Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1891 — TITLES OF NOVELS. [ARTICLE]

TITLES OF NOVELS.

The Right of Authors to Quarry for Rew Names In Poetry. The average novel, the outsider gathers, is a better-paying concern than the average poem, says the St. James’ Budget. And that, no doubt, is why there is so much more fuss about proprietary rights in the titles of novels. If you feel so inclined you may go on singing and sonneteering “To Delia” and “To Chloe” to your heart’s content, but if you desire to romance about some “not impossible she” you will be well advised to avoid putting “She” upon your title-page. Yet there is a decorum in these matters. And personally one is inclined to think that Edward Jay was unwise to write “The Worst of It” over his lines in Lippincott’s Magazine. The phrase was all the world’s one. Now you shall hardly hear it uttered in the most different context without a wave of reminiscence of the passionate self-abandonment of the guilty husband of the wife in Browning’s poem. And the worst of it is that Mr. Jay’s subject seems to be the same. The right of novelists, on the other hand, to quarry for titles in the demensne of poetry is well established by custom. Any novelist may take “Proud Maisie’s” name in vain or degrade “Airy Fairy Lilian” into some “Easy Breezy Caroline* in three volumes of prose travesty. Mr. Jay is well entitled—by custom—to write a thrilling shilling book and call it “Mesmerism,” or a novel of Bostonian introspection and call it “Le Byron de Nos Jours,” or an erotic study after Mr. Saltus and call it “A Light Wcman.” Poets have been known to protest, but they are a little oldfashioned up on Parnassus. When, in her habitation, the loyal Primrose Dame is asked if she has read “Endymion” she naturally answers: “Yes.” But it is Keats’ poem that the title denotes in the republic of letters still. Mr. Stevenson stole the title of one of his volumes of verse from Ben Jonson’s “Underwood," and a very prettj’ title it is. Mr. Stevenson acknowledge the theft in the handsomest manner: Of aUmy verse, like not a single line; But like my title, for It is not mine. That title from a better man I stole; Ah, how much better had I stol’n the whole; —because, of course, there is no copyright in Ben Jonson. It is to be feared that but few of Mr. Stevenson’s readers were much bothered by reminiscences of Rare Ben.