CAXTON’S DEVICE.
was but an episode—albeit the last—in the long and busy life of this active man; an experiment, doubtful at first, which presently became the serious business of a man advanced in years, his occupation at an age when most men think of ease and retirement. The name and fame and praise of Caxton have gone forth into all lands; but it is the fame of Caxton in old age, Caxton the printer, not Caxton in early life and in full manhood, Caxton of the Mercers’ Company, Caxton the Merchant Adventurer, Caxton the Rector of the English House. If you ask any person of ordinary acquirements who invented printing, he will probably tell you that it was Caxton. Yet the person of a little more than ordinary acquirements very well knows that Caxton was not the inventor at all. What he did was to bring over the art of printing from the Netherlands to this country. Not such a very great thing, perhaps; had he not done so someone else would; it was
SUPPOSED PORTRAIT OF CAXTON. FROM BLADES’ “PENTATEUCH OF PRINTING.”
only a matter of time; the invention was already beginning to leave its cradle; other men already understood that here was a thing belonging to the whole world—a thing bound to travel over the whole world. Caxton, however, did actually give it to us; he first brought it over here; he introduced the new invention into this country. That is his great glory; for that service he will never be forgotten; he has the honor that belongs to those who understand, and advance, and associate with their own lives and achievements, things invented by others who could not, perhaps, see their importance.
Perhaps everything that can be found out about Caxton has been already discovered. When we consider the antecedent improbability of learning anything at all about a merchant of the fifteenth century,—not a merchant of the wealthier kind, neither a Whittington nor a Gresham,—we may congratulate ourselves upon knowing a good deal about Caxton. To be sure, he gives us in his prefaces many valuable facts concerning himself. The learned Mr. William Blades has put together in his two books on Caxton all that he himself, or that others before him, had been able to discover. He has also added certain conjectures as to the most important step in Caxton’s life; I will speak of these conjectures presently. The result is a tolerably complete biography. We cannot fill up the life year after year, but in general terms we know how it was spent and what things were done in the allotted span. That the personality is shadowy—yet not more shadowy than that of Shakespeare—cannot be denied.
No one, however, can say, in these times of research, when the documents of the past are overhauled and made to yield their secrets, that any point of archæological investigation is finally closed, so that nothing more will be discovered about it. Somewhere or other are lying hidden documents, contracts, wills, conveyances, letters, reports, diaries—which may at any moment yield unexpected treasures to the finder. Let us remember how Peter Cunningham unearthed the accounts of the Revels and Masques among the papers of the Audit Office; how the debates of the House of Commons in the time of Cromwell were discovered; how Riley’s researches in the archives of London have actually restored the mediæval city in every detail of its multi-colored life; how the history of England has been already entirely rewritten during the last fifty years from newly discovered documents, and must in the next fifty years be again rewritten. Remembering these things, let us not conclude that concerning any man, king, statesman, churchman, citizen, the last word has been spoken, the last discovery made.
For my own part, I have to contribute only those little discoveries—some may call them theories—which always present themselves when another man from another point of view approaches a certain array of facts. That is to say, I have no new fact to announce, but I have one or two new conclusions to draw.
Let me endeavor, then, to present to you William Caxton as a reality, not a shadow; you shall see how and why he became, late in life, a printer; what he was and what was his reputation before he became a printer. And you shall see for yourselves what kind of book he produced, how he illustrated it, the kind of type he employed, and the binding of his books.