Old Wine in New Bottles

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

THE ancient disputation between the Body and the Soul gives vise — in a fanciful mind at least — to a curious conception of the world of books. In that fresh and vigorous inaugural lecture, wherewith the present professor of poetry at Oxford took up his torch, there is a text, apt to the elaboration of this view. “ An actual poem,” said Mr. Bradley, “ is the succession of experiences — sounds, images, thoughts, emotions — through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can.” ¹ So, one might say by way of inference, an actual book is the train of various and connected pleasures which we enjoy on a long winter’s evening by the fire, or under Jove on a summer’s day, as we peruse from top to bottom one of the inky, multitudinously split parallelopipeds miscalled a volume. It is a queer realm of phantasmagoria to which this definition leads us ; the idealistically minded reader may wander there at his own sweet will, while the pedestrian reviewer goes his ways.

In appraising some of the more notable new editions of the past year, upon which the publishers have expended time and money and taste in the endeavor to make them beautiful and fit, this old notion of the ideality of letters will cheer and guide us. Yet the true book-lover is no mere Platonick, any more than he is of that Epicurean Stye, where large-paper editions quite virgin of the paper-knife go down to a forlorn decay. He is one who is peculiarly aware of the temperament of books, — that misty mid-region where Soul and Body, the Actual Book and its format, blend in an individuality as of a person. Such an one knows well how appreciably the fit embodiment adds to his joy in a beloved author; his first care with the new edition of an old author is to read It through ; and with him the consideration of the beauty and fitness of its form is always secondary to his pleasure in the Actual Book, and to his interest in determining whether there has been any change in the quality of this pleasure since last he felt it, — and, if there has been, the reasons and the extent of the change.

I.

There has been in recent years no more interesting and revolutionary venture in publishing than that which is now giving life to the so-called Unit Books.² The scheme calls for a series of reprints of classical and entertaining works at the uniform price of one cent for each unit of twenty-five pages, with a slight addition for variation in binding. The first two volumes, The Marble Faun, and Lincoln’s Letters and Addresses, are, in many respects, admirable specimens of book - making. The paper and letter-press are decent and comely, the binding in good taste, and the editorial notes more than ordinarily intelligent and useful. Yet though the Actual Books are there, the true booklover, who is always something of a whimsicalist, is likely to find the volumes lacking in temperament, and the melancholy product of a machine-made age. In the little stock-company theatre under his shabby hat some such comedy as this is sure to be enacted : —

PERSONS OF THE DRAMA : MERCATOR ; BIBLIOPHELUS.

Scene: Mercator’s Book Emporium. Mercator solus, to him Bibliophilus.

Mercator. Good-morning, Bibliophilus, how can I serve you this morning, sir ?

Bibliophilus. Cut me off four pounds of fiction, if you please, and trim me up a dozen essays.

Mercator. Very good, sir ; anything else, sir?

Bibliophilus. No, but let me tell you that if you send me any more shortweight histories, as you did day before yesterday, I shall take my patronage elsewhere.

Mercator. The history was an even nine pounds, sir, as you ordered.

Bibliophilus. It was not!

Mercator. I will speak to my clerks, sir.

(Excursions and alarums, and finally exit Bibliophilus, drawing his cloak about him, and tapping the ground feverishly with his stick as if in agitation.)

We may imagine that Bibliophilus does, indeed, take his patronage elsewhere, — and most of his ilk with him, — while the book-butcher continues to make a living, and a fat one, by catering to the needs of Scholasticus, Viator, and Bibliothecarius. So let us leave them with their units and the rest, and pass with Bibliophilus to the perusal of certain newly reprinted volumes wherein writings more than ordinarily savored with the salt of personality have been embodied in forms which pretend to a like distinction.

II.

At the risk of having some Lamb-like reader wishful to “get at our bumps,” we may venture the truism that in all literature there is no book more vitally instinct with the pure essence of personality than the Essays of Elia.³ Mr. MacDonald has endeavored in his new and complete edition of Lamb to produce a definitive edition, comporting with the individuality of the author. As an announcer Mr. MacDonald interests us a good deal. The superior completeness of his own edition is proclaimed, perhaps a bit too noisily, but he has gathered into his set much that the lover of Lamb would not willingly forgo. It is pleasant, for example, to know that he is to forsake the narrow path of previous editors and include among Lamb’s complete works some minor pieces excluded by Mr. Ainger’s modesty, as well as the lovely volume of Poetry for Children. As Leigh Hunt wrote, in that charming passage of his Autobiography ⁴ where the character of Lamb is painted with so tender a detachment, “ he was a great acquaintance of the little children,” and his selective instinct in choosing their poetry is in the highest degree sound and fine, and significant of character.

Mr. MacDonald’s Memoir of Lamb, which attains the proportion of a respectable short biography, is a very honest and virile piece of writing. His Gaelic sportiveness, both here and in his excellent ample notes, does not always consort quite amicably with the Celtic playfulness of Lamb. Some of his facetiae come but lamely off, and one likes to imagine how Elia (to filch yet another phrase from Hunt) would have “ pelted his head with pearls.” He is addicted, too, to the use of passing queer words in what he seems to think the manner of his author ; and he accomplishes the sesquipedalian by the sheer strength of his bootstraps, with none of the tender, humorsome irony which makes Lamb’s dalliance with big, old words so charming. We are presented with many a morsel like this: “ . . . an extreme example, this, of flagrant intrusion, of unseasonable ebullition; rapscallion irruption of the mere quotidian mortal ”... Yes, indeed ! Yet we like the fellow.

For all his noise, Mr. MacDonald’s is in many respects the best brief life of Lamb that we have had. No other paints so convincingly, and with so little of mere quavering sentimentality, the sombreness and horror that made the warp of Lamb’s life. It reads like a Greek tragedy of love and madness and valiant renunciation. Some months before the letters to Myra Kelly had been made public, Mr. MacDonald, by a curious piece of biographic insight, had reconstructed the episode, and woven a new tragic factor into the story of Elia’s life. No one, not even Walter Pater, has written better of the transmutation of these tragic forces into the finest humor in the world ; and how searching and sombre is this statement of Lamb’s characteristic view of the world : —

“ The problematical was too continuously a dweller in his own house — the need to justify the ways of God to man, even as seen in the history of one innocent woman, was too often forced upon his attention — for him to have any delight in the expatiations of adipose piety or the philosophic earnestness that never knew a grief. Existence for him and for Mary had been a gift too fateful and dark, too fraught with a burden of questions that could only be answered by tears, for him ever to refer with large assurance to those common topics of everybody else — of the meanings of life, and the nature of man, and the ascertained destiny of the world. He drew instinctively toward the particular things and the comradeships of the earth : the old places, and the old books, and the full-flavored passages of old writing in them ; but especially towards those human relationships, of which not the intelligence but the sympathies are the interpreter, the sanction, and the proof.”

Yet Charles Lamb was no mere dim doubter, no mere vague-eyed seeker of sympathy. His was a head, as Leigh Hunt declared, worthy of Aristotle or of Bacon. We like best to leave him in the light of Mr. MacDonald’s final characterization, which is quite in accord with that of his masculine admirers everywhere, — a pure intellect fit to be compared with the greatest, a writer of the finest and richest prose, and the bravest man in the history of English letters.

What a pleasure it would be to read Lamb in folio, so that the eye might have that luxurious sense of covering ground as it moves along the amplitude of the lines ! Yet as no publisher has seen fit to give us a fourteen-inch Elia, we may well be grateful for the present light and distinguished edition, with its excellent printing and dainty binding, — a bit too fussy perhaps, but savoring of personality. Bibliophilus could wish nothing away save Mr. Brock’s illustrations. The pictures are always quaintly and delicately drawn, with perhaps as intimate an imaginative visualization of the subtile text as is possible for an illustrator to attain. Yet, for all that, they vulgarize the imperishable and ideal charm of Elian folk, as the sweetest melody jars upon the spirit ditties of no tone which melt in the music of a true lyric.⁵

III.

The reader in this year of grace 1904, who shares Lamb’s love for old books and the full-flavored passages of old writing in them, will find much to engage him in the new editions of the past year. Whether he is moved by the affectionate curiosity of the amateur of letters, or by that deeper passion which still drives many a man to seek upon his shelves solace for the barrenness or the stifled sorrow of his days, where shall he drink more deeply of life, or bring away a better cheer than from old romance of adventure, from the older English Dramatists, from Fielding and Smollett, from Don Quixote, or from the novels of Thomas Love Peacock ? ⁶

A book that would surely have gladdened the heart of Elia, to which nothing quaintly human was ever alien, is The History of Oliver and Arthur, the oldest wine in the newest bottle that we have to taste. After nearly four centuries of Stygian obscurity the tale comes again bravely from the press in a form full of temperament; for the double-columned page of Caxton type, with its rubrications and facsimiles of queer, simpleminded woodcuts, is as close an approximation to old printing as has recently been seen. The flavor of the wine does not belie the look of the bottle. Wilhelm Liely of Bern, who in 1521 turned this old tale out of French into German, was no Malory. He was rather, if one may guess, the Trollope, the E. P. Roe, the Mrs. Alexander of his age, and he tells the story of the generous friendship and miraculous adventures of Oliver and Arthur in the sentimental, prosy, and pragmatical vein of one who writes for the common reader. This quality, which doubtless accounted for the popularity which the tale seems to have enjoyed in its century, has been caught with considerable felicity by the present translators, who — by virtue of eschewing the aureate diction affected by most translators of Mediaeval or Renaissance prose — have contrived to convey from their German original much of its homely and flat-footed gait, together with many of its turns of unconscious humor. In virtue of this quality and of the significance of the book in showing the attitude of a Plain Man of the Renaissance approaching and retelling a marvelous Mediaeval story, this book, which has been strangely overlooked by literary historians, will deeply engage the interest not only of Bibliophilus, but of Scholasticus as well.

The excellent Mermaid Series — what memories in the name for the lover of old plays ! — is extremely prepossessing in its new embodiment. For getting at the full, salty savor of an old dramaturge,

“ So nimble and so full of subtle flame,” naught can compare with a dog’s-eared small quarto. Yet the man who persists in squeezing small quartos into the side pocket of his coat, with a dolorous distention of the same, will be too frequently called upon to enact an inglorious part in curtain-comedy, to contemplate his return from the pleasantest ramble without anxiety. Such an one, can he be but once brought to it, will be most thankful for the present reprint, — so slim and insinuating. He will be glad to know, too, that new volumes are to be added, offering for his perusal some of the best of the eloquent highflown plays of Shadwell and Dryden.

It is just possible that our worthy Bibliophilus may be disposed to wrinkle his delicate nose, as he thrusts it into the successive volumes of the new editions of Fielding and Smollett which Mr. Maynadier has edited. The rubrication of the title-pages may seem to him too gratuitous, the pictures, for all their firm and studious drawing, a bit too conventionally Howard Pylean, and the look of the page too suggestive of the Six most Popular Books of the Week, to be quite the proper dress for such roistering, full-bodied tales as those of Jones and Rory Random. Yet here again a Plain Man may venture with an apage to send Bibliophilus piking home to the dust and dilapidation of his old editions, while he himself sits him down to enjoy the clear large type and comfortable lightness of the new. The Plain Man may perhaps find Mr. Maynadier’s Introductions to the various novels somewhat over ample, but they are full of sound and readable criticism, which will help him, not only by the longer balking of his curiosity, to bring a keener gust to the enjoyment of the Actual Books.

Should the Plain Man rise from his reading of Fielding and Smollett with a desire to refresh his memory of the incomparable Book which was their chief exemplar and inspiration, he may now procure an edition of Don Quixote which will suit his purpose admirably, and by which even the querulousness of Bibliophilus will be subdued. The idea of an English Don Quixote in thin and pocketable volumes is not a new one, but it was a wise choice that selected in the present instance John Ormsby’s translation for such embodiment. With the exception of Shelton’s quaint and breezy version, no English translation of Cervantes’s book is in itself such delightful reading, while, by virtue of the translator’s superior Spanish scholarship, it is the most faithful of all. Ormsby, we recall, was a private scholar, so virile and reticent that the name Warrington was constantly on the lips of his friends. His favorite reading was always in the great English novelists of the eighteenth century, and this, one thinks, was the prime source of the curious felicity of his dealings with Don Quixote. In his version there is just the mingling of gusto and formality, plain speech and ornate, that the book needs, and that is best attained by imbuing one’s self with the modes of expression of Smollett and Fielding. His style has always an oldtime, but not an archaic, flavor ; and no one else has dealt so well with the proverbial wisdom of Sancho Panza. The English Cervantist will be unaffectedly pleased with this handy little set, and its component volumes will often be found in his pocket.

The seven Novels of Thomas Love Peacock complete in one volume seven inches by four, with its pages, numerous as the years of Methuselah, bulking to but three quarters of an inch in thickness, is as big a book of its size as any one could wish to see. It is hard to measure the joy in it of the true-born Peacockian. A more genial traveling companion for sea or shore than this learned whimsicalist it would be impossible to conceive. Nor will Bibliophilus find the book lacking in temperament, for the soft, intricately stamped leather cover and quaintly conceived title-page agree most harmoniously with the exquisite humor, poetic fancy, and all the other kindred qualities of that light fantastic pen which they embellish.

The reader who has drunk his fill of Peacock’s inimitable distillation may wish to round out the night by application to the good English ale of other Early Victorian and Late Georgian humorists. Nothing can be more apt for the purpose of such an one than a series of reprints whose sleek red bodies and white labeled backs chime most consonantly with their rubicund contents.⁷ The Memoirs of John Mytton, the Napoleon of English eccentrics, are as valuable to students of the Byronic mood as they are diverting to lovers of curious reading. For collateral reading with this veracious memoir nothing could be more fit than the high-spirited sporting fiction wherein R. S. Surtees set forth, in the ample diction of his sub-title, “ The Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eating, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of that Renowned Sporting Citizen, Mr. John Jorrocks of St. Botolph Lane and Great Coram Street.” The amazing activity of those beefy times is still further and more strikingly shown in the Tour of Doctor Syntax, and the other poems of William Combe, where his poetic faculty is seen to be no mere trickling rill in a Castalian meadow, but a spring freshet and inundation. Yet in all the prodigious submerged area of his doggerel versifying there is hardly a dull or a nerveless line ; and nowhere in the rapid poetic narrative is there a serious discrepancy from Rowlandson’s vigorous Hogarthian plates, which it was written to accompany.

If, during this ambrosial night and long potation of the pride of life, any reader feel sharp compunction stir within him, he may find penitential reading in the Bay Psalm Book.⁸ It was a sublime adventure that called “the thirty pious and learned ministers ” then in New England to set all the Psalms of David over into English metre ; and it is a worthy ambition that leads the present publishers to call in the aid of Old Sol — subtlest of printers — in reproducing the first volume printed in America. The metrical versions, not smoothed “ with the fweetnes of any paraphrafe,” breathe more piety than poetry ; but they are full of the very quintessential spirit of quaintness, and the page lacks only the savor of must in the nostrils of being an ideal setting. Yet the last impression we bring away from the book is not that of remoteness and queerness, rather it is a feeling of the actuality and sempiternity of what the men of those times were pleased to call the motions of the Soul. Thus we are pleased to learn by the first words of the preface of the pious and learned ministers, that even in those days church music was not always a cause of congregational concord. For they tell us : “ The finging of Pfalmes, though it breath forth nothing but holy harmony and melody: yet fuch is the fubtilty of the enemie and the enmity of our nature againft the Lord, & his wayes, that our hearts can finde matter of difcord in this harmony, and crotchets of divifion in this holy melody.”

IV.

To pass from the pleasant, busy landscape, through which the reader of the books we have been considering progresses so wholesomely, to the devious coverts of spiritual dismay which await him in the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a parlous affair. Yet the present publication of a notable edition of Rossetti’s poems,⁹ illustrated from his own designs, forces an issue which even a peace-loving man like Bibliophilus cannot dare to shirk. Let us follow him as, pulling the bolt upon his books, he grasps a stout staff, — which may be useful, — and fares to his adventure.

In nearly all of its mechanical and editorial details this edition is admirable. The page is tall and noble-seeming, the paintings excellently reproduced, and the binding in commendable taste. Miss Cary has done her work well. One wishes that more of Rossetti’s paintings might have been offered, and that some of those given us might have been disposed in a little easier contiguity to the poems they carnify. The propriety of printing introductory notes continuously with the poetical text and in the same type is questionable ; but the notes themselves are more than commonly intelligent and sensible. All in all, by virtue of the presentation of both poems and pictures, the chronological arrangement of them together with many earlier versions, and the judicious statement of significant biographical details, this is the best edition that we know of, to be studied by a person wishing to get at the actual Rossetti. It is, precisely, this Actual Rossetti that will engage Bibliophilus and his stout staff.

For our final impression of the book is that it contains the mongrel art of a man whom a mixed ancestry had deprived of the deep-rooted imaginative energy of racial integrity, at the same time that it endowed him with the wistful, brief fecundity which so often appears in the hybrid. In Rossetti’s work, poetry and painting were strangely interfused, and in this arrangement of it the pictorial quality of his writing is strikingly manifest, and the relation of the quality of his art to the quality of his mind becomes clear. Despite Miss Cary’s and other evidence of his bursts of epistolary animation, we do not get over the notion that he was a moody, preoccupied man. Through this very preoccupation his passionate dream of the world became deeply colored and rich in beautiful detail. The depth of coloring and beauty of detail appear equally in his pictures and in his poems. But in his pictures these qualities are adapted to the development of a composed theme, while in his poems — save in sonnets where structure is given in the form, and in a few tales like the King’s Tragedy where it is given in the subject — we have only a series of picturesque moments of arrested expression, slackly joined by an under-running mood. The crystallizing heat of the true poetic fire is not there. We hear his sad music with its ravishing division ; we are subjected to the witchery of a spell as seducing as Lady Lilith’s; yet, with all its glamour, no poetry of this sort, so devoid of initial poetic energy, has ever proved more than a beautiful, short-lived hybrid.

The reader of this new edition will not see in its queer interfusion of poetry and painting any conscious and premeditated Anderstreben, or Wagnerian striving after the effect of mingled arts ; rather he will see a mind in which the visualizing faculty of the painter and the sentimentalizing faculty of the poet are inextricably tangled in a mystical and unhealthy temperament; in which neither is of sufficient independent vigor to be applied quite independently. As the result of this he will find a disproportionate amount of imagery in the poems, and an equally disproportionate amount of sentiment in the pictures. Where the poem and the picture are closely linked together the effect is startling and phantasmagoric ; and this will be the interesting and characteristic, if not the attractive thing about Rossetti to the men of the more classically minded age which is likely to succeed our own. To romantic sensibilities easily touched by the wistfulness of beauty, or to shadowy souls who go mournfully adown the world,

“ Ripae ulterioris amore,” the appeal of the Blessed Damozel is the same whether she be painted in words or in pigments. The malign light, as of another world than ours of the sun, in which Beata Beatrix sits ugly, unwholesome, and forlorn is the same that baffles and distorts our vision in the House of Life, — the same that Dr. Johnson in his Elysian conversation with Mr. William Watson reprobated so severely.

V.

“ The faces of the Madonnas are beyond the discomposure of passion, and their very draperies betoken an Elysian atmosphere where wind never blew.” So wrote Edward FitzGerald in one of his casual, imperishable letters ; and how good it is to come up out of the dim and troubled places, whither our pursuit of Bibliophilus has led us, into the upper air, the calm and quietude of high art, there to hear one discoursing of great things simply, in a style as pure and living as ever mirrored the mind of a man of genius:—

“ E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.”

To the zeal of FitzGerald’s authorized publishers, and to the pious care of his friend Mr. Aldis Wright, we owe a luxurious definitive edition of his complete works in seven octavo volumes.¹⁰ It would have startled the recluse of Woodbridge could he in his retired and unlaborious days have foreseen such a monument erected from the materials of his daily literary diversions. One who, already knowing his FitzGerald well, is lured by the dignified page and artfully contrived temperament of the set into a thorough re-reading, so to taste again and re-measure his joy in the Actual Books, will be not so much startled as more deeply delighted and impressed.

Beginning with the four volumes of the letters, it is pleasant to notice that the letters to Fanny Kemble have been disposed in their proper chronological places, thus giving to the collection something of the completeness and continuity of autobiography, and compensating in a measure for Mr. Wright’s extreme reticence in the matter of biographical annotation. Of the irresistible personal charm of the letters it is as needless to speak here, as it is impertinent to discourse at large of the reality of learning, the precision and intensity of taste, the lively humanity, which everywhere inform them. It is enough to say that they are of the priceless Actual Books of the world.

When one comes to the volumes of the translations of Æschylus and Sophocles and Calderon he is newly filled with admiration for the mingled unction and grandeur of an English dramatic style, which in its harmonious union of racy, homespun speech with poetic phrases that go like arrows to the gold is nearer to the inapproachable Shakespearean style than that of any other dramatic writer in English for a hundred years. Nor will he complete the reading without an admiration still more profound for the intellectual force that would convey into English both the pathos and the ethos of alien drama, so fully and firmly, and with so little loss. It is not easy to exaggerate the importance of such work. For all the long list of admirable translations that have appeared in our tongue since King Alfred set so high a standard in the translator’s art, we are still far behind the Germans in the wealth of translated literature which we possess. It is probably not too much to affirm that there is no considerable piece of the world’s literature which cannot be found done into German not only adequately, but brilliantly, — naturalized, as it were. The part played by such an inheritance in enriching national culture is incalculable.

It is a fair question whether, from the suffrage of the centuries, these free dramatic translations may not appear to be a service to English literature greater than the perfectly phrased and musical rendering of the blasphemous Persian Horace, greater than the faultless Euphranor, with its exquisitely drawn picture of young English manhood, greater, even, than the incomparable letters. At any rate, these two volumes, with their dozen of plays, serve to put FitzGerald quite out of that polite company of literary idlers to which he is so often relegated. Despite his modest disclaiming, they give evidence of a scholarship beside which slovenly and ill-assimilated learning is seen for what it is, and of a vital imaginative realization which could only have been attained by the strictest and most searching thought in a mind of unusual native power. Furthermore, it is a good subject for psychological inquiry by some earnest young man, whether there is not actually as much volitional energy — as much overcoming of organic inhibitions — involved in translating a difficult play from Greek or Spanish as in taking a city.

The character of Old Fitz emerges from this monumental collection of his classic “ scribblings ” less eccentric, more human, more melancholy than he has sometimes seemed to essayists and biographers who have not been forgetful of the popular appeal of lettered eccentricity. We know him for a sturdy sentimentalist, who could ignore Rossetti and rail at Mrs. Browning, yet weep over Sophocles, Virgil, and Crabbe. If he was “ eccentric ” it was largely because he preferred a breezy human talk with the captain of his schooner to being bored in a parlor ; the first-rate in literature to the third-rate ; God’s country to man’s town.

As we by aid of the letters share his mood from his ardent, friendly youth down to his serene and solitary old age, we notice how tenaciously he held to the old friends and the old books; how, as death and inevitable estrangement did their mortal work, he more and more found in these old books support against the failing and angustation of his life.

“ I read of mornings,” he says, “ the same old books over again, for I have no command of new ones: Walk with my great black dog of an afternoon, and at evening sit with open windows up to which China roses climb, with my pipe, while the black-birds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden, and the nightingale to have the neighborhood to herself.” He was the sincerest, sanest, most constant Book-lover since Lamb.

It is a moved and mellowed Bibliophilus that rises from this survey and peregrination de fauteuil, and proceeds with slippered shuffling to his bed. The Actual Books that have taken place within him have left him the breath of a richer being, and stirred him with the undulations of a deeper self. So let us leave him, stepping bedwards with no evil in his heart ; none toward those wan, sad women of the painter-poet; toward Mercator and his Units, none.

Ferris Greenslet.