at American publishers who offer him the best possible proof of their good faith. He steps up not to the pedestal of the public benefactor whom the Easy Chair had in mind, and who moves the public laughter at extravagance and folly, but to the seat of the common scold, who moves the public laughter at himself as a more ludicrous figure than his most ridiculous creation.

To Act I or Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

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