From a Cornish Window Part 8

How quietly its best things steal upon the world! And in a world where a single line of Sappho's survives as a something more important than the entire political history of Lesbos, how little will the daily newspaper help us to take long views!

Whether England could better afford to lose Shakespeare or her Indian Empire is no fair question to put to an Englishman. But every Englishman knows in his heart which of these two glories of his birth and state will survive the other, and by which of them his country will earn in the end the greater honour. Though in our daily life we--perhaps wisely--make a practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most perdurable claim on man's remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which outlast all phenomena.

The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous bookseller of Charing Cross Road, rediscovered (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet.

Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the Republic of Letters under many obligations. To begin with, he loves his trade and honours the wares in which he deals, and so continues the good tradition that should knit writers, printers, vendors and purchasers of books together as partakers of an excellent mystery. He studies--and on occasion will fight for--the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the out-of-door-stall, the 'cla.s.sic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing.

He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature.

He has edited James Thomson, him of _The City of Dreadful Night_.

He has helped us to learn more than we knew of Charles Lamb. He has even written poems of his own and printed them under the t.i.tle of _Rosemary and Pansies_, in a volume marked 'Not for sale'--a warning which I, as one of the fortunate endowed, intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne.

Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the discovery let us rehea.r.s.e the few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne.

He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight.

He wrote a polemical tract on _Roman Forgeries_, which had some success; a treatise on _Christian Ethicks_, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was utterly neglected; an exquisite work, _Centuries of Meditations_, never published; and certain poems, which also he left in ma.n.u.script. And there the record ends.

Next let us tell by how strange a chance this forgotten author came to his own. In 1896 or 1897 Mr. William T. Brooke picked up two volumes of MS.

on a street bookstall, and bought them for a few pence. Mr. Brooke happened to be a man learned in sacred poetry and hymnology, and he no sooner began to examine his purchase than he knew that he had happened on a treasure. At the same time he could hardly believe that writings so admirable were the work of an unknown author. In choice of subject, in sentiment, in style, they bore a strong likeness to the poems of Henry Vaughan the Silurist, and he concluded that they must be a.s.signed to Vaughan. He communicated his discovery to the late Dr. Grosart, who became so deeply interested in it that he purchased the ma.n.u.scripts and set about preparing an edition of Vaughan, in which the newly-found treasures were to be included. Dr. Grosart, one may say in pa.s.sing, was by no means a safe judge of characteristics in poetry. With all his learning and enthusiasm you could not trust him, having read a poem with which he was unacquainted or which perchance he had forgotten, to a.s.sign it to its true or even its probable author. But when you hear that so learned a man as Dr. Grosart considered these writings worthy of Vaughan, you may be the less apt to think me extravagant in holding that man to have been Vaughan's peer who wrote the following lines:--

"How like an Angel came I down!

How bright are all things here!

When first among His works I did appear how their Glory me did crown!

The world resembled His Eternity, In which my soul did walk; And everything that I did see Did with me talk.

"The streets were paved with golden stones, The boys and girls were mine, O how did all their lovely faces shine!

The sons of men were holy ones; In joy and beauty they appeared to me: And everything which here I found, While like an angel I did see, Adorned the ground."

'Proprieties.'--

That is to say, 'properties,' 'estates.'--

"Proprieties themselves were mine, And hedges ornaments, Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents Did not divide my joys, but all combine.

Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed My joys by others worn; For me they all to wear them seemed When I was born."

Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and elaborate edition of Vaughan, which, only just before his death, he was endeavouring to find means to publish. After his death the two ma.n.u.scripts pa.s.sed by purchase to Mr. Charles Higham, the well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when a part of Dr. Grosart's library was sold at Sotheby's, Mr. Dobell bought--and this is perhaps the strangest part of the story--a third ma.n.u.script volume, which Dr. Grosart had possessed all the time without an inkling that it bore upon Mr.

Brooke's discovery, "though nothing is needed but to compare it with the other volumes in order to see that all these are in the same handwriting."

Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them with Vaughan's, and began to have his doubts. Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author be?

Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume of Giles Fletcher's, _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had appended a number of seventeenth-century poems not previously collected; and to one of these, ent.i.tled 'The Ways of Wisdom,' he drew Mr. Dobell's attention as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To Mr. Dobell the resemblance between it and the ma.n.u.script poems was at once evident.

Mr. Brooke had found the poem in a little book in the British Museum ent.i.tled, _A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of G.o.d, in several most Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same_ (a publisher's t.i.tle it is likely): and this book contained other pieces in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. Dobell's request, he examined them and felt no doubt at all that the author of the ma.n.u.script poem and of the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be one and the same person. But, again, who could he be?

A sentence in an address 'To the Reader' prefixed to the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ provided the clue. The editor of this work (a posthumous publication), after eulogising the unnamed author's many virtues wound up with a casual clue to his ident.i.ty:--

"But being removed out of the Country to the service of the late Lord Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he died young and got early to those blissful mansions to which he at all times aspir'd."

But for this sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the clue--that the author of _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman--had only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne.

This information was obtained from Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, which mentioned Traherne as the author of two books, _Roman Forgeries_ and _Christian Ethicks_.

The next step was to get hold of these two works and examine them, if perchance some evidence might be found that Traherne was also the author of the ma.n.u.scripts, which as yet remained a guess, standing on Mr.

Dobell's conviction that the verses in the ma.n.u.scripts and those in _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be by the same hand.

By great good fortune that evidence was found in _Christian Ethicks_, in a poem which, with some variations, occurred too in the ma.n.u.script _Centuries of Meditations_. Here then at last was proof positive, or as positive as needs be.

The most of us writers hope and stake for a diuturnity of fame; and some of us get it. _Sed ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?_ "That bay leaves were found green in the tomb of St. Humbert after a hundred and fifty years was looked upon as miraculous," writes Sir Thomas Browne. But Traherne's laurel has lain green in the dust for close on two hundred and thirty years, and his fame so cunningly buried that only by half a dozen accidents leading up to a chance sentence in a dark preface to a forgotten book has it come to light.

I wonder if his gentle shade takes any satisfaction in the discovery?

His was by choice a _vita fallens_. Early in life he made, as we learn from a pa.s.sage in _Centuries of Meditations_, his election between worldly prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the chase of fleeting phenomena and rest upon the soul's centre:--

"When I came into the country and, being seated among silent trees and woods and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of Happiness, and to satiate the burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth; in which I was so resolute that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and to feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour. And G.o.d was so pleased to accept of that desire that from that time to this I have had all things plentifully provided for me without any care at all, my very study of Felicity making me more to prosper than all the care in the whole world. So that through His blessing I live a free and kingly life, as if the world were turned again into Eden, or, much more, as it is at this day."

Yet Traherne is no quietist: a fervent, pa.s.sionate lover, rather, of simple and holy things. He sees with the eyes of a child: the whole world shines for him 'apparell'd in celestial light,' and that light, he is well aware, shines out on it, through the eyes which observe it, from the divine soul of man. The verses which I quoted above strike a note to which he recurs again and again. Listen to the exquisite prose in which he recounts the 'pure and virgin apprehension' of his childhood:--

"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels; I knew not that they were born, or should die. . . . The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . ."

All these things he enjoyed, his life through, uncursed by the itch for 'proprietorship': he was like the Magnanimous Man in his own _Christian Ethicks_--'one that scorns the s.m.u.tty way of enjoying things like a slave, because he delights in the celestial way and the Image of G.o.d.' In this creed of his all things are made for man, if only man will inherit them wisely: even G.o.d, in conferring benefits on man, is moved and rewarded by the felicity of witnessing man's grateful delight in them:--

"For G.o.d enjoyed is all His end, Himself He then doth comprehend When He is blessed, magnified, Extoll'd, exalted, prais'd, and glorified."

Yes, and 'undeified almost, if once denied.' A startling creed, this; but what a bold and great-hearted one! To Traherne the Soul is a sea which not only receives the rivers of G.o.d's bliss but 'all it doth receive returns again.' It is the Beloved of the old song, 'Quia Amore Langueo;' whom G.o.d pursues, as a lover. It is the crown of all things. So in one of his loveliest poems he shows it standing on the threshold to hear news of a great guest, never dreaming that itself is that great guest all the while--

ON NEWS

I.

News from a foreign country came, As if my treasure and my wealth lay there: So much it did my heart enflame, 'Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear, Which thither went to meet The approaching sweet, And on the threshold stood To entertain the unknown Good.

It hover'd there As if 'twould leave mine ear, And was so eager to embrace The joyful tidings as they came, 'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place To entertain that same.

II.

As if the tidings were the things, My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure, Or else did bear them on their wings-- With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure-- My Soul stood at that gate To recreate Itself with bliss, and to Be pleased with speed. A fuller view It fain would take, Yet journeys back again would make Unto my heart: as if 'twould fain Go out to meet, yet stay within To fit a place to entertain And bring the tidings in.

III.

What sacred instinct did inspire My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong?

What secret force moved my desire To expect my joy, beyond the seas, so young?

Felicity I knew Was out of view; And being here alone, I saw that happiness was gone From me! For this I thirsted absent bliss, And thought that sure beyond the seas, Or else in something near at hand I knew not yet (since nought did please I knew), my bliss did stand,

IV.

But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by: And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie.

Yet thus it was: The Gem, The Diadem, The Ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthly ball; The Heavenly Eye, Much wider than the sky, Wherein they all included were, The glorious Soul that was the King Made to possess them, did appear A small and little thing.

I must quote from another poem, if only for the pleasure of writing down the lines:--

THE SALUTATION.

These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins-- Where have ye been? Behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long?

Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?

When silent I So many thousand, thousand years Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?