The end of the eighteenth century, which had been puzzled or diverted by the Chatterton and Macpherson frauds, witnessed also the great and famous Shakespearian forgeries. We shall never know the exact truth about the fabrication of the Shakespearian documents, and ‘Vortigern’ and the other plays. We have, indeed, the confession of the culprit: habemus confitentem reum, but Mr. W. H. Ireland was a liar and a solicitor’s clerk, so versatile and accomplished that we cannot always trust him, even when he is narrating the tale of his own iniquities. The temporary but wide and turbulent success of the Ireland forgeries suggests the disagreeable reflection that criticism and learning are (or a hundred years ago were) worth very little as literary touchstones. A polished and learned society, a society devoted to Shakespeare and to the stage, was taken in by a boy of eighteen. Young Ireland not only palmed off his sham prose documents, most makeshift imitations of the antique, but even his ridiculous verses on the experts. James Boswell went down on his knees and thanked Heaven for the sight of them, and, feeling thirsty after these devotions, drank hot brandy and water. Dr. Parr was not less readily gulled, and probably the experts, like Malone, who held aloof, were as much influenced by jealousy as by science. The whole story of young Ireland’s forgeries is not only too long to be told here, but forms the topic of a novel (‘The Talk of the Town’) by Mr. James Payn. The frauds in his hands lose neither their humour nor their complicated interest of plot. To be brief, then, Mr. Samuel Ireland was a gentleman extremely fond of old literature and old books. If we may trust the ‘Confessions’ (1805) of his candid son, Mr. W. H. Ireland, a more harmless and confiding old person than Samuel never collected early English tracts. Living in his learned society, his son, Mr. W. H. Ireland, acquired not only a passion for black letters, but a desire to emulate Chatterton. His first step in guilt was the forgery of an autograph on an old pamphlet, with which he gratified Samuel Ireland. He also wrote a sham inscription on a modern bust of Cromwell, which he represented as an authentic antique. Finding that the critics were taken in, and attributed this new bust to the old sculptor Simeon, Ireland conceived a very low and not unjustifiable opinion of critical tact. Critics would find merit in anything which seemed old enough. Ireland’s next achievement was the forgery of some legal documents concerning Shakespeare. Just as the bad man who deceived the guileless Mr. Shapira forged his ‘Deuteronomy’ on the blank spaces of old synagogue rolls, so young Ireland used the cut-off ends of old rent rolls. He next bought up quantities of old fly-leaves of books, and on this ancient paper he indicted a sham confession of faith, which he attributed to Shakespeare. Being a strong “evangelical,” young Mr. Ireland gave a very Protestant complexion to this edifying document. And still the critics gaped and wondered and believed.
Ireland’s method was to write in an ink made by blending various liquids used in the marbling of paper for bookbinding. This stuff was supplied to him by a bookbinder’s apprentice. When people asked questions as to whence all the new Shakespeare manuscripts came, he said they were presented to him by a gentleman who wished to remain anonymous. Finally, the impossibility of producing this gentleman was one of the causes of the detection of the fraud. According to himself, Ireland performed prodigies of acuteness. Once he had forged, at random, the name of a contemporary of Shakespeare. He was confronted with a genuine signature, which, of course, was quite different. He obtained leave to consult his “anonymous gentleman,” rushed home, forged the name again on the model of what had been shown to him, and returned with this signature as a new gift from his benefactor. That nameless friend had informed him (he swore) that there were two persons of the same name, and that both signatures were genuine. Ireland’s impudence went the length of introducing an ancestor of his own, with the same name as himself, among the companions of Shakespeare. If ‘Vortigern’ had succeeded (and it was actually put on the stage with all possible pomp), Ireland meant to have produced a series of pseudo-Shakespearian plays from William the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth. When busy with ‘Vortigern,’ he was detected by a friend of his own age, who pounced on him while he was at work, as Lasus pounced on Onomacritus. The discoverer, however, consented to “stand in” with Ireland, and did not divulge his secret. At last, after the fiasco of ‘Vortigern,’ suspicion waxed so strong, and disagreeable inquiries for the anonymous benefactor were so numerous, that Ireland fled from his father’s house. He confessed all, and, according to his own account, fell under the undying wrath of Samuel Ireland. Any reader of Ireland’s confessions will be likely to sympathise with old Samuel as the dupe of his son. The whole story is told with a curious mixture of impudence and humour, and with great plausibility. Young Ireland admits that his “desire for laughter” was almost irresistible, when people—learned, pompous, sagacious people—listened attentively to the papers. One feels half inclined to forgive the rogue for the sake of his youth, his cleverness, his humour. But the ‘Confessions’ are, not improbably, almost as apocryphal as the original documents. They were written for the sake of money, and it is impossible to say how far the same mercenary motive actuated Ireland in his forgeries. Dr. Ingleby, in his ‘Shakespeare Fabrications,’ takes a very rigid view of the conduct, not only of William, but of old Samuel Ireland. Sam, according to Dr. Ingleby, was a partner in the whole imposture, and the confession was only one element in the scheme of fraud. Old Samuel was the Fagin of a band of young literary Dodgers. He “positively trained his whole family to trade in forgery,” and as for Mr. W. H. Ireland, he was “the most accomplished liar that ever lived,” which is certainly a distinction in its way. The point of the joke is that, after the whole conspiracy exploded, people were anxious to buy examples of the forgeries. Mr. W. H. Ireland was equal to the occasion. He actually forged his own, or (according to Dr. Ingleby) his father’s forgeries, and, by thus increasing the supply, he deluged the market with sham shams, with imitations of imitations. If this accusation be correct, it is impossible not to admire the colossal impudence of Mr. W. H. Ireland. Dr. Ingleby, in the ardour of his honest indignation, pursues William into his private life, which, it appears, was far from exemplary. But literary criticism should be content with a man’s works; his domestic life is matter, as Aristotle often says, “for a separate kind of investigation.” Old Ritson used to say that “every literary impostor deserved hanging as much as a common thief.” W. H. Ireland’s merits were never recognised by the law.
How old Ritson would have punished “the old corrector,” it is “better only guessing,” as the wicked say, according to Clough, in regard to their own possible chastisement. The difficulty is to ascertain who the apocryphal old corrector really was. The story of his misdeeds was recently brought back to mind by the death, at an advanced age, of the learned Shakespearian, Mr. J. Payne Collier. Mr. Collier was, to put it mildly, the Shapira of the old corrector. He brought that artist’s works before the public; but why? how deceived, or how influenced, it is once more “better only guessing.” Mr. Collier first introduced to the public notice his singular copy of a folio Shakespeare (second edition), loaded with ancient manuscript emendations, in 1849. His account of this book was simple and plausible. He chanced, one day, to be in the shop of Mr. Rudd, the bookseller, in Great Newport Street, when a parcel of second-hand volumes arrived from the country. When the parcel was opened, the heart of the Bibliophile began to sing, for the packet contained two old folios, one of them an old folio Shakespeare of the second edition (1632). The volume (mark this) was “much cropped,” greasy, and imperfect. Now the student of Mr. Hamilton’s ‘Inquiry’ into the whole affair is already puzzled. In later days, Mr. Collier said that his folio had previously been in the possession of a Mr. Parry. On the other hand, Mr. Parry (then a very aged man) failed to recognise his folio in Mr. Collier’s, for his copy was “cropped,” whereas the leaves of Mr. Collier’s example were not mutilated. Here, then (‘Inquiry,’ pp. 12, 61), we have two descriptions of the outward aspect of Mr. Collier’s dubious treasure. In one account it is “much cropped” by the book-binder’s cruel shears; in the other, its unmutilated condition is contrasted with that of a copy which has been “cropped.” In any case, Mr. Collier hoped, he says, to complete an imperfect folio he possessed, with leaves taken from the folio newly acquired for thirty shillings. But the volumes happened to have the same defects, and the healing process was impossible. Mr. Collier chanced to be going into the country, when in packing the folio he had bought of Rudd he saw it was covered with manuscript corrections in an old hand. These he was inclined to attribute to one Thomas Perkins, whose name was written on the fly-leaf, and who might have been a connection of Richard Perkins, the actor (flor. 1633) The notes contained many various readings, and very numerous changes in punctuation. Some of these Mr. Collier published in his ‘Notes and Emendations’ (1852), and in an edition of the ‘Plays.’ There was much discussion, much doubt, and the folio of the old corrector (who was presumed to have marked the book in the theatre during early performances) was exhibited to the Society of Antiquaries. Then Mr. Collier presented the treasure to the Duke of Devonshire, who again lent it for examination to the British Museum. Mr. Hamilton published in the Times (July, 1859) the results of his examination of the old corrector. It turned out that the old corrector was a modern myth. He had first made his corrections in pencil and in a modern hand, and then he had copied them over in ink, and in a forged ancient hand. The same word sometimes recurred in both handwritings. The ink, which looked old, was really no English ink at all, not even Ireland’s mixture. It seemed to be sepia, sometimes mixed with a little Indian ink. Mr. Hamilton made many other sad discoveries. He pointed out that Mr. Collier had published, from a Dulwich MS., a letter of Mrs. Alleyne’s (the actor’s wife), referring to Shakespeare as “Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe.” Now the Dulwich MS. was mutilated and blank in the very place where this interesting reference should have occurred. Such is a skeleton history of the old corrector, his works and ways. It is probable that—thanks to his assiduities—new Shakespearian documents will in future be received with extreme scepticism; and this is all the fruit, except acres of newspaper correspondence, which the world has derived from Mr. Collier’s greasy and imperfect but unique “corrected folio.”
The recency and (to a Shakespearian critic) the importance of these forgeries obscures the humble merit of Surtees, with his ballads of the ‘Slaying of Antony Featherstonhaugh,’ and of ‘Bartram’s Dirge.’ Surtees left clever lacunæ in these songs, ‘collected from oral tradition,’ and furnished notes so learned that they took in Sir Walter Scott. There are moments when I half suspect “the Shirra himsel” (who blamelessly forged so many extracts from ‘Old Plays’) of having composed ‘Kinmont Willie.’ To compare old Scott of Satchell’s account of Kinmont Willie with the ballad is to feel uncomfortable doubts. But this is a rank impiety. The last ballad forgery of much note was the set of sham Macedonian epics and popular songs (all about Alexander the Great, and other heroes) which a schoolmaster in the Rhodope imposed on M. Verkovitch. The trick was not badly done, and the imitation of “ballad slang” was excellent. The ‘Oera Linda’ book, too, was successful enough to be translated into English. With this latest effort of the tenth muse, the crafty muse of Literary Forgery, we may leave a topic which could not be exhausted in a ponderous volume. We have not room even for the forged letters of Shelley, to which Mr. Browning, being taken in thereby, wrote a preface, nor for the forged letters of Mr. Ruskin, which occasionally hoax all the newspapers.
BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCE.
The love of books for their own sake, for their paper, print, binding, and for their associations, as distinct from the love of literature, is a stronger and more universal passion in France than elsewhere in Europe. In England publishers are men of business; in France they aspire to be artists. In England people borrow what they read from the libraries, and take what gaudy cloth-binding chance chooses to send them. In France people buy books, and bind them to their heart’s desire with quaint and dainty devices on the morocco covers. Books are lifelong friends in that country; in England they are the guests of a week or of a fortnight. The greatest French writers have been collectors of curious editions; they have devoted whole treatises to the love of books. The literature and history of France are full of anecdotes of the good and bad fortunes of bibliophiles, of their bargains, discoveries, disappointments. There lies before us at this moment a small library of books about books,—the ‘Bibliophile Français,’ in seven large volumes, ‘Les Sonnets d’un Bibliophile,’ ‘La Bibliomanie en 1878,’ ‘La Bibliothèque d’un Bibliophile’ (1885) and a dozen other works of Janin, Nodier, Beraldi, Pieters, Didot, great collectors who have written for the instruction of beginners and the pleasure of every one who takes delight in printed paper.
The passion for books, like other forms of desire, has its changes of fashion. It is not always easy to justify the caprices of taste. The presence or absence of half an inch of paper in the “uncut” margin of a book makes a difference of value that ranges from five shillings to a hundred pounds. Some books are run after because they are beautifully bound; some are competed for with equal eagerness because they never have been bound at all. The uninitiated often make absurd mistakes about these distinctions. Some time ago the Daily Telegraph reproached a collector because his books were “uncut,” whence, argued the journalist, it was clear that he had never read them. “Uncut,” of course, only means that the margins have not been curtailed by the binders’ plough. It is a point of sentiment to like books just as they left the hands of the old printers,—of Estienne, Aldus, or Louis Elzevir.
It is because the passion for books is a sentimental passion that people who have not felt it always fail to understand it. Sentiment is not an easy thing to explain. Englishmen especially find it impossible to understand tastes and emotions that are not their own,—the wrongs of Ireland, (till quite recently) the aspirations of Eastern Roumelia, the demands of Greece. If we are to understand the book-hunter, we must never forget that to him books are, in the first place, relics. He likes to think that the great writers whom he admires handled just such pages and saw such an arrangement of type as he now beholds. Molière, for example, corrected the proofs for this edition of the ‘Précieuses Ridicules,’ when he first discovered “what a labour it is to publish a book, and how green (neuf) an author is the first time they print him.” Or it may be that Campanella turned over, with hands unstrung, and still broken by the torture, these leaves that contain his passionate sonnets. Here again is the copy of Theocritus from which some pretty page may have read aloud to charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X. This Gargantua is the counterpart of that which the martyred Dolet printed for (or pirated from, alas!) Maître François Rabelais. This woeful ballade, with the woodcut of three thieves hanging from one gallows, came near being the “Last Dying Speech and Confession of François Villon.” This shabby copy of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is precisely like that which Shelley doubled up and thrust into his pocket when the prow of the piratical felucca crashed into the timbers of the Don Juan. Some rare books have these associations, and they bring you nearer to the authors than do the modern reprints. Bibliophiles will tell you that it is the early readings they care for,—the author’s first fancies, and those more hurried expressions which he afterwards corrected. These readings have their literary value, especially in the masterpieces of the great; but the sentiment after all is the main thing.
Other books come to be relics in another way. They are the copies which belonged to illustrious people,—to the famous collectors who make a kind of catena (a golden chain of bibliophiles) through the centuries since printing was invented. There are Grolier (1479–1565),—not a bookbinder, as an English newspaper supposed (probably when Mr. Sala was on his travels),—De Thou (1553–1617), the great Colbert, the Duc de la Vallière (1708–1780), Charles Nodier, a man of yesterday, M. Didot, and the rest, too numerous to name. Again, there are the books of kings, like Francis I., Henri III., and Louis XIV. These princes had their favourite devices. Nicolas Eve, Padeloup, Derome, and other artists arrayed their books in morocco,—tooled with skulls, cross-bones, and crucifixions for the voluptuous pietist Henri III., with the salamander for Francis I., and powdered with fleurs de lys for the monarch who “was the State.” There are relics also of noble beauties. The volumes of Marguerite d’Angoulême are covered with golden daisies. The cipher of Marie Antoinette adorns too many books that Madame du Barry might have welcomed to her hastily improvised library. The three daughters of Louis XV. had their favourite colours of morocco, citron, red, and olive, and their books are valued as much as if they bore the bees of De Thou, or the intertwined C’s of the illustrious and ridiculous Abbé Cotin, the Trissotin of the comedy. Surely in all these things there is a human interest, and our fingers are faintly thrilled, as we touch these books, with the far-off contact of the hands of kings and cardinals, scholars and coquettes, pedants, poets, and précieuses, the people who are unforgotten in the mob that inhabited dead centuries.
So universal and ardent has the love of magnificent books been in France, that it would be possible to write a kind of bibliomaniac history of that country. All her rulers, kings, cardinals, and ladies have had time to spare for collecting. Without going too far back, to the time when Bertha span and Charlemagne was an amateur, we may give a few specimens of an anecdotical history of French bibliolatry, beginning, as is courteous, with a lady. “Can a woman be a bibliophile?” is a question which was once discussed at the weekly breakfast party of Guilbert de Pixérécourt, the famous book-lover and playwright, the “Corneille of the Boulevards.” The controversy glided into a discussion as to “how many books a man can love at a time;” but historical examples prove that French women (and Italian, witness the Princess d’Este) may be bibliophiles of the true strain. Diane de Poictiers was their illustrious patroness. The mistress of Henri II. possessed, in the Château d’Anet, a library of the first triumphs of typography. Her taste was wide in range, including songs, plays, romances, divinity; her copies of the Fathers were bound in citron morocco, stamped with her arms and devices, and closed with clasps of silver. In the love of books, as in everything else, Diane and Henri II. were inseparable. The interlaced H and D are scattered over the covers of their volumes; the lily of France is twined round the crescents of Diane, or round the quiver, the arrows, and the bow which she adopted as her cognisance, in honour of the maiden goddess. The books of Henri and of Diane remained in the Château d’Anet till the death of the Princesse de Condé in 1723, when they were dispersed. The son of the famous Madame de Guyon bought the greater part of the library, which has since been scattered again and again. M. Léopold Double, a well-known bibliophile, possessed several examples. [94]