The ambitious wars of a potent aristocracy inflicted on this country
half a century of public misery. Our fields were a soil of blood; and
maternal England long mourned for victories she obtained over her own
children--lord against lord, brother against brother, and the son
against the father. Rival administrations alternately dispossess each
other by sanguinary conflict; a new monarch attaints the friends of his
predecessor; conspiracy rises against conspiracy--scaffold against
scaffold; the king is re-enthroned--the king perishes in the Tower; York
is triumphant--and York is annihilated.
Few great families there were who had not immolated their martyrs or
their victims; and it frequently occurred that the same family had
fallen equally on both sides, for it was a war of the aristocracy with
the aristocracy: "Save the commons and kill the captains," was the
general war-cry. The distracted people were perhaps indifferent to the
varying fortunes of the parties, accustomed as they were to behold after
each battle the heads of lords and knights raised on every bridge and
gate.
During this dread interval, all things about us were thrown back into a
state of the rudest infancy; the illiterature of the age approached to
barbarism; the evidences of history were destroyed; there was such a
paucity of readers, that no writers were found to commemorate
contemporary events. Indeed, had there been any, who could have ventured
to arbitrate between such contradictory accounts, where every party had
to tell their own tale? Oblivion, not history, seemed to be the
consolation of those miserable times.
It was at such an unhappy era that the new-found art of printing was
introduced into England by an English trader, who for thirty years had
passed his life in Flanders, conversant with no other languages than
were used in those countries.
Our literature was interested in the intellectual character of our
first English printer. A powerful mind might, by the novel and mighty
instrument of thought, have created a national taste, or have sown that
seed of curiosity without which no knowledge can be reared. Such a
genius might have anticipated by a whole century that general passion
for sound literature which was afterwards to distinguish our country.
But neither the times nor the man were equal to such a glorious
advancement.
The first printed book in the English language was not printed in
England. It is a translation of Raoul le Fevre's "Recuyel of the
Historyes of Troye," famed in its own day as the most romantic history,
and in ours, for the honour of bibliography, romantically valued at the
cost of a thousand guineas. This first monument of English printing
issued from the infant press at Cologne in 1471, where Caxton first
became initiated in "the noble mystery and craft" of printing, when
printing was yet truly "a mystery," and Caxton himself did not import
the art which was to effect such an intellectual revolution till a year
or two afterwards, on his return home. The first printer, it is evident,
had no other conception of the machine he was about to give the nation
than as an ingenious contrivance, or a cheap substitute for costly
manuscripts--possibly he might, in his calculating prudence, even be
doubtful of its success!
At the announcement of the first printed book in our vernacular idiom,
the mind involuntarily pauses: looking on the humble origin of our
bibliography, and on the obscure commencement of the newly-found art of
printing itself, we are startled at the vast and complicated results.
The contemporaries of our first printer were not struck by their novel
and precious possession, of which they participated in the first fruits
in the circulation and multiplication of their volumes. The introduction
of the art into England is wholly unnoticed by the chroniclers of the
age, so unconscious they were of this new implement of the human mind.
We find Fabian, who must have known Caxton personally--both being
members of the Mercers' Company--passing unnoticed his friend; and
instead of any account of the printing-press, we have only such things
as "a new weathercock placed on the cross of St. Paul's steeple." Hall,
so copious in curious matters, discovered no curiosity to memorialize
in the printing-press; Grafton was too heedless; and Holinshed, the most
complete of our chroniclers, seems to have had an intention of saying
something by his insertion of a single line, noticing the name of
"Caxton as the first practiser of the art of printing;" but he was more
seriously intent in the same paragraph to give a narrative of "a bloody
rain, the red drops falling on the sheets which had been hanged to dry."
The history of printing in England has been vainly sought for among
English historians; so little sensible were they to those expansive
views and elevated conceptions, which are now too commonplace eulogies
to repeat.
By what subdolous practices among the first inventors of this secret art
Caxton obtained its mastery, we are not told, except that he learnt the
new art "at his own great cost and expense;" and on his final return
home, he was accompanied by foreigners who lived in his house, and after
his death became his successors. Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Machlinia and
others, by their names betray their German origin. We have recently
discovered that we had even a French printer who printed English books.
Francis Regnault (or Reynold, anglicised) was a Frenchman who fell under
the displeasure of the Inquisition for printing the Bible in English. He
resided in England, and had in hand a number of primers in English and
other similar books, which at length excited the jealousy of _the
Company of Booksellers in London_--in the reign of Henry the Eighth. To
allay this bibliopolic storm, the affrighted French printer, with all
his stock in hand, procured Coverdale and Grafton to intercede with
Cromwell to grant him a licence to sell what he had already printed,
engaging hereafter "to print no more in the _English tongue_ unless he
have an _Englishman_ that is learned to be his corrector;" and further,
he offers to cancel and reprint any faulty leaf again.[1]
Caxton did not extend his views beyond those of a mercantile printer and
an indifferent translator. As a writer, Caxton had reason to speak with
humility of the style of his vernacular versions. His patroness, the
Lady Margaret, sister to our Edward the Fourth, and Duchess of
Burgundy, after inspecting some quires of his translation of the
"Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," returned them, finding, as Caxton
ingenuously acknowledges, "some defaut in his English which she
commanded him to amend." Tyrwhit sarcastically observes, that the
duchess might have been a purist. As we are not told what were these
"defauts," we cannot decide on the good taste or the fastidiousness of
the sister of Edward the Fourth. But the duchess was not the only critic
whom Caxton had to encounter, for we learn by his preface to his "Boke
of Aeneydos compiled by Virgil," now metamorphosed into a barbarous
French prose romance, and the French translation translated, that there
were "gentlemen who of late have blamed me that in my translations I had
over-curious terms which could not be understood by common people. I
fain would satisfy every man." He apologises for his own style by
alleging the unsettled state of the English language, of which he tells
us that "the language now used varieth far from that which was used and
spoken when I was born." An absence of thirty years from his native land
did not improve a diction which originally had been none of the purest.
We find in his translations an abundance of pure French words, and it is
remarkable that the printer of the third edition of the Troy history, in
1607, altered whole sentences "into plainer English," alleging, "the
translator, William Caxton, being, _as it seemeth_, no Englishman!"
The "curious" prices now given among the connoisseurs of our earliest
typography for their "Caxtons," as his Gothic works are thus honourably
distinguished, have induced some, conforming to traditional prejudice,
to appreciate by the same fanciful value "the Caxtonian style." But
though we are not acquainted with the "defauts" which offended the Lady
Margaret, nor with the "terms which were not easily understood," as
alleged by "the gentlemen," nor with "the sentences improperly
Englished," as the later printer declared, we shall not, I suspect, fall
short of the mark if we conclude that the style of a writer destitute of
a literary education, a prolix genius with a lax verbosity, and almost a
foreigner in his native idiom, could not attain to any skill or felicity
in the maternal tongue.
As a printer, without erudition, Caxton would naturally accommodate
himself to the tastes of his age, and it was therefore a consequence
that no great author appears among "the Caxtons." The most glorious
issues of his press were a Chaucer and a Gower, wherein he was simply a
printer. The rest of his works are translations of fabulous histories,
and those spurious writings of the monkish ages ascribed by ignorant
transcribers to some ancient sage. He appears frequently to have been at
a loss what book to print, and to have accidentally chosen the work in
hand; so he tells us--"Having no work in hand, I sitting in my study,
where as lay many diverse paunflettes and bookys, happened that to my
hand came a lytel boke in French, which late was translated out of Latin
by some noble clerk of France, which book is named Aeneydos." And this
was the origin of his puerile romance! He exercised no discrimination in
his selection of authors, and the simplicity of our first printer far
exceeded his learning. One of his greater works is "The noble History of
King Arthur and of certain of his Knights." Caxton, who had charmed
himself and his ignorant readers with his authentic "Aeneydos," hesitated
to print "this history," for there were different opinions that "there
was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be made of him be but
feigned and fables." It would be difficult to account for the scepticism
of one who always found the marvellous more delectable than the natural,
and who had published so many "feigned" histories--as "The veray trew
History of the valiant Knight Jason," or the "Life of Hercules," and all
"The Merveilles of Virgil's Necromancy," solemnly vouching for their
verity! His sudden scruples were, however, relieved, when "a gentleman"
assured our printer that "it was great folly and blindness in the
disbelievers of this true history."
In the early stage of civilization men want knowledge to feel any
curiosity; like children, they are only affected through the medium of
their imagination. But it is a phenomenon in the history of the human
mind, that at a period of refinement we may approximate to one of
barbarism. This happens when the ruling passion wholly returns to
fiction, and thus terminates in a reckless disregard for all other
studies. Whenever history, severe and lofty, displaying men as they are,
is degraded among the revels and the masques of romance; and the slow
inductions of reasoning, and the minute discoveries of research, and the
nice affinities of analogy, are impatiently rejected, while fiction in
her exaggerated style swells every object into a colossal size, and
raises every passion into hyperbolical violence; a distaste for
knowledge, and a coldness for truth, which must follow, are fatal to the
sanity of the intellect. And thus in the day of our refinement we may be
reverting to our barbarous infancy.
Caxton, mindful of his commercial interests and the taste of his
readers, left the glory of restoring the classical writers of antiquity,
which he could not read, to the learned printers of Italy.[2] The Orator
of Cicero, the histories of Herodotus and Polybius, the ethics of
Seneca, and the elaborate volumes of St. Austin, were some of the rich
fruits of the early typography of the German printers who had conveyed
their new art to the Neapolitan monastery of Subiaco. Our English
printer, indeed, might have heard of their ill-fortune, when, in a
petition to the Pope, they sent forth this cry--"Our house is full of
proof-sheets, but we have nothing to eat!" The trivial productions from
Caxton's press, romantic or religious legends, and treatises on hunting
and hawking, and the moralities of the game of chess, with Reynard the
Fox, were more amusing to the ignorant readers of his country; but the
national genius was little advanced by a succession of "merveillous
workes;" nor would the crude, unformed tastes of the readers be matured
by stimulating their inordinate appetites. The first printing-press in
England did not serve to raise the national taste out of its barbarous
infancy. Caxton was not a genius to soar beyond his age, but he had the
industry to keep pace with it, and with little judgment and less
learning he found no impediment in his selection of authors or his
progress in translation.
Our earliest printed works consist of these translations of French
translations; and the historian of our poetry considered that this very
circumstance, which originated in the general illiteracy of the times,
was more favourable to our vernacular literature than would have been
the publication of Roman writers in their original language. Had it not
been for these French versions, Caxton could not have furnished any of
his own. The multiplication of English copies multiplied English
readers, and when at length there was a generation of readers, an
English press induced many to turn authors who were only qualified to
write in their native tongue.
Venerable shade of Caxton! the award of the tribunal of posterity is a
severe decision, but an imprescriptible law! Men who appear at certain
eras of society, however they be lauded for what they have done, are
still liable to be censured for not doing what they ought to have done.
Patriarch of the printing-press! who to thy last and dying day withdrew
not thy hand from thy work, it is hard that thou shouldst be amenable to
a law which thy faculties were not adequate to comprehend; surely thou
mayst triumph, thou simple man! amid the echoes of thy "Caxtonians"
rejoicing over thy Gothic leaves--but the historian of the human mind is
not the historian of typography.