INTRODUCTION TO THOMAS STANLEY
Thomas Stanley, poet, scholar, translator, and historian of philosophy, occupies a position in literary history, and in the general knowledge of fairly instructed people, which is less unenviable than that of Cleveland, almost equally curious, but more distinctly accidental. In a way—in more ways than one—he cannot be said to be exactly unknown. Everybody who has received the once usual 'liberal education', if not directly acquainted with his work on classical literature, has seen his History of Philosophy referred to in later histories; and his notes on Aeschylus quoted, and sometimes fought over, in later editions. His translations have attained a place in that private-adventure Valhalla of English translations—Bohn's Library. A few at least of his poems are in all or most of the anthologies. Not many writers have such an anchor with four flukes, lodged in the general memory, as this. And yet there are probably few people who have any very distinct knowledge or idea of his work as a whole; his Poems (until a time subsequent to the original promise of them in this Collection) had never been issued since his own day save in one of the few-copied reprints of the indefatigable Sir Egerton Brydges; and he makes small figure in most literary histories.
The reasons of this, however, are not very far to seek. For a very considerable time during the later seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century, if not later, Stanley was a recognized authority on history and scholarship: but during this time a philosopher and a scholar would have been usually thought to derogate, strangely and not quite pardonably, by writing and translating love poetry in a style of 'false wit' the most contrary to the precepts of Mr. Addison. We cannot even be sure that Stanley himself would not have been short-sighted enough to feel a certain shame at his harmless fredaines in verse, for he certainly never published or fully collected them at all after he was six and twenty, though he lived to double that age. He seems, moreover, though most forward to help other men of letters, to have been in all other ways a decidedly retiring person—a man of books rather than of affairs. Though an unquestioned Royalist, and not accused of any dishonourable compliance, he seems to have been quite undisturbed during the Civil War, no doubt because of his observation of the precept λάθε βιώσας. In short, he took no trouble to keep himself before any public except the public of letters, and the public of letters chose to keep him only in his capacity as scholar.
If, however, he put himself not forward it was not for want of means and opportunity to do so. After some mistakes about his genealogy, it has been made certain that he was descended, though with the bend sinister, from the great house that bears the same name, and through a branch which enriched itself by commerce and settled in Hertfordshire and Essex. His mother was a Hammond of the family which has been referred to in dealing with his uncle the poet (vol. ii), and he was also connected with Sandys, Lovelace, and Sherburne, all of whom were his intimate friends, as were John Hall and Shirley the dramatist. He seems always to have been a man of means: and used them liberally, though less thoughtlessly than Benlowes, in assisting brother men of letters. He is not said to have been at any of the great schools, but his private tutor William Fairfax (son of Edward of Tasso fame) appears to have grounded him thoroughly in scholarship. At thirteen he went to Pembroke College (then Hall), Cambridge, entering in June 1639 and matriculating in December. He is said to have entered at Oxford next year. He was co-opted at Cambridge in 1642 as (apparently) a gentleman pensioner or commoner. He married early, his wife's name being Dorothy Enyon, and they had several children, of whom four survived him when he died, in 1678, at Suffolk Street, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields.
There is a tendency—which is perhaps rather slightly unfair than positively unjust—to suspect a poet who is specially given to translation: and not exactly to discard the suspicion in the ratio of his excellence as a translator. The reason behind this is sufficient, as has been said, to free it from the charge of positive injustice as a general rule, for it may be plausibly contended that a true poet, with nature and his own soul to draw upon, will not experience any great necessity to go to some one else for matter. But these general rules are always dangerous in particular application, and therefore it has been said that the notion is not quite fair. In fact, if it is examined as it does apply to individuals, it becomes clear that it will not do as a general rule at all—that like some other general rules it is practically useless. That Chaucer was grant translateur may be said to be neither here nor there in the circumstances. But Spenser did not disdain translation; Dryden evidently did it for love as well as for money, though the latter may have been its chief attraction for Pope; and a poet such as Shelley, who was very nearly the poet, by no means despised it.
When, however, we come to examine Stanley's work we may perhaps discover something in the very excellence of his translations which connects itself usefully with his original poems. These translations are excellent because he has almost unerringly selected writers who are suitable to the poetical style of his own day, and has transposed them into English verse of that style. But in his original poems there is perhaps a little too much suggestion of something not wholly dissimilar. They are (pretty as they almost always are, and beautiful as they sometimes are) a little devoid of the spontaneity and élan which distinguish the best things of the time from Carew and Crashaw down to Kynaston and John Hall. There is a very little of the exercise about them. Moreover, not quite as a necessary consequence of this, there is a want of decided character. Stanley is much more a typical minor Caroline poet than he is Stanley, and so much must needs be said critically in these volumes on the type that it seems unnecessary to repeat it on an individual who gives that type with little idiosyncrasy, even while giving it in some abundance and with real charm. Only let it be added that we could not have a better foil to Cleveland, who, though unpolished, is always 'Manly, Sir, manly!' than this scholarly and graceful but somewhat epicene poet.
There are, however, some peculiarities about his work which made me slow to make up my mind about the fashion of presenting it. His translations are numerous: but this collection was not originally intended to include translations unless they were inextricably connected with issues of original work, or where, as in Godolphin's case, there was a special reason. Further, the translations, which are from a large number of authors, ancient and modern, sometimes include prose as well as verse. Thirdly, even the original poems were cross-issued in widely different arrangements. In short, the thing was rather a muddle, and though no one has occupied me in my various visits to the British Museum and the Bodleian during the past ten or twelve years oftener than Stanley, I postponed him from volume to volume. At last, and very recently a feasible plan suggested itself—to give the edition of 1651 as Brydges had done, this being after all the only one which at once represents revision and definite literary purpose, and to let the translations in this represent—as the poet seems himself to have selected them to do—his translating habits and studies. Before these I have printed the original poems of the first or 1647 edition, and after them the few which he seems to have allowed to be added to the set versions in Gamble's Airs and Dialogues ten years later. I think this will put Stanley on a fair level with the rest of our flock. Those who want his classical translations from Anacreon, Ausonius, the Idylls, and the Pervigilium, as well as from Johannes Secundus, will not have much difficulty in finding them; and I did not see my way to load this volume with Preti's Oronta, Montalvan's Aurora, &c. The bibliography of these things is rather complicated, and I do not pretend to have followed it out exhaustively. In fact this is certainly the case as far as my own collations of 1647, made at the British Museum, and those furnished me from the Bodleian copy are concerned.[1] But the differences are rarely of importance. 1647, a private issue, was reprinted in 1650 and 1651: while Gamble's Airs and Dialogues appeared in 1656 and was reissued with a fresh title-page in 1657. In the latter year Stanley furnished another composer—John Wilson, Professor of Music at Oxford—with the letterpress of Psalterium Carolinum, the King's devotions from the Eikon versified. His History of Philosophy appeared in 1655: his Aeschylus in 1663.
Some years ago (London, 1893) a beautiful illustrated edition of his Anacreon appeared, and more recently—but, as I have noted, after the announcement of this collection—a carefully arranged and collated edition of the original Lyrics with a few selected translations (Tutin, Hull, 1907), edited by Miss L. Imogen Guiney. I have not found Miss Guiney's work useless, and if I have occasionally had to question her emendations that is only a matter of course.
[1] I am informed by three subsequent collators more experienced in such work than myself—Mr. Percy Simpson, Mr. Thorn-Drury, and a Clarendon Press reader—that they have not found some differences which my own comparison-notes of some years ago seemed to show between the British Museum and the Bodleian copies of 1647. No doubt they are right. Some of the dates given above have also been corrected by them.