Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3

by Isaac Disraeli

Soft, bold, and free, your manuscripts still please. How justly bold in Snell’s improving hand The pen at once joins freedom with command! With softness strong, with ornaments not vain, Loose with proportion, and with neatness plain; Not swell’d, not full, complete in every part, And artful most, when not affecting art.

And these describe those pencilled knots and flourishes, “the angels, the men, the birds, and the beasts,” which, as one of them observed, he could

Command Even by the gentle motion of his hand,

all the speciosa miracula of caligraphy;

Thy tender strokes, inimitably fine, Crown with perfection every flowing line; And to each grand performance add a grace, As curling hair adorns a beauteous face: In every page new fancies give delight, And sporting round the margin charm the sight.

One Massey, a writing-master, published in 1763, “The Origin and Progress of Letters.” The great singularity of this volume is “a new species of biography never attempted before in English.” This consists of the lives of “English Penmen,” otherwise writing-masters! If some have foolishly enough imagined that the sedentary lives of authors are void of interest from deficient incident and interesting catastrophe, what must they think of the barren labours of those who, in the degree they become eminent, to use their own style, in the art of “dish, dash, long-tail fly,” the less they become interesting to the public; for what can the most skilful writing-master do but wear away his life in leaning over his pupil’s copy, or sometimes snatch a pen to decorate the margin, though he cannot compose the page? Montaigne has a very original notion on writing-masters: he says that some of those caligraphers who had obtained promotion by their excellence in the art, afterwards affected to write carelessly, lest their promotion should be suspected to have been owing to such an ordinary acquisition!

Massey is an enthusiast, fortunately for his subject. He considers that there are schools of writing, as well as of painting or sculpture; and expatiates with the eye of fraternal feeling on “a natural genius, a tender stroke, a grand performance, a bold striking freedom, and a liveliness in the sprigged letters, and pencilled knots and flourishes;” while this Vasari of writing-masters relates the controversies and the libels of many a rival pen-nibber. “George Shelley, one of the most celebrated worthies who have made a shining figure in the commonwealth of English caligraphy, born I suppose of obscure parents, because brought up in Christ’s Hospital, yet under the humble blue-coat he laid the foundation of his caligraphic excellence and lasting fame, for he was elected writing-master to the hospital.” Shelley published his “Natural Writing;” but, alas! Snell, another blue-coat, transcended the other. He was a genius who would “bear no brother near the throne.”—“I have been informed that there were jealous heart-burnings, if not bickerings, between him and Col. Ayres, another of our great reformers in the writing commonweal, both eminent men, yet, like our most celebrated poets Pope and Addison, or, to carry the comparison still higher, like Cæsar and Pompey, one could bear no superior, and the other no equal.” Indeed, the great Snell practised a little stratagem against Mr. Shelley, for which, if writing-masters held courts-martial, this hero ought to have appeared before his brothers. In one of his works he procured a number of friends to write letters, in which Massey confesses “are some satyrical strokes upon Shelley,” as if he had arrogated too much to himself in his book of “Natural Writing.” They find great fault with pencilled knots and sprigged letters. Shelley, who was an advocate for ornaments in fine penmanship, which Snell utterly rejected, had parodied a well-known line of Herbert’s in favour of his favourite decorations:—

A Knot may take him who from letters flies, And turn delight into an exercise.

These reflections created ill-blood, and even an open difference amongst several of the superior artists in writing. The commanding genius of Snell had a more terrific contest when he published his “Standard Rules,” pretending to have demonstrated them as Euclid would. “This proved a bone of contention, and occasioned a terrific quarrel between Mr. Snell and Mr. Clark. This quarrel about ‘Standard Rules’ ran so high between them, that they could scarce forbear scurrilous language therein, and a treatment of each other unbecoming gentlemen! Both sides in this dispute had their abettors; and to say which had the most truth and reason, non nostrum est tantas componere lites; perhaps both parties might be too fond of their own schemes. They should have left them to people to choose which they liked best.” A candid politician is our Massey, and a philosophical historian too; for he winds up the whole story of this civil war by describing its result, which happened as all such great controversies have ever closed. “Who now-a-days takes those Standard Rules, either one or the other, for their guide in writing?” This is the finest lesson ever offered to the furious heads of parties, and to all their men; let them meditate on the nothingness of their “Standard Rules,” by the fate of Mr. Snell.