Alike in the annals of forgery—State forgery of “real” evidence—and
in the annals of the British drama, “The Golden Rump” has a history
very well known. It was a farce, the representation of which was
made the excuse for the passing of the Act whereunder the licensing
of theatrical performances was established. At the same time it
was a farce which those in power had directly induced its author
to compose. That there was no one to imagine or tolerate a play
sufficiently rampant to justify the proposal to fetter, which Party
Government imagined it well to execute—that this was believed,
becomes a testimony to the potency of customary self-regulation. Now
conversely, and carrying the analogy to all branches of literature, it
may be asserted that the suppression of books by authors themselves
is likely to be comparatively frequent just in those countries in
which the State does not much concern itself with suppression by its
authority. If this analogy have force it must, to Englishmen, be
peculiarly gratifying—though the elements of restraint have prevailed
in our history to an extent far beyond general belief—at a time when
Dr. Reusch’s excellent Index of books prohibited by the authority of
Pope, Archbishop, or Continental University is extracting from the
competent critics of all countries the homage which untiring assiduity,
monumental learning, and rich moderation compel.
However, into the measurement of this comparative frequency, _causes_
essentially enter. These, in England, as in other realms, have
abounded. Now, of all the motives which have led authors to consign
their compositions to the flames, one of the most frequent, if one of
the least seductive, has been the ridicule and elaborate discouragement
with which parents have received the knowledge of their offspring’s
first essays. The feeling which prompts this is not one to be
altogether blamed: it has its partial justification even in
the distaste with which the recipient children lay open their
treasure-house to those who in days of feebleness have guarded
them. For there is, as Tom Tulliver felt, a “family repulsion which
spoils the most sacred relations of our lives,” and which is only
broken down by some community of art levelling with the sense of a
universality wherein all distinction of discipleship is lost, or else
by dire circumstance shattering into shapelessness beyond disguise.
This, perhaps, rather than quicker sensitiveness, is why it is that
young Mozart met response, but the little Burney girl did not. Only
to Susanna, her sister, would Fanny breathe her secret, and anxious
was she because her mother gained sufficient inkling to induce her
periodically to tell the evils of a scribbling turn of mind. But, as
with Petrarch centuries before, some time in her fifteenth year the
promptings of obedience gained the day. “She resolved,” says Charlotte,
her niece and editor, “to make an auto da fé of all her manuscripts,
and, if possible, to throw away her pen. Seizing, therefore, an
opportunity when Dr. and Mrs. Burney were from home, she made over to
a bonfire in a paved play-court the whole stock of her compositions,
while faithful Susanna stood by, weeping at the conflagration. Among
the works thus immolated was one tale of considerable length, the
‘History of Caroline Evelyn,’ the mother of ‘Evelina.’”
As if further to justify the halting or rebuking posture which at first
is apt to prove provocative of indignation, remarkable diffidence in
maturer life has pushed its way into sight where early publications have
been due to parental sympathy. The historian of Greece, Connop
Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, was taught Latin at the age of
three: at four could “read Greek with an ease and fluency which
astonished all who heard him,” and at seven began the composition
of didactic homilies. Now to this precocity was allied a taste for
verse, especially as shown in Dryden and in Pope; and the result was
the issue of a work, edited and prefaced by the father, entitled
“Primitiæ: or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral
and Entertaining; by Connop Thirlwall, eleven years of age.” But not
only did these effusions lead to no riper verse, but it is understood
the Bishop disliked the little book, and by no means enjoyed seeing
copies of it. That he went to the length of Thomas Lovell Beddoes we
are not prepared to say. _He_, when a freshman at Oxford, first owned
himself an author by sending to the press the “Improvisatore.” “Of this
little memento of his weakness, as he used to consider it,” says his
biographer, “Beddoes soon became thoroughly ashamed, and long before he
left Oxford he suppressed the traces of its existence, carrying the war
of extermination into the bookshelves of his acquaintance, where, as he
chuckled to record, it was his wont to leave intact its externals (some
gay binding perhaps of his own selection), but thoroughly eviscerated,
every copy on which he could lay his hands.”
Gymnasiarch as well as poet, it was natural that Pehr Henrik Ling,
the Swede, should do whatever he did with energy. Still, the burning
of eleven volumes by the time the age of twenty-one was reached must
be allowed to show as much vigor and striving after excellence in
the language of the gods as in what has been humorously termed “the
language of nudges.” Indeed, the author of the epic “Asar” does not
seem to have thrown any work into general circulation until he arrived
at thirty, and then only on the pressure offered by some friends,
without his knowledge, having got up a subscription for the publication
of one of his poems, when, says he, “I could not honorably refuse.” Yet
there must have been much of interest in these now perished volumes,
for not only had their author, early as school-days, experienced
something of the bitterness of life—of a political life, which was
shared by the people—in being driven from Wexio because he would not
betray innocent youngsters who had been comrades, but in the wandering
outcast career which for some years following he had strange and drear
experience, which, acting on a nature poetic and passionate, can hardly
but have expressed itself now in soothing verse, now in melancholy,
but ever in rich and true. It could at least be wished, if but for the
purpose of forwarding that life-resulting interchange of matter which
men of science assure us ceaselessly proceeds, that some of those who
compose under feeble inspiration, or under inspiration which has lost
its fire with lapse of time and change of circumstance, and which,
though a spiritless yeast, tempts to use as a ferment, would be as
little sparing in their sacrifices, so that it should not be held up as
a thing for boast, as we perceive it of late to have been in the case
of the Rev. Dr. Tiffany, that some five hundred pages of _sermons_ have
been delivered to the irrevocable pyre.
There is the semblance of a common motive inducing men to destroy their
early work, and give over the labor of their hands to consumption
on approach of death. But in the latter case there is usually more
concentration and intensity of purpose. The purpose unquestionably may
have this added intensity merely in meanness; but there is also scope
for more valorous self-judgment. The argument is clearly seized by
Dugald Stewart thus:—
It is but seldom that a philosopher who has been
occupied from his youth with moral or political
inquiries succeeds completely to his wish in
stating to others the grounds upon which his own
opinions are founded; and hence it is that the
known principles of an individual who has approved
to the public his candor, his liberality, and his
judgment, are entitled to a weight and an authority
independent of the evidence which he is able,
upon any particular occasion, to produce in their
support. A secret consciousness of this circumstance,
and an apprehension that by not doing justice to
an important argument the progress of truth may
be rather retarded than advanced, have probably
induced many authors to withhold from the world the
unfinished results of their most valuable labors,
and to content themselves with giving the general
sanction of their suffrages to truths which they
regarded as peculiarly interesting to the human race.
This finely balanced observation—kind, penetrating, lacking warmth,
that it may appear more general, more forcible—was made apropos of
Adam Smith. It appears from a letter to Hume that as early as 1773
Smith, who died in 1790, had determined that the bulk of the literary
papers about him should never be published. And he would in after-life
seem carefully to have separated, as he esteemed it worthy or not,
whatever work he did. Among the papers destined to destruction one
may guess—for though Smith, to the end a slow composer, had the
habit of dictating to a secretary as he paced his room, the contents
of his portfolios were not certainly known to any—were the lectures
on rhetoric which he read at Edinburgh in 1748, and those on natural
religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow.
But his anxiety to blot out the trace of even these, which he was too
conscientious not at one time to have deemed sound, so increased as his
last painful illness drew the threads of life out of his willing hand,
that Dr. Hutton says he not only entreated the friends to whom he had
entrusted the disposal of his MSS., to destroy them with some small
specified exceptions, in the event of his death; but at the last could
not rest satisfied till he learnt that the volumes were in ashes; and
to that state, to his marked relief, they were accordingly reduced some
few days before his death.
This anxiety of Smith’s, who had justly confidence in his executors,
has frequently been entertained very reasonably indeed with regard
to reminiscences, the spicy character of which often requires the
publication to be long posthumous, but tempts the graceless to make
it not so. Rochefoucauld’s “Mémoires,” which have, however, more of
the chronicle and less of the journal than is generally relished, were
certainly delayed, as the event turned out, long enough after his
death, in appearing in any tolerable form. But it had been like not to
be so. While he was still living he found that at the shop of Widow
Barthelin, relict of a printer of Rouen, his work had been secretly
put to press by the orders of the Comte de Brienne. The Count had
furtively made a copy from the manuscript borrowed from Arnaud
d’Andilly, to whom Rochefoucauld had submitted it for the purposes of
correction—“Particulièrement pour la pureté de la langue.” Measures
as furtive were necessary to recover it. The Duke accordingly pounced
on the printer, gave Widow Barthelin twenty-five pistoles, carried
off the whole of the edition, and stored it in a garret of the Hôtel
de Liancourt at Paris. We doubt if it is generally known that this
edition, wherein the widow had shown few signs of care, was entitled,
“Relation des guerres civiles de France, depuis août 1649 jusqu’à
la fin de 1652.” In curious contrast is the fact that sometimes a
relative destroys what the author has shown no vigilant scrupulousness
in suppressing. It was perhaps esteemed by the “very devout lady of
the family of St. John,” who was mother to the notable Rochester, on
whose death Bishop Burnet has so improvingly written, that the final
scenes of her son made it unsuitable that any of his papers should be
kept—especially the history of the intrigues of the court of Charles
II. reported by Bolingbroke to have been written by him in a series of
letters to his friend Henry Saville.
Nor let it be supposed that this would have been so adverse to the
desires of Rochester himself. The late James Thompson, author of the
“City of Dreadful Night,” destroyed before his death all that he had
written previous to 1857, though he has been very virulent against a
sample king who of malice prepense with gross ingratitude thus treated
the donor of a priceless if imaginary gift:—
A writer brought him truth;
And first he imprisoned the youth;
And then he bestowed a free pyre
That the works might have plenty of fire,
And also to cure the pain
Of the headache called thought in the brain.
Pierius Valerianus tells us that Antonius Marosticus, when held in high
esteem and loved of all men, enjoying the dainties of life at the court
of some Cardinal, and dallying with existence which he had rooted hopes
would henceforth be peaceful, was carried off within three days by
a sudden epidemic. The doleful deed, Pierius says, was made more
distressful by the fact that sanitary considerations required the
cremation of all the dead man’s books with the dead man’s body. How far
the sense of tragedy may lie in this melancholy incident, the death
of Shelley helps one to appreciate. His corpse was washed ashore near
the Via Reggio, four miles from that of his friend Williams, which lay
close to the tower of Migliarino, at the Bocca Lericcio. The attitude
was memorable. His right hand was clasped in his heart. Bent back and
thrust away, as if in haste, was in a side pocket the last volume
of the poet Keats. It had been lent by Leigh Hunt, who had told the
borrower to keep it till he should return it by his own hands. This
impossible, and Hunt refusing to receive it through others, it was
burnt with the body amid frankincense and myrrh.
It was fit that the pathetic in death should spring from a cause so
troublous in life. Again and again was Shelley wounded by the forced
suppression of his work. Doubtless merit is not extreme in the two-act
tragedy of “Œdipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant.” But its fate was
as subtle and sure as that of Œdipus himself. Written abroad, it was
transmitted to England, printed and published anonymously, and stifled
at the very dawn of its existence by the “Society for the Suppression
of Vice,” who threatened a prosecution upon it, if not immediately
withdrawn. The friend who had taken the pains of bringing it out did
not deem it worth the cost, to pocket and nerve, of a contest, and it
was laid aside—only to be revived in Mrs. Shelley’s second edition.
It is said, indeed, that but seven copies are extant, one of which
Mr. Buxton Forman, the industrious and intelligent editor to whom the
best students of Shelley feel themselves the most beholden, secured,
by search through the vast stores of Mr. Lacy, the dramatic publisher
of the Strand—one of the very last plays in the very last boxes—a
mere paper pamphlet, devoid of a wrapper, carried away at the cost of a
six-pence, proving to be the treasure. And far was the Œdipus from
being the sole cause of trouble in respect of the works of its author.
Posthumous Poems of Shelley were suppressed on the application of Sir
Timothy, his father. The Posthumous Letters, which excellent forgers
had contrived to manufacture from articles written after the decease
of the poet, exercising an amount of ingenuity described as “most
extraordinary,” and receiving the reward of the labor of their hands
from Sir Percy Shelley, or from Mr. Moxon, were called in on the
discovery of the fraud. “Laon and Cythna” was cancelled to make way for
the “Revolt of Islam.” “Queen Mab,” which had been written when Shelley
was eighteen, though completed only when in his twenty-first year, was
surreptitiously published while its author was in Italy—copies having
been distributed among his friends—and though adjudged by the Court
of Chancery, from which an injunction was sought for restraint of this
irregular edition, to be disentitled to privilege on the futile score
of an immorality shocking to the British constitution, it and its notes
were, so late as 1840, the subject of prosecutions and convictions to
all who openly, being men of fair fame, ventured to publish it, as Mr.
Moxon experienced.
The poets, indeed, of Shelley’s time were peculiarly unfortunate. It
is a sound enough deduction of law that what is evil—is filthy, or
blasphemous, or scandalous—cannot be for the benefit of the public
to learn of, nor therefore an object of the law, which is built on
the needs of society, to extend its protection to—a protection which
has in view the advantages of private individuals only as members of
society. But in this refusal of the active bestowment of privilege
the guardian of public morals in an individual man, in no sense a
representative of his country—a judge of the old Court of Chancery.
Now in active suppression, in punishment for enticing the public to
things contaminating and none the less subtle because presented in
intellectual form, there is indeed the benefit of the presence of a
judge, but the issue is with a jury. And the unfortunate interval,
or breach, through which public morals are so roughly assailable is
measured (usually at least) by the _sum_ of the differences
between a publication disentitled to privilege or worthy of punishment,
and the judgment of an individual or the opinion of the country. In
this vast moral interval, to say nothing of the interval of time
which rapidity in administration, on the one hand, and slowness in
administration on the other, scarcely ever fail to involve, there is an
enticement to the indifferent part of the population, or to that bold
and heroic part which dares to set up its private and painfully honest
judgment against the judgment of a Chancery judge—to trade upon the
bruited knowledge of a suspected well of evil, unchecked by unpalatable
astringency in consumption of the draught. With the narrowness of men
like Lords Eldon and Ellenborough, and the rebellious attitude held by
a nation consciously approaching to the dawn of an age of a freedom
of thought greater because more nobly and wit-wisely sanctioned, this
breach was disastrously great, and beckoned the way to a flood of
mischances directly or affectively extensive.
Now, a highly curious result of the working of these doctrines was
seen in cases in which—not as with Shelley, nor as with Byron, who
vainly sought in February 1822 to suppress the edition of “Cain” which
the pirate, Benbow, had printed, and who in the same year saw his
“Vision” first refused by the publishers of the Row, then given to
John Hunt, then placed by John and his brother in the first number of
the _Liberal_, and then made the subject of a true bill returned by a
Middlesex grand jury on an indictment preferred by the “Constitutional
Association”—in cases in which, I say, the authors, from change of
opinion, were opposed to any publication of their earlier works. The
most prominent instance of this occurs, of course, in the “Wat Tyler”
of Laureate Southey. In the height of his pantisocratic schemes, and
full of Socialist feelings, Southey had written this dramatic poem,
and placed the manuscript in the hands of his brother-in-law, Robert
Lovell; he took it to Mr. Ridgway, the London publisher. When Southey
visited the Metropolis shortly afterwards, the year was 1794, Mr.
Ridgway was in Newgate. Thither Southey went, and either found
incarcerated in the same apartment with his publisher, or took with
him, the Rev. Mr. Winterbottom, a dissenting minister. It was agreed
that “Wat Tyler” should be published anonymously. The piece, however,
appears to have been forgotten, and wholly to have escaped the memory
of both publisher and Southey. But it had crept—so Cottle, Hone, and
Browne may best be reconciled—into the hands of Mr. Winterbottom,
who taking it with him, when years had passed, while on a visit to
friends at Worcester, beguiled some dull hour by reading the piece for
the amusement of the company, who were well pleased to pamper their
dislike to Southey by chuckling at his _ratting_ in political opinions.
But generosity clearly demanded that this pleasant spirit of carping
should have a sphere extended far beyond a Worcestershire company. So
thought two of the guests, who, obtaining the manuscript, with great
devotion sacrificed the long hours of night by transcribing it, being
careful the while to preserve the privacy which attends the most highly
charitable actions. Through their hands the transcription reached the
publisher, and no sooner had his edition appeared than Southey became
naturally anxious to lay the ghost of his former beliefs. For that
purpose, with the advice of his friends, he applied for an injunction.
Lord Eldon refused to grant it, on the plea that “a person cannot
recover damages upon a work which in its nature is calculated to do
injury to the public.” The decision of the Court encouraged the vendors
to redouble their efforts, and not fewer than 60,000 copies are said
to have been sold during the excitement the case created. As for poor
Southey, he defended himself as best he could in the _Courier_, and
underwent the further suspense of seeing a prosecution urged against
him by turbulent spirits in the legislature—Lord Brougham first, and
Mr. William Smith after. The ridicule was all the more increased by the
fact that Southey had recently published in the _Quarterly Review_ an
article in most striking contrast. And it is noticeable that in _his_
American _Quarterly Review_ Dr. Orestes A. Brownson printed opinions
destructive of his early views, which had also been in sympathy with
Socialistic and transcendental movements, as well as with Unitarianism,
and threw cold water upon, and indeed endeavored in his own country
altogether to suppress, the work by which in this country he is best
known, “Charles Elwood; or, the Infidel Converted.”
Certainly few authors have had better justification for a change of
opinion than Adrian Beverland. In a work quite unfit for general
reading, which purported to be issued “Eleutheropoli, in Horto
Hesperidum, typis Adami, Evæ, Terræ filii, 1678,” he had maintained
with nasty nicety that view of original sin which Henri Corneille
Agrippa in his “Declamatio de originali Peccato” had nearly as
undisguisedly maintained before him. For this performance he was cast
into prison at Leyden, and would have fared badly enough had he not
found means of escape. His work, however, was sufficiently thought
of to provoke from Leonard Ryssenius a “justa detestatio libelli
sceleratissimi,” just as a previous work had called from Allard
Uchtman a “Vox clamantis in deserto, ad sacrorum ministros, adversus
Beverlandum.” Passing these by, Beverland himself was contented to
write stinging libels against the Leyden magistrates and professors,
and then to flee to London, where he engaged himself principally
in collecting odious pictures. But after a time came a measure of
repentance, and though no excessive purity can be claimed for an
“Admonition” published by Bateman, of London, in 1697, yet the preface
or “advertisement” does certainly contain a strong condemnation of his
“Peccatum originale.” Fifteen years after, he died in a state of deep
poverty, a madman—impressed with the horrible idea that he was pursued
by two hundred men allied by oath to slay him.
A state more interesting that either stanch advocacy or loud
condemnation of a position once relied on is that of hesitation. It
is one peculiarly unlikely to express itself, because the tendency of
hesitation is to refrain; or if expressing itself to arrest attention,
because subtile or feeble qualifications refer their interest to the
themes they hedge and do not centre in themselves. But when a mind
throws itself with force into a posture of racked doubt, and bids
us be aware that the struggle, not the issue, is of utter worth, or
when with yet greater fervor of expectancy a revelation, we know not
whence, we know not whither, is awaited with every nerve full-strained,
the world more surely than by either other mood becomes a gallery
rocked with hearkening spectators. I think there is something of this
earnest hesitation in a career it is not difficult, at this distance
of time, to futilize—Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s. There is a very
human weakness in his self-debate upon the publication of the “De
Veritate,” but there is a very human need—and, moreover, a need made
personal (as are all needs), though founded in philanthropy. Truly the
more sacred experience is—unless it can reach to that intensity and
presentness which thrills all who stand enclosed in the thin line of
its horizon—the more clearly it is desecrated by the common tread, and
seems a thing to mock at. So is it with the scene which Herbert himself
describes.
Being thus doubtful in my chamber, one fair day in
the summer, my casement being open towards the sun,
the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring, I took
my work, “De Veritate,” in my hand, and kneeling on
my knees, devoutly said these words: “O Thou eternal
God, Author of the light which now shines upon me,
and Giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech
Thee, give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall
suppress it.” I had no sooner spoken these words,
but a loud, though yet gentle noise, came from
heaven (for it was like nothing on earth), which did
so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition
as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded;
whereupon also I resolved to print my book.
An aspect of mind combining both resolution and diffidence, which has
lead to the obliteration of literary work, is reliance on a friend’s
counsel. An amusing example of this is related in the ecclesiastical
history of Nicephorus Callistus concerning Marsilius Ficinus. This
gentleman had translated Plato into Latin, and came to his learned
friend Musurus Candiotus to know his opinion of it. Candiotus, after
perusing some few leaves, perceived that it would not satisfy the
expectation of the learned, and was even of opinion that it was so
slubbered over as to resemble the original (as Cicero the younger did
his father) in nothing but in name. He accordingly took up a sponge,
dipped it in an ink-pot, and blotted out the first page. This done,
he turns to Ficinus. “Thou seest,” quoth he “how I have corrected the
first page; if thou wilt, I will correct the rest in like sort.” Now
Ficinus was fully as mild in temper as slender in scholarship. “No
reason,” says he, “that Plato should be disgraced through my default;
refine away.” And according to his words was it done.
It would appear from Scaliger that even had not Ficinus commenced his
out-sponged work afresh, literature would not have lamentably lost.
Far, indeed, would this have been from true, had the influence of a
friend prevailed to wipe from among the works of Gray “The Progress of
Poetry,” and “The Bard.” I will not deny of its setting the sentence in
which Walpole communicates the likelihood of such a fate.
One quality I may safely arrogate to myself: I am
not _afraid to praise_. Many are such timid judges
of composition, that they hesitate to wait for the
public opinion. Show them a manuscript, though they
highly approve it in their hearts, they are afraid to
commit themselves by speaking out. Several excellent
works have perished from this cause; a writer of
real talents being often a mere sensitive plant with
regard to his own productions. Some cavils of Mason
(how inferior a poet and judge!) had almost induced
Gray to destroy his two beautiful and sublime odes.
We should not only praise, but hasten to praise.
In modern days the function of Mason is more generally filled by
adverse public critics. The case of the late Edward Fitzgerald, who
by an unfavorable review was induced to withdraw from circulation his
“Six Dramas of Calderon,” and probably altogether to withhold from the
public his rendering of “La Vida es Sueño,” and “El Mágico Prodigioso,”
is until the present unhappily in point.
More melancholy still are those episodes of literary history which
present the wearied author consigning with forced smile and show of
acquiescence—“coactus volo”—the products of his craft to an untimely
end. English history does not lack its instances of these heroic
souls in motley, these Herculeses with their distaffs. There is John
Selden, and there is Reginald Pecock: let us bare the mishaps of these
representatives.
In the time of James I., the clergy were pleased to advance to
the utmost the doctrine of the divine right of tithes—a divinity
entailed in a pedigree of patriarchal ages, Jewish priesthood, and
Christian priesthood. Upon so venerable a claim so cogently revived,
lawyers yet looked with jealousy. For they saw in every claim by
divine right, where royal and sub-royal patrons were unconcerned, a
limitation of human rights, with their correlative human duties very
apt to be regulated by positive law. Selden, partaking of the legal
spirit—coincident this once with the historic—produced his “History
of Tithes,” a plain narrative, margented with copious authorities,
which established abundantly the duty of paying tenths—but established
on the distasteful ground of human authority. James, who patronised
divinity partly to show the ardor with which he in his one turn could
venerate, partly for the reflected strength wherewith it encircled
himself, partly from conceit and cowardice, and partly from better
motives, summoned the author to appear before him in December 1618, at
his palace at Theobalds. Introduced by Ben Jonson and Edward Hayward,
Selden maintained the test of two conferences at Theobalds, and one at
Whitehall with the monarch in person; but this in nowise prevented his
being called, on January 28, 1618, before seven members of the High
Commission Court in whose presence he was induced to make and sign this
declaration.
My good Lords, I most humbly acknowledge the error
which I have committed in publishing “The History of
Tithes,” and especially in that I have at all, by
showing any interpretation of Holy Scriptures, by
meddling with councils, fathers, or canons, or by
what else soever occurs in it, offered any occasion
of argument against any right of maintenance, _jure
divino_, of the minister of the Gospel; beseeching
your Lordships to receive this ingenuous and
humble acknowledgment, together with the unfeigned
protestation of my grief, for that through it I have
so incurred both his Majesty’s and your Lordships’
displeasure conceived against me in behalf of the
Church of England.
Beside this forced submission, the authority which had exacted it
prohibited the book. Further, Selden was forbidden to publish anything
in his own defence, while public invitation—pluckily used—was given
to any who should choose to attack either him or his history with all
the virulence of pocket and party polemics. Nor was this all, but
Selden stooped at the bidding of the king to uphold opinions, no doubt
on three small points, which he had seemed to impugn in his greater
work. It is pleasant to add that he circulated among his friends in
manuscript answers to the attacks which were published against him.
The fall of Pecock was more abject, and less relieved. About 1449 he
had written—not printed, of course—“The Repressor.” He had in design
to defend the clergy from the aspersions, as he conceived them, of
the “Bible-man” or Lollards. With this view he vindicated the use of
images, the going on pilgrimages, and the retention of the various
ranks of the hierarchy in their full directive authority. In 1450 he
remained in sufficient esteem—though indeed his treatise was not much
circulated for four or five years—to be transferred to the see of
Chichester. From that time, however, his good fortune deserted him.
The Duke of York conceived it well to cover his strides towards the
crown, with the redress of grievances; and the disgrace of Pecock’s
patrons, the Duke of Suffolk and the Bishop of Norwich, together with
the personal dislike the king contracted towards him, made Chichester
a safe object of attack. While all things were thus working for the
good man’s evil, the council met at Westminster in the autumn of 1457,
whence by general acclamation Pecock was expelled. He was cited to
appear before Archbishop Bourchier on November 11, and the character of
his offence became more definitised. He had held cheap the authority
of the old doctors, he had denied that the Apostles’ Creed was made
by the Apostles, and at the same time he had magnified the office of
reason—rather than singly of the Scriptures, or rather than singly
of the Church—as an ultimate test. Accordingly, to this citation he
appeared, armed with nine of his books, into which it must be confessed
were introduced some newly conceived passages and some erasures. A
committee of Bishops, to whom the matter was then referred, reported
adversely; and after further disputation the archbishop offered Pecock
his choice of making a public abjuration of his errors, or of being
first degraded, and then delivered over to the secular arm “as the
food of fire, and fuel for the burning.” He chose the abjuration: a
preliminary confession was forthwith made, a written confession was
added at Lambeth on the 3rd of December, and on the next day, Sunday,
arrayed in his episcopal habit, in the presence of 20,000 persons,
he knelt at the feet of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of
London, Rochester, Durham, and of his “own pure and free will, and
without any man’s coercion or dread,” made his recantation. In this
he had declared that he presumed of his own natural wit to prefer the
judgment of reason before the Testaments and the authority of the
Church; had published many perilous doctrines and books containing
enumerated heresies; and now considered himself grievously to have
sinned and wickedly to have deceived the people of God, but returned to
the unity of the mother Holy Church and renounced both the rehearsed
heresies and all other “spices,” or kinds of heresy, and exhorted all
men not to trust in his books, neither to keep or read them in any
wise, but to bring them in haste to the Primate or his agents; in
that he publicly assented that his books should be deputed unto the
fire, and openly be burnt as an example and terror to all others. The
recantation ended, a fire was kindled at the Cross. With his own hands
Pecock delivered three folios and eleven quartos of his own composition
to the executioner, who took and threw them in the flames, while the
Bishop exclaimed aloud “My pride and presumption have brought upon me
these troubles and these reproaches.” Little could he then think that
in some future day England would, at public cost, republish the chief
of the books his own lips had condemned.
But the punishment of Pecock did not end here. It was perhaps not much
to him that the University of Oxford (which has consistently shown a
spirit of illiberality, or at least a burning disposition, throughout
its eras almost down to the present age) should in solemn procession,
its Chancellor at its head, march to a place where four roads met—the
Quatre-voix or Carfax—and there burn to ashes every copy of his works
on which hands could be laid. But, deprived of his bishopric, it was
necessary that directions should be given for his personal fare. These
came to the Abbot of Thorney, to whose Cambridgeshire Abbey the cleric
was sent. He was to live for ever in one closed chamber, so contrived
that he might hear Mass; to be attended by one sad man to make his
bed; to be forbidden all books but a breviary, a mass-book, a psalter,
a legend, and a Bible; to be refused any thing to write with or on;
but to be allowed a sufficiency of food and fire. And in this dolorous
state there is all reason to suppose his closing days were spent.[74]
It is recorded of St. Briccius, that when a boy he saw the devil behind
the altar, noting the misdemeanors of people on a piece of parchment.
This seems to have stirred in him a desire for parchment that he in
turn might write; but so firmly did the devil by his teeth stick to
the stolen goods, that on the achievement of mastery by his juvenile
but saintly competitor, the horny, wicked head was knocked against
the wall, at which painful juncture St. Martin, ever valorous, so
conjured the devil that he caused him _willy nilly_ to blot out what
he had written. What then, one wonders, was the devil’s code of which
the people’s acts were breaches. What his diabolic, though discarded
standard? The prescience of St. Briccius or St. Martin would doubtless
be required to tell. But it is plain he too is fabled as possessed
with desire to bend the will of men in obedience to some crystallized
tradition, some extraneous rule. And yet, what is this principle of
tradition, this authority-binding, which in this form and that defeats
equally Fanny Burney or Gray, Shelley, Southey, or Selden? It is
something which, no matter what its ineptness to the circumstances
of the present, cannot yield; which is made up of the circumstances
of the past, and has in its whole as much as in every shred the
inevitability of the past, which pushes by informed private judgment
and reason—perhaps on the wiser plea that, ourselves a product of
the past, the accumulated and sifted wisdom of that past, the residue
of eclecticism on eclecticism, must be most appropriate to guide; or
else perhaps on the more foolish, that makes a creed osseous in one
infinitely remote exercise of one man’s inspired thoughts. As if, in
the latter alternative, the very strength was not the very weakness of
the argument which reduces after all everything to single and perhaps
sullied private judgment; and as if in the former the very strength was
not again the very weakness of the argument which cuts off arbitrarily
as the last point of systematized knowledge (more often not at the
last) its own method of history. For does it not result that if it
be truly said, there is nothing new under the sun, there must in all
cases be selection, and if selection be thus the real principle of
action, why is some portion of accessible knowledge, some portion
even of _received_ knowledge, to be cast without the bounds of usable
materials, as though to prohibit us too perchance, from strengthening
that uniformity or preponderance in independent selections to which
tradition owes its strength? Thirlwall may act as Pecock, and Beddoes
as Fitzgerald—but both the virtue of action and the virtue of
restraint are lost.
Herodotus, if we may believe Blakesley and Professor Sayce, though the
“Father of History,” by no means illustrates tradition at its best.
Different, however, would it be, could we make up our minds, backed
by the later authority of Canon Rawlinson to side in this perennial
contest with Henri Estienne. This scholar in preparing an edition
of that ancient traveller took occasion to maintain that his author
was the reporter of things fabulous to an extent far less than was
generally supposed. Hearing that of this defence, which was written
in Latin, it was proposed to make a translation into French, he
determined, as an old critic says, to become now a _traditore_, as he
had formerly early been a _traduttore_, and to render his own work.
But if this was his original purpose, he immediately lost sight of it.
He took up, in fact, his argument thus:—From the unlikelihood of an
event it is unreasonable to conclude against it: Herodotus may have
reported things true, in presenting unlikely tales, otherwise, we must
banish a prodigious amount of incontestable but absurd matter, though
much of this character has occurred of late, especially in popery, as I
proceed to instance in anecdotes which objectors may style apocryphal,
fables they will call malicious, and chronicles they are certain to
brand as scandalous. Now, this was clearly of intolerable bearing.
And according to Tollius, its upshot was that Estienne was burnt in
effigy at Paris; though, having fled to the mountains of Auvergne,
and being in the thick of winter, he was enabled to chuckle at his
joke that he never was so cold as when he was being burnt, a joke the
authenticity of which late commentators might perhaps have less readily
impeached had they remembered that Antonio de Dominis had used it, as
he too for writing an unappreciated book was consumed in effigy at
Rome, while he lay shivering with the cold of a November at sea and a
fugitive’s fears at heart. Certain it is that at Geneva Estienne met
with repulse. For the archives of that state show that late in 1566, on
his first applying for a license to expose for sale his “Apologie pour
Herodote,” he was directed to amend “certains feulletz où il y a des
propos vilains et parlans trop évidemment des princes en mal” and that
after these amendments were duly made he deliberately encouraged the
suppression of his work, by taking advantage of an imperfect piratical
edition, appearing at Lyons, to add without license the famous
“Avertissement” with its tables or indexes, which drew down upon him
imprisonment, followed quickly by enlargement coupled with conspicuous
deprivation of the Eucharist on one occasion—if that be the meaning of
“pour punition, privé de la cène, pour une fois.”
With consequences more radical, but with either far more boldness or
far less wit, Camille Desmoulins upwards of two centuries after courted
the suppression, not indeed of a book, but of life. It was full four
years since he had learnt that the parliament of Toulouse had hurried
to the flames his “La Libre France,” when entering the Jacobin Club,
just two days after the publication of the fifth number of his _Vieux
Cordelier_, he heard the question being for the third time put, whether
he should be expelled. His presence quelling in no measure the rising
anger, Robespierre, desirous to stay the wrath of the Jacobins by
sacrificing the work to save the author, spoke. “Camille,” said he with
dryness, and that air of patronage which the simulation of a tempered
passion carries, “is a spoilt child; he had a good disposition; bad
company has led him astray.” “We must,” urged he, concluding, “deal
vigorously with these numbers, which even Brissot would not have dared
to acknowledge, but we must keep Desmoulins among us. I demand, for
example’s sake, that these numbers be burnt before this society.” But
with what surprise did the echo of this speech, proceeding clearly,
and accompanied with indignant flash of eye, greet him—“Bravo,
Robespierre; but I will answer with Rousseau, _To burn is not to
answer_.” Strange retort! Had pride so dulled perception, or surprise
with one stroke slain confidence in all? No wonder that not less the
change of time than the terms, the very measuredness of the answering
words bidding Camille learn that he was treated with indulgence, and
disclosing that his mode of justification would be held to show that
the worst import of his writings was designed, left in him a sense
that his present non-expulsion, even the restoration of the title of
“Cordelier,” had no security. The lull _was_ false, Desmoulins was lost.
Concession to honest criticism was received with not more tact by
Richelieu than by Desmoulins. It is true that in the Cardinal’s case
the upshot, perilous as it seemed to one of the grand supports of
dramatic literature, was merely ludicrous—but it may also be true that
that was because the appeal was indeed through the intellect, but to
the passive, not the active powers of man. The Cardinal was dramatist,
and had carried politics into comedy by making the characters called
France, Spain, or names of other States develop the fortunes of
“Europe.” Anxious to get the countenance of the Academy, which his
energies had lately organized, he sent the piece to them, that any
errors in the rules of the style or poetry might be corrected. The
Academy fulfilled their task, criticising so severely that scarcely a
line was left unaltered. The Cardinal—but I may as well adopt the tale
as Noël d’Argonne tells it.
The Cardinal, to whom it was brought back in this
condition, was so enraged, that he tore it on the
spot, and threw it in pieces into the hearth. This
was in summer, and fortunately there was no fire in
the hearth. The Cardinal went to bed; but he felt
the tenderness of a father for his dear Europe; he
regretted having used it so cruelly; and calling up
his secretary, he ordered him to collect with care
the papers from the chimney, and to go and look
whether he could find any paste in the house—adding
that in all probability he would find some starch
with the women who took charge of his linen. The
secretary went to their apartment; and having found
what he wanted, he spent the greater part of the
night with the Cardinal in trying to paste together
the dismembered comedy. Next morning he had it
recopied in his presence, and changed almost every
one of the corrections of the Academy, affecting,
at the same time, to retain a few of the least
important. He sent it back to them the same day by
Boisrobert, and told them they would perceive how
much he had profited by their criticisms; but as
all men were liable to err, he had not thought it
necessary to follow them implicitly. The Academy, who
had learned the vexation of the Cardinal, took care
not to retouch the piece, and returned it to him with
their unanimous approbation.
It seems a pity that after so much care and tenderness the play should
have been produced along with “The Cid,” and that the audience, less
manageable than the Academy, on the announcement that “Europe” would be
repeated the next day, murmured their wish for Corneille’s piece. But
the influence he sought to throw upon the fortunes of the Cid there can
be no need to recount to Englishmen. Only it is clear that Richelieu
was more like Cicero than Virgil, the former of whom indeed affected
to be desirous of burning some productions, but was easily diverted by
pleasant flattery; but the latter of whom, after having bestowed the
labor of twelve years on his immortal poem, was genuinely conscious of
imperfections which so few beside himself could have perceived, that
in his last moments he ordered it to be committed to the flames, a
fate evaded only by disregard of his solemn testamentary injunction.
It is equally clear that Richelieu had not the plea of neglect and
undeserved disfavor felt in its extreme by William Collins. For his
odes, first published in 1747, crept slowly into notice, were spoken
of indifferently by his acquaintance Dr. Johnson, and met with feeble
praise from Gray. The while the author was sensible of their beauty,
and so deeply felt the coldness with which they were received, that
he obtained from his publisher the unsold copies and burnt them with
his own hand. “If then his highly finished productions brought back
but disappointment,” hypothesises Mr. Thomas Miller, “how thankful he
must have felt that he had not committed himself further by sending
into the world such works as his own fine taste condemned! We believe
that when he had completed his ”Ode on the Passions,” he knew he had
produced a poem which ought to live forever, for we cannot conceive
that the mind which erected so imperishable a fabric could have a doubt
of its durability.” Alas! an immortality which sees no origin _in
præsenti_—how burdensome it is to bear.[75]
It was the conviction of “Messieurs de Port Royal” that in the denial
of self was a tower of moral strength; and in this denial of self
they included a true abnegation of the glories of authorship. “If
any work for God were well done,” said St. Cyran, “it was the Divine
Grace which had effectually co-operated to its performance, and the
human instrument was nothing, and less than nothing.” With this there
was not one of his colleagues unwilling practically to show that he
agreed—Pascal least of all. What greater instance of literary modesty
can be alleged than the destruction by him of his treatise on geometry,
upon his learning that Arnauld had prepared the volume given to the
world in 1667 as “Elements” of that subject and his seeing its fitness
for the Port Royal schools? With most it would be much easier to apply
the system of Naugerius, who loving Catullus, but hating Martial, set
apart one day that every year he might sacrifice by fire a copy of the
works of one epigrammatist to the manes of the other. It is only fair
to add that Naugerius, who died while on an embassy to Francis I. in
1529, destroyed shortly before his death a history of his native city,
Venice, carried forward from 1486, which he had himself compiled, and
submitted to the same effective purging a considerable proportion of
his own poetic compositions.
At this point I conclude. I perceive indeed that there remains
scattered through literature unused material of interest, and even
that motives to self-suppression of several entire classes have been
here unexemplified. But of this we might feel confident, that the more
and more this subject were opened up, personal as it appears to the
authors themselves, the more and more would one be struck with the duty
of the State, and no less than of the State of professed critics and
of friends of the hearth, not only not to discourage the expressions
of genius if even somewhat errant, but where there is the true
appeal—then, as Walpole says, to _hasten to praise_.—_Gentleman’s
Magazine._