Time brings to obscure authors[30] an odd kind of reparation, an immortality, not of love and interest and admiration, but of curiosity merely. In proportion as their language was uncouth, provincial, or even barbarous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pastry-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, and its name shall accordingly live forever in a note. Is not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none? And if literary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Brunetto Latini’s made him insensible for a moment to the rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors of such books as are not properly literature may still comfort themselves with a non omnis moriar, laying a mournful emphasis on the adjective, and feeling that they have not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo a fragmentary continuance on earth. To be sure, the immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to the famous men they help to illustrate. If they escape oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they survive only in fine print at the page’s foot. At the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all, perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous is to be utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a kind of definite result by living. To hang on the perilous edge of immortality by the nails, liable at any moment to drop into the fathomless ooze of oblivion, is at best a questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the merest barnacles that have attached themselves to the stately keels of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton have an interest of their own by letting us know in what remote waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. Has not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare’s “dusty death” to Anthony Copley, and Milton’s “back resounded Death!” to Abraham Fraunce? Nay, is it not Bernard de Ventadour’s lark that sings forever in the diviner air of Dante’s Paradise?
“Quan vey laudeta mover
De joi sas alas contra’l rai,
Que s’oblida e s laissa cazer
Per la doussor qu ’al cor li ’n vai.”
“Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia,
Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
Dell’ ultima dolcezza che la sazia.”
We are not sure that Bernard’s “Que s’oblida es laissa cazer” is not sweeter than Dante’s “tace contenta,” but it was plainly the doussor that gave its cue to the greater poet’s memory, and he has improved on it with that exquisite ultima, as his master Virgil sometimes did on Homer.
But authors whose interest for us is mainly bibliographic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Allibone’s. As literature they are oppressive; as items of literary history they find their place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of the Books. There our hearts are touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability! How many a controversialist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone brevity of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity,—and then read “Smith J. [ohn?] 1713-1784 (?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to. See Lowndes.” The time of his own death less certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom a name was valuable in proportion as it was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your title-page read after it has rounded the corner of its first century, and to enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the Libro d’oro of the onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who exist only in name. Parson Adams would be here had he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr. Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on monogamy. Papyrorcetes junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the name of his respectable progenitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least, if of nothing better, and are sons though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the waxen imagines of the Roman patriciate, for those must have been inconvenient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus himself might soften in the dog-days) and not readily salable unless to some novus homo willing to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in genealogy are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to the world at large, he must not less be Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Guérard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply because of their illegibility, so there is another class driven by a like irresistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these have even a philologic value for us depends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them by the editor.
For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out of which something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our literature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent industry. It would not be easy to name any work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so exactly the meaning with which words were used during the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholar ship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor than downright ignorance. This language is strong because it is true, though we should not have felt called upon to use it but for the vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly to the labors of his predecessors,—to such men as Ritson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Madden, his superiors in everything that goes to the making of a good editor. Most of them are now dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for us to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled wilderness of our early literature. A modern editor, with his ready-made helps of glossary, annotation, and comment, should think rather of the difficulties than the defects of these pioneers.
How different is Mr. Hazlitt’s spirit from that of the thorough and therefore modest scholar! In the Preface to his Altenglische Sprachproben, Mätzner says of an editor, das Beste was er ist verdankt er Andern, an accidental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out of Nathan der Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting some friend to translate for him the whole paragraph in which it occurs.
We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superintend a new edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry, and are pained to think of the treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. He tells us that “in an artistic and constructive point of view, the Mylner of Abington is superior to its predecessor,” that predecessor being Chaucer’s Reve’s Tale, which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the Miller! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a late edition of the most graceful of our lyric poets. Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right word, for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads carefully the very documents he prints. For example, in the Biographical Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says (p. xvii): “Mr. W. Perry Herrick has plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir William to his nephew were simply on account of the fortune which belonged to Robert in right of his father, and which his uncle held in trust; this was about £400; and I think from allusions in the letters printed elsewhere that this view may be the correct one.” May be! The poet says expressly, “I entreat you out of my little possession to deliver to this bearer the customarye £10, without which I cannot meate [?] my ioyrney.” The words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr. Hazlitt’s wise-looking query after “meate” is conclusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he never hear of the familiar phrase “to meet the expense”? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must be the condition of his mind in face of the more than Protean travesties which words underwent before they were uniformed by Johnson and Walker? Mr. Hazlitt’s mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own fog. In another of Herrick’s letters we find, “For what her monie can be effected (sic) when there is diuision ’twixt the hart and hand?” “Her monie” of course means harmonie, and effected is therefore right. What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his “(sic)” it were idle to inquire.
We have already had occasion to examine some of Mr. Hazlitt’s work, and we are sorry to say that in the four volumes before us we find no reason for changing our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never, we might say, with lights of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where none was before, and the peculiar bumptiousness of his incapacity makes it particularly offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of what we assert, our only embarrassment being in the superabundance of our material. In the Introduction to the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt speaks of “the utter want of common care on the part of previous editors of our old poetry.” Such oversights as he has remarked upon in his notes are commonly errors of the press, a point on which Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, should have been charitable, for his own volumes are full of them. We call his attention to one such which is rather amusing. In his “additional notes” we find “line 77, wylle. Strike out the note upon this word; but the explanation is correct. Be wroght was a misprint, however, for he wroght.” The error occurs in a citation of three lines in which lother is still left for tother. The original note affords us so good an example of Mr. Hazlitt’s style of editing as to be worth preserving. In the “Kyng and the Hermit” we read,—
“He ne wyst w[h]ere that he was
Ne out of the forest for to passe,
And thus he rode all wylle.”