Amenities of Literature Part 18

[12] A single trait, however, has come down to us from that other scholar of Chaucer, whom we are next to follow. Lydgate a.s.sures us, from what he heard, that the great poet would not suffer petty criticisms "to perturb his reste." He did not like to groan over, and "pinch at every blot," but always "did his best."--

My master Chaucer that founde ful many spot, Hym lyste not gruche, nor pynch at every blot; Nor move himself to perturb his reste; I have perde tolde, but seyd alway his beste.

LYDGATE's "Troy."

LYDGATE; THE MONK OF BURY.

LYDGATE, the monk of Bury, was also the scholar of Chaucer: our monk had not pa.s.sed a whole sequestered life in his Benedictine monastery; he had journeyed through France and Italy, and was familiar with the writings of Dante, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and of Alain Chartier. The delectable catalogue of his writings, great and small, exceeds two hundred and fifty, and may not yet be complete, for they lie scattered in their ma.n.u.script state. A great mult.i.tude of writings, the incessant movements of a single mind, will at first convey to us a sense of magnitude; and in this magnitude, if we observe the greatest possible diversity of parts, and, if we may use the term, the flashings of the most changeable contrasts, we must place such a universal talent among the phenomena of literature.

LYDGATE composed epics, which were the lasting favourites of two whole centuries--so long were cla.s.sical repet.i.tions of "Troy" and of "Thebes"

not found irksome.[1] In his graver hours he instructed the world by ethical descants, aesopian fables, and quaint proverbs; fixed their wonder by saintly legends and veracious chronicles; and disported in amorous ditties, and many a merrie tale: translating or inventing, labour or levity, rounded the unconscious day of the versifying monk. We descend from the "Siege of Troy," a romance of nearly thirty thousand lines, which long graced the oriel window, to the freer vein of humour of "London Lick-penny," which opens the street scenery of London in the fourteenth century, and "The Prioresse and her Three Wooers," that exquisitely ludicrous narrative ballad for the people.[2]

Ritson, whose rabid hostility to the clerical character was part of his const.i.tutional malady, whether it related to "a mendacious prelate" or "a stinking monk," after having expended twenty pages in the mere enumeration of the t.i.tles of Lydgate's writings, heartlessly hints at the "cart-loads of rubbish of a voluminous poetaster; a prosaic and drivelling monk." And this is greedily seized on by the hand of the bibliographer. Percy and Ellis, too, mention DAN LYDGATE with contempt.

Critics often find it convenient to resemble dogs, by barking one after the other, without any other cause than the first bark of a brother, who had only bayed the moon. It now seemed concluded that the rhyming monk was to be dismissed for ever. A very credible witness, however, at last deposed that "Lydgate has been oftener abused than read."[3] And now Mr.

Hallam tells us that "GRAY, no light authority, speaks more favourably of Lydgate than either Warton or Ellis;" and this nervous writer, with his accustomed correct discernment, has alleged a valid reason why Gray excelled them in this criticism; for "great poets have often the taste to discern, and the candour to acknowledge, those beauties which are latent amidst the tedious dulness of their humbler brethren."

Warton has, however, afforded three copious chapters on Lydgate, which are half as much as his enthusiasm bestowed on Chaucer. A Gothic monk, composing ancient romances, was a subject too congenial to have been neglected by the historian of our poetry, and he has limned and illuminated the feudal priest with the love of the votary, who deemed, in his "lone-hours,"

Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways Of h.o.a.r Antiquity, but strown with flowers.

His miniature is exquisitely touched. "He was not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. If a _disguising_ was intended by the company of goldsmiths, a _mask_ before his majesty, a _may-game_ for the sheriffs and aldermen of London, a _mumming_ before the lord-mayor, a procession of _pageants_ for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a _carol_ for the coronation, Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry."[4]

Mr. HALLAM objects that "the attention fails in the school-boy stories of Thebes and Troy; but it seems probable that Lydgate would have been a better poet in satire upon his own times, or delineation of their manners--themes which would have gratified us much more than the fate of princes."

This is relatively true--true as regards some of us, but not at all as respects Lydgate, nor the people of his age, nor the king and the princes who commanded themes congenial with their military character, and their simple tastes, romantically charming the readers of two centuries. If our critic, in the exercise of his energetic faculties, lives out of the necromancy of the old Romaunt, afar from Thebes and Troy, Thomas Warton was cradled among the children of fancy, and in his rovings had tasted their wild honey. The only works of Lydgate which attracted his attention were precisely these tedious "Fate of Princes"

and "The Troy Book."

The other modern critics--Ritson, Percy, and Ellis--had but a slight knowledge of DAN[5] LYDGATE. They have generally acted on the pressure of the moment, to get up a hasty court of _Pie-poudre_--that fugitive tribunal held at fairs--to determine on the case of a culprit even before they could shake the dust off their feet. But time calls for an arrest of hasty judgments, or brings forward some ill.u.s.trious advocate to reverse the judicial decision, or set forth the misfortunes of the accused. Two, most eminent in genius, stand by the side of the monk of Bury--COLERIDGE and GRAY. Coleridge has left us his protest in favour of Lydgate, for he deeply regrets that in the general collection of our poets, the unpoetic editor "had not subst.i.tuted _the whole of Lydgate's works from the ma.n.u.script extant_, for the almost worthless Gower."[6]

Gray alone has taken an enlarged view of the state of our poetry and our language at this period. When that master-spirit abandoned the history of our poetry from his fastidious delicacy or from his learned indolence, because Warton had projected it, English literature sustained an irreparable loss.[7] In Gray surely we have lost a literary historian such as the world has not yet had; so rare is that genius who happily combines qualities apparently incompatible. In his superior learning, his subtle taste, his deeper thought, and his more vigorous sense, we should have found the elements of a more philosophical criticism, with a more searching and comprehensive intellect, than can be awarded to our old favourite, THOMAS WARTON. In the neglected quartos of GRAY we discover that the poet had set earnestly to work on the archaeology of our poetry; we also find in his works those n.o.ble versions of the northern Scalds, and the Welsh bards, which he designed to have introduced into his history; thus to have impressed on us a perfect notion of a national poetry, by poetry itself; a rare good fortune which does not enliven the toil of prosaic critics or verbal interpreters. Gray had found the ma.n.u.scripts of Lydgate at Cambridge, and has made them a vehicle for the most beautiful disquisitions. On a pa.s.sage in Lydgate, the poet-critic developes a curious occurrence in the history of the poetic art--namely, that p.r.o.neness to minute circ.u.mstances which lengthens the strains of our elder poets, and which the impatience of modern taste rejects as tediousness; yet this will be found to be "the essence of poetry and oratory." This topic is important; and as I can neither add nor dare to take away from this perfect criticism, I submit to the task of transcribing what I am sure will come to most of my readers in all its freshness and novelty.

Our ancient poet seems to be apologising for telling long stories, which he a.s.serts cannot be told "in wordes few"--

For a storye which is not plainly told, But constreyned under _wordes few_ For lack of truth, wher they ben new or olde, Men by reporte cannot the matter shewe; These oakes greate be not down yhewe First at a stroke, but by a _long processe_; Nor long stories a word may not expresse.

LYDGATE, in his "Fall of Princes."

On this Gray has delivered the following observations:--"These 'long processes,' indeed, suited wonderfully with the attention and simple curiosity of the age in which LYDGATE lived; many a _stroke_ have he and the best of his contemporaries spent upon _a st.u.r.dy old story_, till they had blunted their own edge and that of their readers--at least a modern reader will find it so: but it is a folly to judge of the understanding and patience of those times by our own. They loved, I will not say tediousness, but _length_ and a train of circ.u.mstances in a narration. The vulgar do so still: it gives an air of reality to facts; it fixes the attention; raises and keeps in suspense their expectation, and supplies the defects of their little and lifeless imagination; and it keeps pace with the slow motion of their own thoughts. Tell them a story as you would tell it to a man of wit; it will appear to them as an object seen in the night by a flash of lightning: but when you have placed it in various lights and in various positions, they will come at last to see and feel it as well as others. But we need not confine ourselves to the vulgar, and to understandings beneath our own.

Circ.u.mstance ever was and ever will be the life and the essence both of oratory and of poetry. It has in some sort the same effect upon every mind that it has upon that of the populace; and I fear the _quickness and delicate impatience of these polished times_ in which we live are but the forerunners of the decline of all those beautiful arts which depend upon the imagination. Homer, the father of _circ.u.mstance_, has occasion for the same apology which I am making for Lydgate and for his predecessors."[8]

At the monastery of Bury we might have listened to that Gothic monk's "goodly tale," or "notable proverb of aesopus" for the nonce; or saintly legend, or "merrie balade;" or the story of "Thebes," which the scholar took up from his master Chaucer: or that from "Bochas," and Guido Colonna's "Troy Book:" but too numerous were the volumes to tell, and too voluminous was many a volume. Verbose and diffuse, yet clear and fluent, ran his page; too minutely copious were his descriptions, yet the delineations seemed the more graphical; his verse, too long or too short, halts in his measures till we fall into the minstrel's "metring,"

and lines break forth, beautiful as any in our day. He expands the same image, and loses all likeness in a prolix simile, for his readers were not so impatient as ourselves. These poets suffered or enjoyed a fatal facility of rhyming, lost for us, from the use of polysyllabic words from the French and the Latin accented on the last syllable, a custom continued by the Scots; and these provided them with too ready an abundance of poetic terminations or rhymes, tending to make their poems voluminous. The art of selection is the art of an age less florid and more fastidious, but not always more genial or more inventive. The pruning-hook was not in use when planters were too eager to gather the first fruits from the trees which their own hands had put into the earth.

Alas! apologies only leave irremediable faults as they were! The tediousness of Dan Lydgate remains as languid, his verse as halting, and "Thebes" and "Troy" as desolate, as we found them!

Let us, however, be reminded, that he who wholly neglects the study of our ancient poets must submit to the loss of knowledge which a philosopher would value; the manners of the age, the modes of feeling, the stream of thought, the virgin fancies, and that position which the human character takes in distant ages--these will imbue his memory with the genius of his country and the eternal truth of authentic nature. No English poet should wholly resign these ma.s.ses of vernacular poetry to the lone closet of the antiquary; he who loves the gain of labour will excavate these quarries for their marble, for we know they are marble, since many a n.o.ble column has been raised from these shapeless and unhewed blocks.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "The Troy Tale" was composed at the command of the King, Henry the Fifth; as "the Fall of Princes," from Boccace, was at the desire of Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester. He wrote regal poems for kings, while he dispersed wisdom and merriment for their subjects.

[2] While this volume is pa.s.sing through the press, "A Selection from the Minor Poems of Lydgate" has been edited by Mr. Halliwell. The versatility of Lydgate's poetical skill is advantageously shown in his comic satire, and his ethics drawn from a deep insight into human nature. The editor suggests a new reading for the t.i.tle of the ballad of "London _Lick-penny_," more suitable to the misadventures of its hero,--"London _Lack-penny_," for London could not lick a penny from the forlorn hero who had not one to offer to it. GROSE, probably taken by the humorous designation, has placed it among his local proverbs.

The tale of the "Prioress and her Three Wooers" is one of the happiest fabliaux. Mr. Campbell transcribed "the merrie tale" for his Specimens, when he discovered that a preceding forager had antic.i.p.ated him in Mr. Jamieson, who has preserved it in his "Popular Ballads," i. 253.

[3] Turner's "Hist. of England," v.

[4] I may point out the raw material which our poetical antiquary has here worked up with such perfect effect in this picturesque enumeration. Appended to Speght's "Chaucer," that editor furnished a very curious list of about a hundred works by Lydgate, which were in his own possession. Most of the singular poetical exhibitions here enumerated are mentioned towards the end of that list, and which Warton has happily appropriated, and so turned a dry catalogue into a poetical picture. [A selection of Lydgate's Poems, 44 in number, were printed by the Percy Society in 1840.]

[5] DAN, as Ritson tells us, is a t.i.tle given to the individuals of certain religious orders, from the barbarous Latin _Domnus_, a variation of _Dominus_, or the French _Dam_, or _Dom_. _Dan_ became a corruption of _Don_ for _Dominus_. The t.i.tle afterwards extended to persons of respectable condition, as vague as our complimentary esquire. It was applied to Chaucer by Spenser, and when obsolete it became jocular; for we have "Dan Cupid." Prior renewed it with ludicrous gravity when telling a tale which he had from "Dan Pope."

It is still used in an honourable sense by the Spaniards in their DON.

[6] "Literary Remains," ii. 130.

[7] The great poet has left two or three most precious fragments; but these have long been buried in those ill-fated quartos, consisting chiefly of notes on Greek and on Plato, which Matthias published with extraordinary pomp; and, so he used to say, as a monument for himself as well as the bard--a monument which, his egregious self-complacency lived to witness, partook more of the properties of a tombstone than the glory of a column.

[8] "Gray's Works," by Matthias, ii. p. 60.

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

Printing remained, as long as its first artificers could keep it, a secret and occult art; and it is the only one that ceaselessly operates all the miracles which the others had vainly promised.

Who first thought to carve the wooden immoveable letters on blocks?--to stamp the first sheet which ever was imprinted? Or who, second in invention, but first in utility, imagined to cast the metal with fusile types, separate from each other?--to fix this scattered alphabet in a form, and thus by one stroke write a thousand ma.n.u.scripts, and, with the identical letters, multiply not a single work, but all sorts of works hereafter? Was it fortunate chance, or deliberate meditation, or both in gradual discovery, which produced this invention? In truth, we can neither detect the rude beginnings, nor hardly dare to fix on the beginners. The _Origines Typographicae_ are, even at this late hour, provoking a fierce controversy, not only among those who live in the shades of their libraries, but with honest burghers; for the glory of patriotism has connected itself with the invention of an art which came to us like a divine revelation in the history of man. But the place, the mode, and the person--the invention and the inventor--are the subjects of volumes! Votaries of Fust, of Schoffer, of Gutenberg, of Costar! A sullen silence or a deadly feud is your only response. Ye jealous cities of Mentz, of Strasburg, and of Haarlem, each of ye have your armed champion at your gates![1]

The mystical eulogist of the art of printing, who declared that "the invention came from Heaven," was not more at a loss to detect the origin than those who have sought for it among the earliest printers.[2]

Learned but angry disputants on the origin of printing, what if the art can boast of no single inventor, and was not the product of a single act? Consider the varieties of its practice, the change of wood to metal, the fixed to the moveable type; view the complexity of its machinery; repeated attempts must often have preceded so many inventions ere they terminated in the great one. From the imperfect and contradictory notices of the early essays--and of the very earliest we may have no record--we must infer that the art, though secret, was progressive, and that many imperfect beginnings were going on at the same time in different places.

Struck by the magnitude and the magnificence of the famous Bible of Fust, some have decided on the invention of the art by one of its most splendid results; this, however, is not in the usual course of human affairs, nor in the nature of things. "The Art of Printing," observes Dr. Cotton, in his introduction, "was brought almost to perfection in its infancy; so that, like Minerva, it may be said to have sprung to life, mature, vigorous, and armed for war." But in the article "Moguntia, or Mentz," this acute researcher states that "after all that has been written with such angry feelings upon the long-contested question of the _origin of the Art of Printing_, Mentz appears still to preserve the best-founded claim to the honour of being the _birth-place of the Typographic Art_; because," he adds, "the specimens adduced in favour of Haarlem and Strasburg, even if we should allow their genuineness, are confessedly of _a rude and imperfect execution_." We require no other evidence of the important fact, that the art, in its early stages, had to pa.s.s through many transitions--from the small school-books, or Donatuses, of Costar, to the splendid Bible of Fust.

Had the art been borrowed or stolen from a single source, according to the popular tradition, the works would have borne a more fraternal resemblance, and have evinced less inferiority of execution; but if several persons at the same time were working in secrecy, each by his own method, their differences and their inferiority would produce "the rude and imperfect specimens." Mr. Hallam has suffered his strong emotion on the greatness of the invention to reflect itself back on the humble discoverers themselves; and, unusual with his searching inquiries, calls once more on Dr. Cotton's Minerva, but with a more celestial panoply. "The _high-minded inventors_ of this great art tried, at _the very outset_, so bold a flight as the printing _an entire Bible_. It was Minerva leaping on earth, in her divine strength and radiant armour, ready at the moment of her nativity to subdue and destroy her enemies."[3] The Bible called the Mazarine Bible, thus distinguished from having been found in the Cardinal's library, remains still a miracle of typography, not only for its type, but for the quality of the paper and the sparkling blackness of its ink.[4] The success of the art was established by this Bible; but the goldsmith Fust, who himself was no printer, was no otherwise "high-minded," than by the usurious prices he speculated on for this innocent imposture of vending what was now a printed book for a ma.n.u.script copy!

No refined considerations of the nature and the universal consequences of their discovery seem to have instigated the earliest printers; this is evident by the perpetual jealousy and the mystifying style by which they long attempted to hide that secret monopoly which they had now obtained.

The first notions of printing might have reached Europe from China. Our first block-printing seems imitated from the Chinese, who print with blocks of wood on one side of the paper, as was done in the earliest essays of printing; and the Chinese seem also to have suggested the use of a thick black ink. European traders might have imported some fugitive leaves; their route has even been indicated, from Tartary, by the way of Russia; and from China and j.a.pan, through the Indies and the Arabian Gulf. The great antiquity of printing in China has been ascertained. Du Halde and the missionary Jesuits a.s.sert that this art was practised by the Chinese half a century before the Christian era! At all events, it is evident that they exercised it many centuries before it was attempted in Europe. The history of gunpowder would ill.u.s.trate the possibility of the same extraordinary invention occurring at distinct periods. Roger Bacon indicated the terrible ingredients a hundred years before the monk Schwartz, about 1330, actually struck out the fiery explosion, and had the glory of its invention. Machines to convey to a distance the thunder and the lightning described by their discoverers were not long after produced. But it would have astonished these inventors to have learnt that guns had been used as early as the year 85 A.D., and that the fatal powder had been invented previously by the Chinese. Well might the philosophical Langles be struck by "the singular coincidence of the invention in Europe of the compa.s.s, of gunpowder, and of printing, about the same period, within a century." These three mighty agents in human affairs have been traced to that wary and literary nation, who, though they prohibit all intercourse with "any barbarian eye," might have suffered these sublime inventions to steal away over "their great wall."

What has happened to the art of printing also occurred to the sister-art of engraving on copper. Tradition had ascribed the invention as the accidental discovery of the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra. But the Germans insist that they possess engravings before the days of the Italian artist; and it is not doubtful that several of the compatriots of Finiguerra were equally practising the art with himself. Heinecken would arbitrate between the jealous patriots; he concedes that Vasari might ascribe the invention of the art in Italy to Finiguerra, yet that engraving might have been practised in Germany, though unknown in Italy.

Buonarotti, the great judge of all art, was sensible that in this sort of invention every artist makes his own discoveries. Alluding to the art of engraving, he says, "It would be sufficient to occasion our astonishment, that the ancients did not discover the art of chalcography, were it not known that DISCOVERIES OF THIS SORT generally occur ACCIDENTALLY to the mechanics in the exercise of their calling."[5] On this principle we may confidently rest. All the early printers, like the rivals of Finiguerra at home, and his unknown concurrents in Germany, were proceeding with the same art, and might urge their distinct claims.

The natural magic of concave and convex lenses, those miracles of optical science, one of which searches Nature when she eludes the eye, and the other approximates the remotest star--the microscope and the telescope; who were their inventors, and how have those inventions happened? These instruments appeared about the same time. The Germans ascribe the invention of the microscope to a Dutchman, one Drebell; while the Neapolitan Fontana claims the anterior invention; but which Viviani, the scholar of Galileo, a.s.serts, from his own knowledge, was presented to the King of Poland by that father of modern philosophy long anterior to the date fixed on by the Germans. The history of the telescope offers a similar result. Fracastorius may have accidentally combined two lenses; but he neither specified the form nor the quality; and in these consisted the real discovery, which we find in Baptista Porta, and which subsequently was perfected by Galileo. The invention of the art of printing seems a parallel one. It appeared in various quarters about the same time; and in the process of successive attempts, by intimation, by conjecture, and by experiment, each artificer insensibly advanced into a more perfect invention; till some fortunate claimant for the discovery puts aside all preceding essayists, who, not without some claims to the invention, leave their advocates in another generation to dispute about their rights, which are buried in oblivion, or falsified by traditional legends.

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 pract.i.tioners 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]