From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

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 There are lines in them and whole passages in the unpublished Centuries of Meditations which almost set one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable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 starvèd 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."