From a Cornish Window Part 9

Welcome ye treasures which I now receive!

These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole pa.s.sages in the unpublished _Centuries of Meditations_ which almost set one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of Time?"

I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pa.s.s.

For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a cla.s.s apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up in this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man (who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of which _Robinson Crusoe_ may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him--though, to be sure, that gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway, resting his case upon--

SONNET CCXVIII.

Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will: And where is Will alive but _hath a way?_ So in device thy wit is starved still And as devised by Will. That is to say, My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal Thou hast; but all that capital messuage Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall.

Haply the disproportion may engage The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo!

And here revoke all previous testaments: Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents.

After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative.

Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another _trouvaille_, and one which excited me not a little:--

"Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which I had purchased, I came upon some loose leaves which were headed _A Prospect of Society_. The t.i.tle struck me as familiar, and I had only to read a few lines to recognise them as belonging to [Goldsmith's]

_The Traveller_. But the opening lines of my fragment are not the opening lines of the poem as it was published; in fact, the first two lines of _A Prospect of Society_ are lines 353-4 in the first edition of _The Traveller_. . . . A further examination of the fragment which I had discovered showed that it is not what is usually understood as a 'proof' of _The Traveller_, but rather the material, as yet formless and unarranged, out of which it was to be finally evolved."

Now--line for corresponding line--the text discovered by Mr. Dobell often differs, and sometimes considerably, from that of the first edition of _The Traveller_, and these variations are highly interesting, and make Mr.

Dobell's 'find' a valuable one. But on studying the newly discovered version I very soon found myself differing from Mr. Dobell's opinion that we had here the formless, unarranged material out of which Goldsmith built an exquisitely articulated poem.[1] And, doubting this, I had to doubt what Mr. Dobell deduced from it--that "it was in the manner in which a poem, remarkable for excellence of form and unity of design, was created out of a number of verses which were at first crudely conceived and loosely connected that Goldsmith's genius was most triumphantly displayed." For scarcely had I lit a pipe and fallen to work on _A Prospect of Society_ before it became evident to me (1) that the lines were not "unarranged," but disarranged; and (2) that whatever the reason of this disarray, Goldsmith's brain was not responsible; that the disorder was too insane to be accepted either as an order in which he could have written the poem, or as one in which he could have wittingly allowed it to circulate among his friends, unless he desired them to believe him mad.

Take, for instance, this collocation:--

"Heavens! how unlike their Belgic sires of old!

Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold; Where shading elms beside the margin grew, And freshen'd from the waves the zephyr blew."

Or this:--

"To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign, We turn, where France displays her bright domain.

Thou sprightly land of mirth and social ease, Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please, How often have I led thy sportive choir With tuneless pipe, along the sliding Loire?

No vernal bloom their torpid rocks display, But Winter lingering chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sooths the mountain's breast, But meteors glare and frowning storms invest."

Short of lunacy, no intellectual process would account for that sort of thing, whereas a poem more pellucidly logical than _The Traveller_ does not exist in English. So, having lit another pipe, I took a pencil and began some simple counting, with this result:--

The first 42 lines of _The Prospect_ correspond with lines 353-400 of _The Traveller_.

The next 42 with lines 311-352.

The next 34 with lines 277-310.

The next 36 with lines 241-276.

The next 36 with lines 205-240.

The next 36 with lines 169-204.

The next 38 with lines 131-168.

The next 28 with lines 103-130.

And the remaining fragment of 18 lines with lines 73-92.

In other words, _The Prospect_ is merely an early draft of _The Traveller_ printed backwards in fairly regular sections.

But how can this have happened? The explanation is at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all.

Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the ma.n.u.script as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered-- an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the result delightful, and (when you come to think of it) the blunder just so natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.

Upon this simple explanation we have to abandon the hypothesis that Goldsmith patiently built a fine poem out of a congeries of fine pa.s.sages pitchforked together at haphazard--a splendid rubbish heap; and Mr.

Dobell's find is seen to be an imperfect set of duplicate proofs--fellow, no doubt, to that set which Goldsmith, mildly objurgating his own or the printer's carelessness, sliced up with the scissors and rearranged before submitting it to Johnson's friendly revision.

The pleasantest part of the story (for me) has yet to come. We all know how easy it is to turn obstinate and defend a pet theory with acrimony.

Mr. Dobell did nothing of the sort. Although his enthusiasm had committed him to no little expense in publishing _The Prospect_, with a preface elaborating his theory, he did a thing which was worth a hundred discoveries. He sat down, convinced himself that my explanation was the right one, and promptly committed himself to further expense in bringing out a new edition with the friendliest acknowledgment. So do men behave who are at once generous of temper and anxious for the truth.

He himself had been close upon the explanation. In his preface he had actually guessed that the "author's ma.n.u.script, written on loose leaves, had fallen into confusion and was then printed without any attempt at rearrangement." In fact, he had hit upon the right solution, and only failed to follow up the clue.

His find, too, remains a valuable one; for so far as it goes we can collate it with the first edition of _The Traveller_, and exactly discover the emendations made by Johnson, or by Goldsmith after discussion with Johnson. Boswell tells us that the Doctor "in the year 1783, at my request, marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are only line 420, 'To stop too faithful, and too faint to go,' and the concluding ten lines, except the last couplet but one. . . . He added, 'These are all of which I can be sure.'" We cannot test his claim to the concluding lines, for the correspondent pa.s.sage is missing from Mr.

Dobell's fragment; but Johnson's word would be good enough without the internal evidence of the verses to back it. "To stop too faithful, and too faint to go," is his improvement, and an undeniable one, upon Goldsmith's "And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go." I have not been at pains to examine all the revised lines, but they are numerous, and generally (to my thinking) betray Johnson's hand. Also they are almost consistently improvements. There is one alteration, however,-- unmistakably due to Johnson,--which some of us will join with Mr. Dobell in regretting. Johnson, as a fine, full-blooded Jingo, naturally showed some restiveness at the lines--

"Yes, my lov'd brother, cursed be that hour When first ambition toil'd for foreign power,"

And induced Goldsmith to subst.i.tute--

"Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour When first ambition struck at regal power,"

Which may or may not be more creditable in sentiment, but is certainly quite irrelevant in its context, which happens to be a denunciation of the greed for gold and foreign conquest. It is, in that context, all but meaningless, and must have irritated and puzzled many readers of a poem otherwise clearly and continuously argued. In future editions of _The Traveller_, Goldsmith's original couplet should be restored; and I urge this (let the Tory reader be a.s.sured) not from any ill-will towards our old friend the Divine Right of Kings, but solely in the sacred name of Logic.

Such be the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer of such words as these--

"A little touch of something like pride is seated in the true sense of a man's own greatness, without which his humility and modesty would be contemptible virtues."

"It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without loving G.o.d or man.

Love is a transcendent excellence in every duty, and must of necessity enter into the nature of every grace and virtue.

That which maketh the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so bitter and comfortless to men, is its _death_ in the separation and absence of its soul. We suffer but love not."

"All things do first receive that give: Only 'tis G.o.d above That from and in Himself doth live; Whose all-sufficient love Without original can flow, And all the joys and glories show Which mortal man can take delight to know.

He is the primitive, eternal Spring, The endless Ocean of each glorious thing.

The soul a vessel is, A s.p.a.cious bosom, to contain All the fair treasures of His bliss, Which run like rivers from, into, the main, And all it doth receive, return again."

"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."

[1] Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the t.i.tle, _The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society_. Later editions dropped the sub-t.i.tle.

APRIL.

"Thus, then, live I Till 'mid all the gloom By Heaven! the bold sun Is with me in the room Shining, shining!

"Then the clouds part, Swallows soaring between; The spring is alive And the meadows are green!

"I jump up like mad, Break the old pipe in twain, And away to the meadows, The meadows again!"