“And as that soldier conquest doubted not,
Who but one splinter had of Castriot,
But would assault ev’n death, so strongly charmed,
And naked oppose rocks, with this bone armed.”
Mr. Hazlitt reads _his_ for _this_ in the last verse, and his note on
“bone” is:--
“And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand and
took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. (Judges xv. 15.)”
Could the farce of “editing” go further? To make a “splinter of
Castriot” an ass’s jawbone is a little too bad. We refer Mr. Hazlitt to
“The Life of George Castriot, King of Epirus and Albania,” &c., &c.,
(Edinburgh, 1753,) p. 32, for an explanation of this profound
difficulty. He will there find that the Turkish soldiers wore relics of
Scanderbeg as charms.
Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt’s most astounding note is on the word _pickear_. (p.
203.)
“So within shot she doth pickear,
Now gall’s [galls] the flank and now the rear.”
“In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to be peculiar to
Lovelace. _To pickear_, or _pickeer_, means _to skirmish_.” And, pray,
what other possible meaning can it have here?
Of his corrections of the press we will correct a few samples.
Page 34, for “Love _nee’re_ his standard,” read “_neere_.” Page 82, for
“fall _too_,” read “fall _to_” (or, as we ought to print such words,
“fall-to”). Page 83, for “star-made firmament,” read “star, made
firmament.” Page 161, for “To look their enemies _in_ their hearse,”
read, both for sense and metre, _into_. Page 176, for “the gods _have_
kneeled,” read _had_. Page 182, for “In beds they tumbled _off_ their
own,” read _of_. Page 184, for “in mine one monument I lie,” read
_owne_. Page 212, for “Deucalion’s _black_flung stone,” read
“backflung.” Of the punctuation we shall give but one specimen, and that
a fair average one:--
“Naso to his Tibullus flung the wreath,
He to Catullus thus did each bequeath.
This glorious circle, to another round,
At last the temples of a god it bound.”
Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this for
themselves.
* * * * *
Time brings to obscure authors[30] an odd kind of reparation, an
immortality, not of love and interest and admiration, but of curiosity
merely. In proportion as their language was uncouth, provincial, or even
barbarous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which only a
single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pastry-cook and
trunk-maker, may contain one word that makes daylight in some dark
passage of a great author, and its name shall accordingly live forever
in a note. Is not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none? And if
literary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Brunetto Latini’s made
him insensible for a moment to the rain of fire and the burning sand,
the authors of such books as are not properly literature may still
comfort themselves with a _non omnis moriar_, laying a mournful emphasis
on the adjective, and feeling that they have not lived wholly in vain
while they share with the dodo a fragmentary continuance on earth. To be
sure, the immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to
the famous men they help to illustrate. If they escape oblivion, it is
by a back door, as it were, and they survive only in fine print at the
page’s foot. At the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all,
perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous is to be
utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a kind of definite result
by living. To hang on the perilous edge of immortality by the nails,
liable at any moment to drop into the fathomless ooze of oblivion, is at
best a questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the merest barnacles
that have attached themselves to the stately keels of Dante or
Shakespeare or Milton have an interest of their own by letting us know
in what remote waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has
not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare’s “dusty death” to Anthony Copley, and
Milton’s “back resounded Death!” to Abraham Fraunce? Nay, is it not
Bernard de Ventadour’s lark that sings forever in the diviner air of
Dante’s Paradise?
“Quan vey laudeta mover
De joi sas alas contra’l rai,
Que s’oblida e s laissa cazer
Per la doussor qu ’al cor li ’n vai.”
“Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia,
Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
Dell’ ultima dolcezza che la sazia.”
We are not sure that Bernard’s “Que s’oblida es laissa cazer” is not
sweeter than Dante’s “tace contenta,” but it was plainly the _doussor_
that gave its cue to the greater poet’s memory, and he has improved on
it with that exquisite _ultima_, as his master Virgil sometimes did on
Homer.
But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic belong rather
in such collections as Mr. Allibone’s. As literature they are
oppressive; as items of literary history they find their place in that
vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the
killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of the Books. There our
hearts are touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the
eye in some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly
immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of
notability! How many a controversialist, terrible in his day, how many a
rising genius that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a withering
satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone brevity of a name
and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the
confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial and generous
posterity,--and then read “Smith J. [ohn?] 1713-1784 (?). The Vision of
Immortality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to. See _Lowndes_.”
The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, (which we
may fix pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took any
interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom a name was valuable
in proportion as it was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your
title-page read after it has rounded the corner of its first century,
and to enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. This is
the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the _Libro d’oro_ of the
_onymi-anonymi_, of the never-named authors who exist only in name.
Parson Adams would be here had he found a printer for his sermons, and
Mr. Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on monogamy. Papyrorcetes
junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the name of his
respectable progenitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least, if of
nothing better, and are sons though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here
is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the waxen _imagines_ of the
Roman patriciate, for those must have been inconvenient to pack on a
change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather (even the elder
Brutus himself might soften in the dog-days) and not readily salable
unless to some _novus homo_ willing to buy a set of ancestors
ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in genealogy are said to
order a family-tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip
of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should seem,
like electricity, is both positive and negative, and if a writer must be
Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he
must not less be Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Guérard.
The benignity of Providence is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in
its compensations. As there is a large class of men madly desirous to
decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply because of their
illegibility, so there is another class driven by a like irresistible
instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these have even
a philologic value for us depends on the accuracy and learning bestowed
upon them by the editor.
For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out of which
something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer, and the
late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our literature of the
Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, so
many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent industry.
It would not be easy to name any work more thoroughly done than his
edition of Skelton. He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but
no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the meaning
with which words were used during the period he did so much to
illustrate. Elegant scholar ship is not often, as in him, patient of
drudgery and conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and Mr.
Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The one was not
more distinguished by modest accuracy than the other is by the rash
conceit of that half-knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor
than downright ignorance. This language is strong because it is true,
though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the vulgar
flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly to the labors of
his predecessors,--to such men as Ritson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir
Frederick Madden, his superiors in everything that goes to the making of
a good editor. Most of them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and
it is not for us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others
like them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness
of our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps of
glossary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the
difficulties than the defects of these pioneers.
How different is Mr. Hazlitt’s spirit from that of the thorough and
therefore modest scholar! In the Preface to his _Altenglische
Sprachproben_, Mätzner says of an editor, _das Beste was er ist verdankt
er Andern_, an accidental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out
of _Nathan der Weise_. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting some
friend to translate for him the whole paragraph in which it occurs.
We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superintend a new edition of
Warton’s History of English Poetry, and are pained to think of the
treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at
the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or learning. Of
his taste a single specimen may suffice. He tells us that “in an
artistic and constructive point of view, the _Mylner of Abington_ is
superior to its predecessor,” that predecessor being Chaucer’s _Reve’s
Tale_, which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the _Miller_! Of
his discrimination we have a sufficient test in the verses he has
fathered upon Herrick in a late edition of the most graceful of our
lyric poets. Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right word,
for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads
carefully the very documents he prints. For example, in the Biographical
Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says (p. xvii): “Mr. W. Perry Herrick
has plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir William to his
nephew were simply on account of the fortune which belonged to Robert in
right of his father, and which his uncle held in trust; this was about
£400; and I think from allusions in the letters printed elsewhere that
this view may be the correct one.” _May_ be! The poet says expressly, “I
entreat you out of _my little possession_ to deliver to this bearer the
_customarye_ £10, without which I cannot meate [?] my ioyrney.” The
words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr. Hazlitt’s
wise-looking query after “meate” is conclusive also as to his fitness
for editorship. Did he never hear of the familiar phrase “to _meet_ the
expense”? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must be the
condition of his mind in face of the more than Protean travesties which
words underwent before they were uniformed by Johnson and Walker? Mr.
Hazlitt’s mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own
fog. In another of Herrick’s letters we find, “For what her monie can be
effected (_sic_) when there is diuision ’twixt the hart and hand?” “Her
monie” of course means _harmonie_, and _effected_ is therefore right.
What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his “(_sic_)” it were idle to
inquire.
We have already had occasion to examine some of Mr. Hazlitt’s work, and
we are sorry to say that in the four volumes before us we find no reason
for changing our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of
editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never, we might say,
with lights of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where none was
before, and the peculiar _bumptiousness_ of his incapacity makes it
particularly offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of what
we assert, our only embarrassment being in the superabundance of our
material. In the Introduction to the second volume of his collection,
Mr. Hazlitt speaks of “the utter want of common care on the part of
previous editors of our old poetry.” Such oversights as he has remarked
upon in his notes are commonly errors of the press, a point on which Mr.
Hazlitt, of all men, should have been charitable, for his own volumes
are full of them. We call his attention to one such which is rather
amusing. In his “additional notes” we find “line 77, _wylle_. Strike out
the note upon this word; but the explanation is correct. _Be wroght_ was
a misprint, however, for _he wroght_.” The error occurs in a citation of
three lines in which _lother_ is still left for _tother_. The original
note affords us so good an example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing as
to be worth preserving. In the “Kyng and the Hermit” we read,--
“He ne wyst w[h]ere that he was
Ne out of the forest for to passe,
And thus he rode all wylle.”