Thus it has happened that obscure traditions envelope the origin of some of the most interesting inventions. Had these ingenious discoveries been as simple and as positive as their historians oppositely maintain, these origins had not admitted of such interminable disputes. We may therefore reasonably suspect that the practitioners in every art which has reached to almost a perfect state, such as that of printing, have silently borrowed from one another; that there has often existed a secret connexion in things, and a reciprocal observation in the intercourse of men alike intent on the same object; that countries have insensibly transferred a portion of their knowledge to their neighbours; that travellers in every era have imparted their novelties, hints however crude, descriptions however imperfect; all such slight notices escape the detection of an historian; nothing can reach him but the excellence of some successful artist. In vain rival concurrents dispute the invention; the patriotic historian of the art clings to his people or his city, to fix the inventor and the invention, and promulgates fairy tales to authenticate the most uncertain evidence.[6]
The history of printing illustrates this view of its origin. The invention has been long ascribed to Gutenberg, yet some have made it doubtful whether this presumed father of the art ever succeeded in printing a book, for we are assured that no colophon has revealed his name. We hear of his attempts and of his disappointments, his bickerings and his lawsuits. He seems to have been a speculative bungler in a new-found art, which he mysteriously hinted was to make a man’s fortune. The goldsmith, Fust, advanced a capital in search of the novel alchymy—the project ends in a lawsuit, the goldsmith gains his cause, and the projector is discharged. Gutenberg lures another simple soul, and the same golden dream vanishes in the dreaming. These copartners, evidently tired of an art which had not yet found an artist, a young man, probably improving on Gutenberg’s blunders, one happy day displayed to the eyes of his master, Fust, a proof pulled from his own press. In rapture, the master confers on this Peter Schœffer a share of his future fortunes; and to bind the apprentice by the safest ties of consanguinity, led the swart youth, glorious with printer’s ink, to the fair hand of his young daughter. The new partnership produced their famed Psalter of 1457; and shortly followed their magnificent Bible.
While these events were occurring, Costar, of Haarlem, was plodding on with the same “noble mystery,” but only printing on one side of a leaf, not having yet discovered that a leaf might be contrived to contain two pages. The partisans of Costar assert that it was proved he substituted moveable for fixed letters, which was a giant’s footstep in this new path. A faithless servant ran off with the secret. The history of printing abounds with such tales. Every step in the progress of the newly-invented art indicates its gradual accessions. The numbering of the pages was not thought of for a considerable time; the leaves were long only distinguished by letters or signatures—a custom still preserved, though apparently superfluous.
There is something attractive for rational curiosity in the earliest beginnings of every art; every slight improvement, even though trivial, has its motive, and supplies some want. On this principle the history of punctuation enters into the history of literature. Caxton had the merit of introducing the Roman pointing as used in Italy; and his successor, Pynson, triumphed by domiciliating the Roman letter. The dash, or perpendicular line, thus, | was the only punctuation they used. It was, however, discovered that “the craft of poynting well used makes the sentence very light.” The more elegant comma supplanted the long uncouth |; the colon was a refinement, “showing that there is more to come.” But the semicolon was a Latin delicacy which the obtuse English typographer resisted. So late as 1580 and 1590 treatises on orthography do not recognise any such innovator; the Bible of 1592, though printed with appropriate accuracy, is without a semicolon; but in 1633 its full rights are established by Charles Butler’s “English Grammar.” In this chronology of the four points of punctuation it is evident that Shakspeare could never have used the semicolon—a circumstance which the profound George Chalmers mourns over, opining that semicolons would often have saved the poet from his commentators.
Fust had bound his workmen to secrecy by the solemnity of an oath; but at the siege of Mentz that freemasonry was lost. These early printers dispersed, some were even bribed away. Two Germans set up their press in the monastery of Subiaco, in the vicinity of Naples, whose confraternity consisted of German monks. These very printers finally retreated to Rome for that patronage they had still to seek; and at Rome they improved the art by adopting the Roman character. Not only the invention of the art was progressive, but the art itself was much more so.
We have other narratives of printers romantically spirited away from the parent-presses; one of the most extraordinary is the history of printing set up at Oxford, ten years before the art was practised in Europe, except at Haarlem and Mentz. Henry VI., by advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, despatched a confidential agent in disguise, under the guidance of Caxton, in his trading journeys to Flanders. The Haarlemites were so jealous of idling strangers who had come on the same insidious design, that foreigners had frequently been imprisoned.
The royal agent never ventured to enter the city, but by heavy bribes in a secret intercourse with the workmen, one dark night he smuggled a printer aboard a vessel, and carried away Frederick Corsellis. That printer, on landing in England, was attended by a guard to Oxford. There he was constantly watched till he had revealed the mysterious craft. The evidence of this unheard-of history hinged on a record at Lambeth-palace authenticating the whole narrative, and on a monument of Corsellis’s art, which any one might inspect at the Bodleian, being a book bearing a date six years prior to any printing by Caxton. The record at Lambeth, however, was never found, and never heard of, and the date of the book might have been accidentally or designedly falsified. An x dropped in the date of the impression would account for the singularity of a book printed before our Caxton had acquired the art. The tale long excited a sharp controversy, when Corsellis at Oxford was considered as the first printer in England. The possibility of the existence of this person at Oxford, and even of the book he printed, appears by a lively investigation of Dr. Cotton;[7] and I have been assured of a circumstance which, if true, would render the story of Corsellis probable; it is that a family of this name may still be found in Oxfordshire. The whole history has, however, by some been considered as supposititious, standing on the single evidence of a Sir Richard Atkyns, a servile lawyer and royalist of no great character in the days of Charles the Second.[8] Grafting his tale on the accident of the date of this book, he had a covert design—to maintain a theory or a right that printing was “a flower of the crown,” constituting the sovereign the printer of England! all others being his servants. This enormous prevention of the abuses of the press was not deemed too extravagant for those desperate times.
The only certainty in the history of printing, after all the fables of its origin, is its native place. It is a German romance enlivened by some mysterious adventures, wanting only the opening pages, which no one can supply.[9] Even the most philosophic of bibliographers, Daunou, utters a cry of despair, and moreover, at this late day, seems at a loss to decide on the nature of the influence of the art of printing! “We live too near the epoch of the discovery of printing to judge accurately of its influence, and too far from it to know the circumstances which gave birth to it.” Our sage seems to think that another cycle of at least a thousand years must pass away ere we can decide on the real influence of printing over the destinies of man: this new tree of knowledge bears other fruit than that of its own sweetness, source of good and evil, of sense and of nonsense! whence we pluck the windy fruitage of opinions, crude and changeable!
How has it happened that such a plain story as that of the art of printing should have sunk into a romance? Solely because the monopolisers dreaded discovery. It originated in deception, and could only flourish for their commercial spirit in mysterious obscurity. Among the first artisans of printing every one sought to hide his work, and even to blind the workmen. After their operations, they cautiously unscrewed the four sides of their forms, and threw the scattered type beneath, for, as one craftily observed to his partner, “When the component parts of the press are in pieces, no one will understand what they mean.” One of the early printers of the fifteenth century at Mutina, or Modena, professes his press to have been in ædibus subterraneis—doubtless, if possible, still further to darken the occult mystery. They delivered themselves in a mystical style when they alluded to their unnamed art, and impressed on the marvelling reader that the volume he held in his hand was the work of some supernatural agency. They announced that the volumes in this newly-found art were “neither drawn, nor written with a pen and ink, as all books before had been.” In the “Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye,” our honest printer, plain Caxton, caught the hyperbolical style of the dark monopolising spirit of the confraternity. I give his words, having first spelt them. “I have practised and learned at my great charge, and dispense to ordain (put in order) this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them AT ONCE; for all the books of this story, thus imprinted as ye see, were begun in one day, and also finished in one day.” A volume of more than seven hundred folio pages, “begun and finished in one day,” was not the less marvellous for being impossible. But for the times was the style! Caxton would keep up the wonder and the mystery of an art which men did not yet comprehend; and because a whole sheet might have been printed in one day, and was all at once pulled off, and not line by line, our venerable printer mystified the world. And all this was said at a time when so slow was the process of transcription, that one hundred Bibles could not be procured under the expense of seven thousand days, or of nearly twenty years’ labour. Honest men, too eager in their zeal, particularly when their personal interests are at stake, sometimes strain truth on the tenter-hooks of fiction. The false miracle which our primeval printer professed he had performed we seem to have realized: it is amusing to conceive the wonderment of Caxton, were he now among us, to view the steam working that cylindrical machine which disperses the words of a speaker throughout the whole nation, when the voice which uttered them is still lingering on our ear!