And it was a romance! and it served for history many a year![3] This tale of literary delusion may teach all future investigators into obscure points of history to probe them by dates.
It was long after the days of Walpole and Warton, and even of George Ellis, that it was discovered that these travels into Italy by Surrey had been transferred literally from an “Historical Romance.” A great wit, in Elizabeth’s reign, Tom Nash, sent forth in “the Life of Jack Wilton, an unfortunate traveller,” this whole legend of Surrey. The entire fiction of Nash annihilates itself by its extraordinary anachronisms.
In what respect Nash designed to palm the imposture of his “Historical Romance” on the world, may be left to be explained by some “Jack Wiltons” of our own. He says “all that in this phantastical treatise I can promise is some reasonable conveyance of history, and variety of mirth.” Must we trust to their conscience for “the reasonable conveyance?”
We now trace the whole progress of this literary delusion.
On Surrey’s ideal passion, and on this passage misconceived—
| From Tuscan came my lady’s worthy race; Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat— |
the romancer inferred that Geraldine must be a fair Florentine; Surrey had alluded to the fanciful genealogy of the Geralds from the Geraldi. On this single hint the romancer sends him on his aërial journey in this business of love and chivalry.
This romance, of which it is said only three copies are known, was published in 1594. Four years after, Drayton, looking about for subjects for his Ovidian epistles, eagerly seized on a legend so favourable for poetry, and Geraldine and Surrey supplied two amatory epistles. Anthony à Wood, finding himself without materials to frame a life of the poetic Surrey, had recourse to “the famous poet,” as he calls Drayton, whom he could quote; for Drayton was a consecrated bard for the antiquary, since Selden had commented on his great topographical poem. But honest Anthony on this occasion was not honest enough. He did not tell the world that he had fallen on the romance itself, Drayton’s sole authority. Literally and silently, our antiquary transcribed the fuller passages from a volume he was ashamed to notice, disingenuously dropping certain incidents which would not have honoured the memory of Surrey. Thus the “phantastical” history for ever blots the authentic tomes of the grave Athenæ Oxonienses. A single moment of scrutiny would have detected the whole fabricated narrative; but there is a charm in romance which bewitched our luckless Anthony.
Thus it happened that the romancer, on a misconception, constructs an imaginary fabric; the poet Drayton builds on the romancer; the sober antiquary on both; then the commentators stand upon the antiquary. Never was a house of cards of so many stories. The foundation, Surrey’s poetic passion, may be as fictitious as the rest; for the visionary Geraldine, viewed in Agrippa’s magic mirror was hardly a more mysterious shadow.