________________________________________________
_ How quietly its best things steal upon the world! And in a world where a single line of Sappho's survives as a something more important than the entire political history of Lesbos, how little will the daily newspaper help us to take long views!
Whether England could better afford to lose Shakespeare or her Indian Empire is no fair question to put to an Englishman. But every Englishman knows in his heart which of these two glories of his birth and state will survive the other, and by which of them his country will earn in the end the greater honour. Though in our daily life we--perhaps wisely--make a practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most perdurable claim on man's remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which outlast all phenomena.
The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous bookseller of Charing Cross Road, rediscovered (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet. Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the Republic of Letters under many obligations. To begin with, he loves his trade and honours the wares in which he deals, and so continues the good tradition that should knit writers, printers, vendors and purchasers of books together as partakers of an excellent mystery. He studies--and on occasion will fight for--the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the out-of-door-stall, the 'classic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing. He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature. He has edited James Thomson, him of _The City of Dreadful Night_. He has helped us to learn more than we knew of Charles Lamb. He has even written poems of his own and printed them under the title of _Rosemary and Pansies_, in a volume marked 'Not for sale'--a warning which I, as one of the fortunate endowed, intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne.
Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the discovery let us rehearse the few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne. He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight. He wrote a polemical tract on _Roman Forgeries_, which had some success; a treatise on _Christian Ethicks_, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was utterly neglected; an exquisite work, _Centuries of Meditations_, never published; and certain poems, which also he left in manuscript. And there the record ends.
Next let us tell by how strange a chance this forgotten author came to his own. In 1896 or 1897 Mr. William T. Brooke picked up two volumes of MS. on a street bookstall, and bought them for a few pence. Mr. Brooke happened to be a man learned in sacred poetry and hymnology, and he no sooner began to examine his purchase than he knew that he had happened on a treasure. At the same time he could hardly believe that writings so admirable were the work of an unknown author. In choice of subject, in sentiment, in style, they bore a strong likeness to the poems of Henry Vaughan the Silurist, and he concluded that they must be assigned to Vaughan. He communicated his discovery to the late Dr. Grosart, who became so deeply interested in it that he purchased the manuscripts and set about preparing an edition of Vaughan, in which the newly-found treasures were to be included. Dr. Grosart, one may say in passing, was by no means a safe judge of characteristics in poetry. With all his learning and enthusiasm you could not trust him, having read a poem with which he was unacquainted or which perchance he had forgotten, to assign it to its true or even its probable author. But when you hear that so learned a man as Dr. Grosart considered these writings worthy of Vaughan, you may be the less apt to think me extravagant in holding that man to have been Vaughan's peer who wrote the following lines:--
"How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among His works I did appear
how their Glory me did crown!
The world resembled His Eternity,
In which my soul did walk;
And everything that I did see
Did with me talk.
"The streets were paved with golden stones,
The boys and girls were mine,
O how did all their lovely faces shine!
The sons of men were holy ones;
In joy and beauty they appeared to me:
And everything which here I found,
While like an angel I did see,
Adorned the ground."
'Proprieties.'--
That is to say, 'properties,' 'estates.'--
"Proprieties themselves were mine,
And hedges ornaments,
Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents
Did not divide my joys, but all combine.
Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed
My joys by others worn;
For me they all to wear them seemed
When I was born."
Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and elaborate edition of Vaughan, which, only just before his death, he was endeavouring to find means to publish. After his death the two manuscripts passed by purchase to Mr. Charles Higham, the well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when a part of Dr. Grosart's library was sold at Sotheby's, Mr. Dobell bought--and this is perhaps the strangest part of the story--a third manuscript volume, which Dr. Grosart had possessed all the time without an inkling that it bore upon Mr. Brooke's discovery, "though nothing is needed but to compare it with the other volumes in order to see that all these are in the same handwriting."
Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them with Vaughan's, and began to have his doubts. Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author be?
Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume of Giles Fletcher's, _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had appended a number of seventeenth-century poems not previously collected; and to one of these, entitled 'The Ways of Wisdom,' he drew Mr. Dobell's attention as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To Mr. Dobell the resemblance between it and the manuscript poems was at once evident. Mr. Brooke had found the poem in a little book in the British Museum entitled, _A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God, in several most Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same_ (a publisher's title it is likely): and this book contained other pieces in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. Dobell's request, he examined them and felt no doubt at all that the author of the manuscript poem and of the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be one and the same person. But, again, who could he be?
A sentence in an address 'To the Reader' prefixed to the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ provided the clue. The editor of this work (a posthumous publication), after eulogising the unnamed author's many virtues wound up with a casual clue to his identity:--
"But being removed out of the Country to the service of the late Lord Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he died young and got early to those blissful mansions to which he at all times aspir'd."
But for this sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the clue--that the author of _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman--had only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne. This information was obtained from Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, which mentioned Traherne as the author of two books, _Roman Forgeries_ and _Christian Ethicks_.
The next step was to get hold of these two works and examine them, if perchance some evidence might be found that Traherne was also the author of the manuscripts, which as yet remained a guess, standing on Mr. Dobell's conviction that the verses in the manuscripts and those in _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be by the same hand.
By great good fortune that evidence was found in _Christian Ethicks_, in a poem which, with some variations, occurred too in the manuscript _Centuries of Meditations_. Here then at last was proof positive, or as positive as needs be.
The most of us writers hope and stake for a diuturnity of fame; and some of us get it. _Sed ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?_ "That bay leaves were found green in the tomb of St. Humbert after a hundred and fifty years was looked upon as miraculous," writes Sir Thomas Browne. But Traherne's laurel has lain green in the dust for close on two hundred and thirty years, and his fame so cunningly buried that only by half a dozen accidents leading up to a chance sentence in a dark preface to a forgotten book has it come to light.
I wonder if his gentle shade takes any satisfaction in the discovery? His was by choice a _vita fallens_. Early in life he made, as we learn from a passage in _Centuries of Meditations_, his election between worldly prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the chase of fleeting phenomena and rest upon the soul's centre:--
"When I came into the country and, being seated among silent trees and woods and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of Happiness, and to satiate the burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth; in which I was so resolute that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and to feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept of that desire that from that time to this I have had all things plentifully provided for me without any care at all, my very study of Felicity making me more to prosper than all the care in the whole world. So that through His blessing I live a free and kingly life, as if the world were turned again into Eden, or, much more, as it is at this day."
Yet Traherne is no quietist: a fervent, passionate lover, rather, of simple and holy things. He sees with the eyes of a child: the whole world shines for him 'apparell'd in celestial light,' and that light, he is well aware, shines out on it, through the eyes which observe it, from the divine soul of man. The verses which I quoted above strike a note to which he recurs again and again. Listen to the exquisite prose in which he recounts the 'pure and virgin apprehension' of his childhood:--
"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels; I knew not that they were born, or should die. . . . The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . ."
All these things he enjoyed, his life through, uncursed by the itch for 'proprietorship': he was like the Magnanimous Man in his own _Christian Ethicks_--'one that scorns the smutty way of enjoying things like a slave, because he delights in the celestial way and the Image of God.' In this creed of his all things are made for man, if only man will inherit them wisely: even God, in conferring benefits on man, is moved and rewarded by the felicity of witnessing man's grateful delight in them:--
"For God enjoyed is all His end,
Himself He then doth comprehend
When He is blessed, magnified,
Extoll'd, exalted, prais'd, and glorified."
Yes, and 'undeified almost, if once denied.' A startling creed, this; but what a bold and great-hearted one! To Traherne the Soul is a sea which not only receives the rivers of God's bliss but 'all it doth receive returns again.' It is the Beloved of the old song, 'Quia Amore Langueo;' whom God pursues, as a lover. It is the crown of all things. So in one of his loveliest poems he shows it standing on the threshold to hear news of a great guest, never dreaming that itself is that great guest all the while--
ON NEWS
I.
News from a foreign country came,
As if my treasure and my wealth lay there:
So much it did my heart enflame,
'Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear,
Which thither went to meet
The approaching sweet,
And on the threshold stood
To entertain the unknown Good.
It hover'd there
As if 'twould leave mine ear,
And was so eager to embrace
The joyful tidings as they came,
'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place
To entertain that same.
II.
As if the tidings were the things,
My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure,
Or else did bear them on their wings--
With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure--
My Soul stood at that gate
To recreate
Itself with bliss, and to
Be pleased with speed. A fuller view
It fain would take,
Yet journeys back again would make
Unto my heart: as if 'twould fain
Go out to meet, yet stay within
To fit a place to entertain
And bring the tidings in.
III.
What sacred instinct did inspire
My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong?
What secret force moved my desire
To expect my joy, beyond the seas, so young?
Felicity I knew
Was out of view;
And being here alone,
I saw that happiness was gone
From me! For this
I thirsted absent bliss,
And thought that sure beyond the seas,
Or else in something near at hand
I knew not yet (since nought did please
I knew), my bliss did stand,
IV.
But little did the infant dream
That all the treasures of the world were by:
And that himself was so the cream
And crown of all which round about did lie.
Yet thus it was: The Gem,
The Diadem,
The Ring enclosing all
That stood upon this earthly ball;
The Heavenly Eye,
Much wider than the sky,
Wherein they all included were,
The glorious Soul that was the King
Made to possess them, did appear
A small and little thing.
I must quote from another poem, if only for the pleasure of writing down
the lines:--
THE SALUTATION.
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins--
Where have ye been? Behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
When silent I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I smiles or tears
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive!
These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole passages in the unpublished _Centuries of Meditations_ which almost set one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of Time?"
I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass. For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a class apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up in this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man (who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of which _Robinson Crusoe_ may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him--though, to be sure, that gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway, resting his case upon--
SONNET CCXVIII.
Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will:
And where is Will alive but _hath a way?_
So in device thy wit is starved still
And as devised by Will. That is to say,
My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal
Thou hast; but all that capital messuage
Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall.
Haply the disproportion may engage
The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise
Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue
That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise
My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo!
And here revoke all previous testaments:
Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents.
After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative.
Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another _trouvaille_, and one which excited me not a little:--
"Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which I had purchased, I came upon some loose leaves which were headed _A Prospect of Society_. The title struck me as familiar, and I had only to read a few lines to recognise them as belonging to [Goldsmith's] _The Traveller_. But the opening lines of my fragment are not the opening lines of the poem as it was published; in fact, the first two lines of _A Prospect of Society_ are lines 353-4 in the first edition of _The Traveller_. . . . A further examination of the fragment which I had discovered showed that it is not what is usually understood as a 'proof' of _The Traveller_, but rather the material, as yet formless and unarranged, out of which it was to be finally evolved."
Now--line for corresponding line--the text discovered by Mr. Dobell often differs, and sometimes considerably, from that of the first edition of _The Traveller_, and these variations are highly interesting, and make Mr. Dobell's 'find' a valuable one. But on studying the newly discovered version I very soon found myself differing from Mr. Dobell's opinion that we had here the formless, unarranged material out of which Goldsmith built an exquisitely articulated poem.[1] And, doubting this, I had to doubt what Mr. Dobell deduced from it--that "it was in the manner in which a poem, remarkable for excellence of form and unity of design, was created out of a number of verses which were at first crudely conceived and loosely connected that Goldsmith's genius was most triumphantly displayed." For scarcely had I lit a pipe and fallen to work on _A Prospect of Society_ before it became evident to me (1) that the lines were not "unarranged," but disarranged; and (2) that whatever the reason of this disarray, Goldsmith's brain was not responsible; that the disorder was too insane to be accepted either as an order in which he could have written the poem, or as one in which he could have wittingly allowed it to circulate among his friends, unless he desired them to believe him mad. Take, for instance, this collocation:--
"Heavens! how unlike their Belgic sires of old!
Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold;
Where shading elms beside the margin grew,
And freshen'd from the waves the zephyr blew."
Or this:--
"To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign,
We turn, where France displays her bright domain.
Thou sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please,
How often have I led thy sportive choir
With tuneless pipe, along the sliding Loire?
No vernal bloom their torpid rocks display,
But Winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sooths the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare and frowning storms invest."
Short of lunacy, no intellectual process would account for that sort of thing, whereas a poem more pellucidly logical than _The Traveller_ does not exist in English. So, having lit another pipe, I took a pencil and began some simple counting, with this result:--
The first 42 lines of _The Prospect_ correspond
with lines 353-400 of _The Traveller_.
The next 42 with lines 311-352.
The next 34 with lines 277-310.
The next 36 with lines 241-276.
The next 36 with lines 205-240.
The next 36 with lines 169-204.
The next 38 with lines 131-168.
The next 28 with lines 103-130.
And the remaining fragment of 18 lines with lines 73-92.
In other words, _The Prospect_ is merely an early draft of _The Traveller_ printed backwards in fairly regular sections.
But how can this have happened? The explanation is at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered-- an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the result delightful, and (when you come to think of it) the blunder just so natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.
Upon this simple explanation we have to abandon the hypothesis that Goldsmith patiently built a fine poem out of a congeries of fine passages pitchforked together at haphazard--a splendid rubbish heap; and Mr. Dobell's find is seen to be an imperfect set of duplicate proofs--fellow, no doubt, to that set which Goldsmith, mildly objurgating his own or the printer's carelessness, sliced up with the scissors and rearranged before submitting it to Johnson's friendly revision.
The pleasantest part of the story (for me) has yet to come. We all know how easy it is to turn obstinate and defend a pet theory with acrimony. Mr. Dobell did nothing of the sort. Although his enthusiasm had committed him to no little expense in publishing _The Prospect_, with a preface elaborating his theory, he did a thing which was worth a hundred discoveries. He sat down, convinced himself that my explanation was the right one, and promptly committed himself to further expense in bringing out a new edition with the friendliest acknowledgment. So do men behave who are at once generous of temper and anxious for the truth.
He himself had been close upon the explanation. In his preface he had actually guessed that the "author's manuscript, written on loose leaves, had fallen into confusion and was then printed without any attempt at rearrangement." In fact, he had hit upon the right solution, and only failed to follow up the clue.
His find, too, remains a valuable one; for so far as it goes we can collate it with the first edition of _The Traveller_, and exactly discover the emendations made by Johnson, or by Goldsmith after discussion with Johnson. Boswell tells us that the Doctor "in the year 1783, at my request, marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are only line 420, 'To stop too faithful, and too faint to go,' and the concluding ten lines, except the last couplet but one. . . . He added, 'These are all of which I can be sure.'" We cannot test his claim to the concluding lines, for the correspondent passage is missing from Mr. Dobell's fragment; but Johnson's word would be good enough without the internal evidence of the verses to back it. "To stop too faithful, and too faint to go," is his improvement, and an undeniable one, upon Goldsmith's "And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go." I have not been at pains to examine all the revised lines, but they are numerous, and generally (to my thinking) betray Johnson's hand. Also they are almost consistently improvements. There is one alteration, however,-- unmistakably due to Johnson,--which some of us will join with Mr. Dobell in regretting. Johnson, as a fine, full-blooded Jingo, naturally showed some restiveness at the lines--
"Yes, my lov'd brother, cursed be that hour
When first ambition toil'd for foreign power,"
And induced Goldsmith to substitute--
"Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour
When first ambition struck at regal power,"
Which may or may not be more creditable in sentiment, but is certainly quite irrelevant in its context, which happens to be a denunciation of the greed for gold and foreign conquest. It is, in that context, all but meaningless, and must have irritated and puzzled many readers of a poem otherwise clearly and continuously argued. In future editions of _The Traveller_, Goldsmith's original couplet should be restored; and I urge this (let the Tory reader be assured) not from any ill-will towards our old friend the Divine Right of Kings, but solely in the sacred name of Logic.
Such be the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer of such words as these--
"A little touch of something like pride is seated in the true sense of a man's own greatness, without which his humility and modesty would be contemptible virtues."
"It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without loving God or man. Love is a transcendent excellence in every duty, and must of necessity enter into the nature of every grace and virtue. That which maketh the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so bitter and comfortless to men, is its _death_ in the separation and absence of its soul. We suffer but love not."
"All things do first receive that give:
Only 'tis God above
That from and in Himself doth live;
Whose all-sufficient love
Without original can flow,
And all the joys and glories show
Which mortal man can take delight to know.
He is the primitive, eternal Spring,
The endless Ocean of each glorious thing.
The soul a vessel is,
A spacious bosom, to contain
All the fair treasures of His bliss,
Which run like rivers from, into, the main,
And all it doth receive, return again."
"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."
[1] Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the title, _The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society_. Later editions dropped the sub-title. _
Read next: April
Read previous: February
Table of content of From a Cornish Window
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
