Part 29
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.”
And here is Mr. Hazlitt’s annotation on the word _wylle_:--
“_i. e._ evil. In a MS. of the _Tale of the Basyn_, supposed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be written in the Salopian dialect, are the following lines:--
‘The lother hade litull thoght, Off husbandry cowth he noght, But alle his wyves _will_ be wroght.’” (Vol. I. p. 16.)
It is plain that he supposed _will_, in this very simple passage, to mean _evil_! This he would seem to rectify, but at the same time takes care to tell us that “the explanation [of _wylle_] is correct.” He is willing to give up one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort himself withal! _Wylle_ is simply a rhyming fetch for _wild_, and the passage means that the king rode at random. The use of _wild_ with this meaning is still common in such phrases as “he struck wild.” In “Havelok” we find it in the nearly related sense of _being at a loss, knowing not what to do_:--
“To lincolne barfot he yede Hwan he kam ther he was ful _wil_, Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til.”
_All wylle_, in short, means the kind of editing that is likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up his misinformation as he goes along. We would hint that a person must know _something_ before he can use even a glossary with safety.
In the “King and the Barker,” when the tanner finds out that it is the king whom he has been treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees, Mr. Hazlitt prints,
“He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell,”
and subjoins the following note: “Radell, or raddle, signifies a side of a cart; but here, apparently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printed _ner adell_.” Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation of _raddle_, which he got from Halliwell, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from O. F. _rastel_) implies, means the side or end of a _hay_-cart, in which the uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a cart to do here? There is perhaps a touch of what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call humor, in the tanner’s forgetfulness of his raiment, but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. Hazlitt’s own notes. The tanner was on horseback, as the roads of the period required that he should be, and good old Ritson was plainly on the right track in his reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. As it was, he got _one_ word right, and so far has the advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course, _ner a dell_, never a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in his collection,--
“For _never a dell_ He wyll me love agayne.” (Vol. III. p. 2.)
That _adell_ was a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact that the word does not appear in his glossary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints! In the poem we have just quoted he gravely prints,--
“Matter in dede, My sides did blede,”
for “mother, indede,” “through ryght wysenes” for “though ryghtwisenes,” “with man vnkynde” for “sith man vnkynde,” “ye knowe a parte” for “ye knowe aperte,” “here in” for “herein,” all of which make nonsense, and all come within the first one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the shortest, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than want of care. One blunder falling within the same limits we have reserved for special comment, because it affords a good example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing:--
“Your herte souerayne Clouen in twayne By longes the blynde.” (Vol. III. p. 7.)
Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in the dark as to what _longes_ meant as the editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar enough, one should think, to any reader of mediæval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt absolves himself for not having supplied a glossary by the plea that none is needed by the class of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman who often goes out of his way to explain in his notes such simple matters as that “shape” means “form,” and that “Johan of the golden mouthe” means “St. Chrysostom,” which, indeed, it does not, any more than Johannes Baptista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt with an illustration of the passage from Bekker’s _Ferabras_, the more willingly as it may direct his attention to a shining example of how an old poem should be edited:--
“en la crotz vos pendero li fals Iuzieu truan, can Longis vos ferie de sa lansa trencan: el non avia vist en trastot son vivan; lo sanc li venc per l’asta entro al punh colan; e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vic el mantenan.”
Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints _sang parlez_ for _sanz parler_) (Vol. I. p. 265), will not be able to form any notion of what these verses mean, but perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from the capital L that _longes_ is a proper name. The word _truan_ at the end of the first verse of our citation may also suggest to him that _truant_ is not quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word _trewāt_ as he seems to think. (Vol. IV. p. 24, _note_.) In deference to Mr. Hazlitt’s presumed familiarity with an author sometimes quoted by him in his notes, we will point him to another illustration:--
“Ac ther cam forth a knyght, With a kene spere y-grounde Highte Longeus, as the lettre telleth, And longe hadde lore his sighte.” _Piers Ploughman_, Wright, p. 374.
Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where old French is in question. Upon the word _Osyll_ he favors us with the following note: “The blackbird. In East Cornwall _ozell_ is used to signify the windpipe, and thence the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to me.” (Vol. II. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe! The name is merely another form of O. F. _oisil_, and was usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest birds, just as _pajaro_ (L. _passer_) in Spanish, by a similar process in the opposite direction, came to mean bird in general. On the very next page he speaks of “the Romance which is vulgarly entitled _Lybeaus Disconus_, i. e. _Le Beau Disconnu_.” If he had corrected _Disconus_ to _Desconus_, all had been well; but _Disconnu_ neither is nor ever was French at all. Where there is blundering to be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two birds. _Ly beaus Disconus_ is perfectly correct old French, and another form of the adjective (_bius_) perhaps explains the sound we give to the first syllable of _beauty_ and _Beaufort_. A barrister at law, as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know anything about old English or modern French, but we might fairly expect him to have at least a smattering of Law French! In volume fourth, page 129, a goodman trying his wife,
“Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fire And set it abooue vpon the astire.”
Mr. Hazlitt’s note upon _astire_ is “hearth, i. q. _astre_.” Knowing that the modern French was âtre, he too rashly inferred a form which never existed except in Italian. The old French word is _aistre_ or _estre_, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither old French nor new. We do not pretend to know what _astire_ means, but a hearth that should be _abooue_ the pot seething over the fire would be unusual, to say the least, in our semi-civilized country.
In the “Lyfe of Roberte the Deuill” (Vol. I. p. 232), Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knight _sentre_ his lance, and tells us in a note that the “Ed. 1798 has _fentered_,” a very easy misprint for the right word _feutered_. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning of _sentre_ he has not vouchsafed to tell us. _Fautre_ (sometimes _faltre_ or _feutre_) means in old French the _rest_ of a lance. Thus in the _Roman du Renart_ (26517),
“Et mist sa lance sor le _fautre_.”
But it also meant a peculiar _kind_ of rest. In Sir F. Madden’s edition of _Gawayne_ (to which Mr. Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read,
“They _feutred_ their lances, these knyghtes good”;
and in the same editor’s “William and the Werwolf,”
“With sper festened in _feuter_, him for to spille.”
In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, “There seems no reason, however, why it [feuter] should not mean the rest attached to the armour.” But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a “garniture d’une selle pour tenir la lance.” A spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly weight to the blow. The “_him for to spille_” implies this. So in “Merlin” (E. E. Text Soc., p. 488): “Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest crewelte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as in mortall werre.” The context shows that the _fewtre_ turned sport into earnest. A citation in Raynouard’s _Lexique Roman_ (though wrongly explained by him) directed us to a passage which proves that this particular kind of rest for the lance was attached to the saddle, in order to render the blow heavier:--
“Lances _à_ [lege _as_] _arçons_ afeutrées _Pour plus de dures colées rendre._” _Branche des Royaux Lignages_, 4514, 4515.
Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his predecessors. The long and useful career of Mr. Wright, who, if he had given us nothing more than his excellent edition of “Piers Ploughman” and the volume of “Ancient Vocabularies,” would have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our literature or students of our language, does not save him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr. Hazlitt’s own has comically avenged Warton. The word _prayer_, it seems, had somehow substituted itself for _prayse_ in a citation by Warton of the title of the “Schole-House of Women.” Mr. Hazlitt thereupon takes occasion to charge him with often “speaking at random,” and after suggesting that it might have been the blunder of a copyist, adds, “or it is by no means impossible that Warton himself, having been allowed to inspect the production, was guilty of this oversight.” (Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and eighteenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed the following couplet to escape his conscientious attention:--
“Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose That _prayers_ and glory doth consist in cloathes.”
_Lege, nostro periculo_, PRAYSE! Were dear old Tom still on earth, he might light his pipe cheerfully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt’s pages, secure that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blunders at the least. The word _prayer_ is an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the “Knyght and his Wyfe” (Vol. II. p. 18) he prints:--
“And sayd, Syre, I rede we make In this chapel oure prayers, That God us kepe both in ferrus.”
Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things that everybody knows, give us a note upon _in ferrus_? It would have matched his admirable elucidation of _waygose_, which we shall notice presently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. may have read _prayere_ and _in fere_? _Prayere_ occurs two verses further on, and not as a rhyme.
Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on a question of Old English grammar, telling him superciliously that _can_, with an infinitive, in such phrases as _he can go_, is used not “to denote a _past_ tense, but an _imperfect_ tense.” By _past_ we suppose him to mean _perfect_. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in this very collection that _can_, in the phrases referred to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect tense:--
“And thorow that worde y felle in pryde; As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde, And with the tywnkling[31] of an eye God for-dud alle that maystrye And so hath he done for my gylte.”
Now the angel here is Lucifer, and _can of hevyn glyde_ means simply _fell from heaven_, not _was falling_. It is in the same tense as _for-dud_ in the next line. The fall of the angels is surely a _fait accompli_. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes “my for” to “for my,” and wrongly, the _my_ agreeing with _maystrye_ understood. In modern English we should use _mine_ in the same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of himself.
We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt’s impertinence to Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from original sources. We have a _foible_ for Ritson with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his unconsciously depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy’s folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most conscientious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted two poems, “The Squyr of Low Degre” and “The Knight of Curtesy,” which had already been edited by Ritson. The former of these has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the copyist as perhaps an editor should.[32] Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson’s text, that “it offers more than _an hundred_ departures from the original,” and of the “Knight of Courtesy,” that “Ritson’s text is by no means accurate.” Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson’s emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the original reading in a foot-note with an “old ed. has” so and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the corrections were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For example, he prints,
“Alas! it tourned to _wroth her heyle_,”
where Ritson had substituted _wrotherheyle_. The measure shows that Ritson was right. _Wroth her heyle_, moreover, is nonsense. It should have been _wrother her heyle_ at any rate, but the text is far too modern to admit of that archaic form. In the “Debate of the Body and the Soul” (Mätzner’s A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have,
“Why schope thou me to wrother-hele,”
and in “Dame Siris” (Ibid., 110),
“To goder hele ever came thou hider.”
Mr. Hazlitt prints,
“For yf it may be found in thee That thou them [de] fame for enuyte.”