Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

An aspect of mind combining both resolution and diffidence, which has lead to the obliteration of literary work, is reliance on a friend’s counsel. An amusing example of this is related in the ecclesiastical history of Nicephorus Callistus concerning Marsilius Ficinus. This gentleman had translated Plato into Latin, and came to his learned friend Musurus Candiotus to know his opinion of it. Candiotus, after perusing some few leaves, perceived that it would not satisfy the expectation of the learned, and was even of opinion that it was so slubbered over as to resemble the original (as Cicero the younger did his father) in nothing but in name. He accordingly took up a sponge, dipped it in an ink-pot, and blotted out the first page. This done, he turns to Ficinus. “Thou seest,” quoth he “how I have corrected the first page; if thou wilt, I will correct the rest in like sort.” Now Ficinus was fully as mild in temper as slender in scholarship. “No reason,” says he, “that Plato should be disgraced through my default; refine away.” And according to his words was it done.

It would appear from Scaliger that even had not Ficinus commenced his out-sponged work afresh, literature would not have lamentably lost. Far, indeed, would this have been from true, had the influence of a friend prevailed to wipe from among the works of Gray “The Progress of Poetry,” and “The Bard.” I will not deny of its setting the sentence in which Walpole communicates the likelihood of such a fate.

One quality I may safely arrogate to myself: I am not afraid to praise. Many are such timid judges of composition, that they hesitate to wait for the public opinion. Show them a manuscript, though they highly approve it in their hearts, they are afraid to commit themselves by speaking out. Several excellent works have perished from this cause; a writer of real talents being often a mere sensitive plant with regard to his own productions. Some cavils of Mason (how inferior a poet and judge!) had almost induced Gray to destroy his two beautiful and sublime odes. We should not only praise, but hasten to praise.

In modern days the function of Mason is more generally filled by adverse public critics. The case of the late Edward Fitzgerald, who by an unfavorable review was induced to withdraw from circulation his “Six Dramas of Calderon,” and probably altogether to withhold from the public his rendering of “La Vida es Sueño,” and “El Mágico Prodigioso,” is until the present unhappily in point.

More melancholy still are those episodes of literary history which present the wearied author consigning with forced smile and show of acquiescence – “coactus volo” – the products of his craft to an untimely end. English history does not lack its instances of these heroic souls in motley, these Herculeses with their distaffs. There is John Selden, and there is Reginald Pecock: let us bare the mishaps of these representatives.

In the time of James I., the clergy were pleased to advance to the utmost the doctrine of the divine right of tithes – a divinity entailed in a pedigree of patriarchal ages, Jewish priesthood, and Christian priesthood. Upon so venerable a claim so cogently revived, lawyers yet looked with jealousy. For they saw in every claim by divine right, where royal and sub-royal patrons were unconcerned, a limitation of human rights, with their correlative human duties very apt to be regulated by positive law. Selden, partaking of the legal spirit – coincident this once with the historic – produced his “History of Tithes,” a plain narrative, margented with copious authorities, which established abundantly the duty of paying tenths – but established on the distasteful ground of human authority. James, who patronised divinity partly to show the ardor with which he in his one turn could venerate, partly for the reflected strength wherewith it encircled himself, partly from conceit and cowardice, and partly from better motives, summoned the author to appear before him in December 1618, at his palace at Theobalds. Introduced by Ben Jonson and Edward Hayward, Selden maintained the test of two conferences at Theobalds, and one at Whitehall with the monarch in person; but this in nowise prevented his being called, on January 28, 1618, before seven members of the High Commission Court in whose presence he was induced to make and sign this declaration.

My good Lords, I most humbly acknowledge the error which I have committed in publishing “The History of Tithes,” and especially in that I have at all, by showing any interpretation of Holy Scriptures, by meddling with councils, fathers, or canons, or by what else soever occurs in it, offered any occasion of argument against any right of maintenance, jure divino, of the minister of the Gospel; beseeching your Lordships to receive this ingenuous and humble acknowledgment, together with the unfeigned protestation of my grief, for that through it I have so incurred both his Majesty’s and your Lordships’ displeasure conceived against me in behalf of the Church of England.

Beside this forced submission, the authority which had exacted it prohibited the book. Further, Selden was forbidden to publish anything in his own defence, while public invitation – pluckily used – was given to any who should choose to attack either him or his history with all the virulence of pocket and party polemics. Nor was this all, but Selden stooped at the bidding of the king to uphold opinions, no doubt on three small points, which he had seemed to impugn in his greater work. It is pleasant to add that he circulated among his friends in manuscript answers to the attacks which were published against him.

The fall of Pecock was more abject, and less relieved. About 1449 he had written – not printed, of course – “The Repressor.” He had in design to defend the clergy from the aspersions, as he conceived them, of the “Bible-man” or Lollards. With this view he vindicated the use of images, the going on pilgrimages, and the retention of the various ranks of the hierarchy in their full directive authority. In 1450 he remained in sufficient esteem – though indeed his treatise was not much circulated for four or five years – to be transferred to the see of Chichester. From that time, however, his good fortune deserted him. The Duke of York conceived it well to cover his strides towards the crown, with the redress of grievances; and the disgrace of Pecock’s patrons, the Duke of Suffolk and the Bishop of Norwich, together with the personal dislike the king contracted towards him, made Chichester a safe object of attack. While all things were thus working for the good man’s evil, the council met at Westminster in the autumn of 1457, whence by general acclamation Pecock was expelled. He was cited to appear before Archbishop Bourchier on November 11, and the character of his offence became more definitised. He had held cheap the authority of the old doctors, he had denied that the Apostles’ Creed was made by the Apostles, and at the same time he had magnified the office of reason – rather than singly of the Scriptures, or rather than singly of the Church – as an ultimate test. Accordingly, to this citation he appeared, armed with nine of his books, into which it must be confessed were introduced some newly conceived passages and some erasures. A committee of Bishops, to whom the matter was then referred, reported adversely; and after further disputation the archbishop offered Pecock his choice of making a public abjuration of his errors, or of being first degraded, and then delivered over to the secular arm “as the food of fire, and fuel for the burning.” He chose the abjuration: a preliminary confession was forthwith made, a written confession was added at Lambeth on the 3rd of December, and on the next day, Sunday, arrayed in his episcopal habit, in the presence of 20,000 persons, he knelt at the feet of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, Rochester, Durham, and of his “own pure and free will, and without any man’s coercion or dread,” made his recantation. In this he had declared that he presumed of his own natural wit to prefer the judgment of reason before the Testaments and the authority of the Church; had published many perilous doctrines and books containing enumerated heresies; and now considered himself grievously to have sinned and wickedly to have deceived the people of God, but returned to the unity of the mother Holy Church and renounced both the rehearsed heresies and all other “spices,” or kinds of heresy, and exhorted all men not to trust in his books, neither to keep or read them in any wise, but to bring them in haste to the Primate or his agents; in that he publicly assented that his books should be deputed unto the fire, and openly be burnt as an example and terror to all others. The recantation ended, a fire was kindled at the Cross. With his own hands Pecock delivered three folios and eleven quartos of his own composition to the executioner, who took and threw them in the flames, while the Bishop exclaimed aloud “My pride and presumption have brought upon me these troubles and these reproaches.” Little could he then think that in some future day England would, at public cost, republish the chief of the books his own lips had condemned.

But the punishment of Pecock did not end here. It was perhaps not much to him that the University of Oxford (which has consistently shown a spirit of illiberality, or at least a burning disposition, throughout its eras almost down to the present age) should in solemn procession, its Chancellor at its head, march to a place where four roads met – the Quatre-voix or Carfax – and there burn to ashes every copy of his works on which hands could be laid. But, deprived of his bishopric, it was necessary that directions should be given for his personal fare. These came to the Abbot of Thorney, to whose Cambridgeshire Abbey the cleric was sent. He was to live for ever in one closed chamber, so contrived that he might hear Mass; to be attended by one sad man to make his bed; to be forbidden all books but a breviary, a mass-book, a psalter, a legend, and a Bible; to be refused any thing to write with or on; but to be allowed a sufficiency of food and fire. And in this dolorous state there is all reason to suppose his closing days were spent.74

It is recorded of St. Briccius, that when a boy he saw the devil behind the altar, noting the misdemeanors of people on a piece of parchment. This seems to have stirred in him a desire for parchment that he in turn might write; but so firmly did the devil by his teeth stick to the stolen goods, that on the achievement of mastery by his juvenile but saintly competitor, the horny, wicked head was knocked against the wall, at which painful juncture St. Martin, ever valorous, so conjured the devil that he caused him willy nilly to blot out what he had written. What then, one wonders, was the devil’s code of which the people’s acts were breaches. What his diabolic, though discarded standard? The prescience of St. Briccius or St. Martin would doubtless be required to tell. But it is plain he too is fabled as possessed with desire to bend the will of men in obedience to some crystallized tradition, some extraneous rule. And yet, what is this principle of tradition, this authority-binding, which in this form and that defeats equally Fanny Burney or Gray, Shelley, Southey, or Selden? It is something which, no matter what its ineptness to the circumstances of the present, cannot yield; which is made up of the circumstances of the past, and has in its whole as much as in every shred the inevitability of the past, which pushes by informed private judgment and reason – perhaps on the wiser plea that, ourselves a product of the past, the accumulated and sifted wisdom of that past, the residue of eclecticism on eclecticism, must be most appropriate to guide; or else perhaps on the more foolish, that makes a creed osseous in one infinitely remote exercise of one man’s inspired thoughts. As if, in the latter alternative, the very strength was not the very weakness of the argument which reduces after all everything to single and perhaps sullied private judgment; and as if in the former the very strength was not again the very weakness of the argument which cuts off arbitrarily as the last point of systematized knowledge (more often not at the last) its own method of history. For does it not result that if it be truly said, there is nothing new under the sun, there must in all cases be selection, and if selection be thus the real principle of action, why is some portion of accessible knowledge, some portion even of received knowledge, to be cast without the bounds of usable materials, as though to prohibit us too perchance, from strengthening that uniformity or preponderance in independent selections to which tradition owes its strength? Thirlwall may act as Pecock, and Beddoes as Fitzgerald – but both the virtue of action and the virtue of restraint are lost.

Herodotus, if we may believe Blakesley and Professor Sayce, though the “Father of History,” by no means illustrates tradition at its best. Different, however, would it be, could we make up our minds, backed by the later authority of Canon Rawlinson to side in this perennial contest with Henri Estienne. This scholar in preparing an edition of that ancient traveller took occasion to maintain that his author was the reporter of things fabulous to an extent far less than was generally supposed. Hearing that of this defence, which was written in Latin, it was proposed to make a translation into French, he determined, as an old critic says, to become now a traditore, as he had formerly early been a traduttore, and to render his own work. But if this was his original purpose, he immediately lost sight of it. He took up, in fact, his argument thus: – From the unlikelihood of an event it is unreasonable to conclude against it: Herodotus may have reported things true, in presenting unlikely tales, otherwise, we must banish a prodigious amount of incontestable but absurd matter, though much of this character has occurred of late, especially in popery, as I proceed to instance in anecdotes which objectors may style apocryphal, fables they will call malicious, and chronicles they are certain to brand as scandalous. Now, this was clearly of intolerable bearing. And according to Tollius, its upshot was that Estienne was burnt in effigy at Paris; though, having fled to the mountains of Auvergne, and being in the thick of winter, he was enabled to chuckle at his joke that he never was so cold as when he was being burnt, a joke the authenticity of which late commentators might perhaps have less readily impeached had they remembered that Antonio de Dominis had used it, as he too for writing an unappreciated book was consumed in effigy at Rome, while he lay shivering with the cold of a November at sea and a fugitive’s fears at heart. Certain it is that at Geneva Estienne met with repulse. For the archives of that state show that late in 1566, on his first applying for a license to expose for sale his “Apologie pour Herodote,” he was directed to amend “certains feulletz où il y a des propos vilains et parlans trop évidemment des princes en mal” and that after these amendments were duly made he deliberately encouraged the suppression of his work, by taking advantage of an imperfect piratical edition, appearing at Lyons, to add without license the famous “Avertissement” with its tables or indexes, which drew down upon him imprisonment, followed quickly by enlargement coupled with conspicuous deprivation of the Eucharist on one occasion – if that be the meaning of “pour punition, privé de la cène, pour une fois.”

With consequences more radical, but with either far more boldness or far less wit, Camille Desmoulins upwards of two centuries after courted the suppression, not indeed of a book, but of life. It was full four years since he had learnt that the parliament of Toulouse had hurried to the flames his “La Libre France,” when entering the Jacobin Club, just two days after the publication of the fifth number of his Vieux Cordelier, he heard the question being for the third time put, whether he should be expelled. His presence quelling in no measure the rising anger, Robespierre, desirous to stay the wrath of the Jacobins by sacrificing the work to save the author, spoke. “Camille,” said he with dryness, and that air of patronage which the simulation of a tempered passion carries, “is a spoilt child; he had a good disposition; bad company has led him astray.” “We must,” urged he, concluding, “deal vigorously with these numbers, which even Brissot would not have dared to acknowledge, but we must keep Desmoulins among us. I demand, for example’s sake, that these numbers be burnt before this society.” But with what surprise did the echo of this speech, proceeding clearly, and accompanied with indignant flash of eye, greet him – “Bravo, Robespierre; but I will answer with Rousseau, To burn is not to answer.” Strange retort! Had pride so dulled perception, or surprise with one stroke slain confidence in all? No wonder that not less the change of time than the terms, the very measuredness of the answering words bidding Camille learn that he was treated with indulgence, and disclosing that his mode of justification would be held to show that the worst import of his writings was designed, left in him a sense that his present non-expulsion, even the restoration of the title of “Cordelier,” had no security. The lull was false, Desmoulins was lost.

Concession to honest criticism was received with not more tact by Richelieu than by Desmoulins. It is true that in the Cardinal’s case the upshot, perilous as it seemed to one of the grand supports of dramatic literature, was merely ludicrous – but it may also be true that that was because the appeal was indeed through the intellect, but to the passive, not the active powers of man. The Cardinal was dramatist, and had carried politics into comedy by making the characters called France, Spain, or names of other States develop the fortunes of “Europe.” Anxious to get the countenance of the Academy, which his energies had lately organized, he sent the piece to them, that any errors in the rules of the style or poetry might be corrected. The Academy fulfilled their task, criticising so severely that scarcely a line was left unaltered. The Cardinal – but I may as well adopt the tale as Noël d’Argonne tells it.

The Cardinal, to whom it was brought back in this condition, was so enraged, that he tore it on the spot, and threw it in pieces into the hearth. This was in summer, and fortunately there was no fire in the hearth. The Cardinal went to bed; but he felt the tenderness of a father for his dear Europe; he regretted having used it so cruelly; and calling up his secretary, he ordered him to collect with care the papers from the chimney, and to go and look whether he could find any paste in the house – adding that in all probability he would find some starch with the women who took charge of his linen. The secretary went to their apartment; and having found what he wanted, he spent the greater part of the night with the Cardinal in trying to paste together the dismembered comedy. Next morning he had it recopied in his presence, and changed almost every one of the corrections of the Academy, affecting, at the same time, to retain a few of the least important. He sent it back to them the same day by Boisrobert, and told them they would perceive how much he had profited by their criticisms; but as all men were liable to err, he had not thought it necessary to follow them implicitly. The Academy, who had learned the vexation of the Cardinal, took care not to retouch the piece, and returned it to him with their unanimous approbation.

It seems a pity that after so much care and tenderness the play should have been produced along with “The Cid,” and that the audience, less manageable than the Academy, on the announcement that “Europe” would be repeated the next day, murmured their wish for Corneille’s piece. But the influence he sought to throw upon the fortunes of the Cid there can be no need to recount to Englishmen. Only it is clear that Richelieu was more like Cicero than Virgil, the former of whom indeed affected to be desirous of burning some productions, but was easily diverted by pleasant flattery; but the latter of whom, after having bestowed the labor of twelve years on his immortal poem, was genuinely conscious of imperfections which so few beside himself could have perceived, that in his last moments he ordered it to be committed to the flames, a fate evaded only by disregard of his solemn testamentary injunction. It is equally clear that Richelieu had not the plea of neglect and undeserved disfavor felt in its extreme by William Collins. For his odes, first published in 1747, crept slowly into notice, were spoken of indifferently by his acquaintance Dr. Johnson, and met with feeble praise from Gray. The while the author was sensible of their beauty, and so deeply felt the coldness with which they were received, that he obtained from his publisher the unsold copies and burnt them with his own hand. “If then his highly finished productions brought back but disappointment,” hypothesises Mr. Thomas Miller, “how thankful he must have felt that he had not committed himself further by sending into the world such works as his own fine taste condemned! We believe that when he had completed his ”Ode on the Passions,” he knew he had produced a poem which ought to live forever, for we cannot conceive that the mind which erected so imperishable a fabric could have a doubt of its durability.” Alas! an immortality which sees no origin in præsenti– how burdensome it is to bear.75

It was the conviction of “Messieurs de Port Royal” that in the denial of self was a tower of moral strength; and in this denial of self they included a true abnegation of the glories of authorship. “If any work for God were well done,” said St. Cyran, “it was the Divine Grace which had effectually co-operated to its performance, and the human instrument was nothing, and less than nothing.” With this there was not one of his colleagues unwilling practically to show that he agreed – Pascal least of all. What greater instance of literary modesty can be alleged than the destruction by him of his treatise on geometry, upon his learning that Arnauld had prepared the volume given to the world in 1667 as “Elements” of that subject and his seeing its fitness for the Port Royal schools? With most it would be much easier to apply the system of Naugerius, who loving Catullus, but hating Martial, set apart one day that every year he might sacrifice by fire a copy of the works of one epigrammatist to the manes of the other. It is only fair to add that Naugerius, who died while on an embassy to Francis I. in 1529, destroyed shortly before his death a history of his native city, Venice, carried forward from 1486, which he had himself compiled, and submitted to the same effective purging a considerable proportion of his own poetic compositions.

At this point I conclude. I perceive indeed that there remains scattered through literature unused material of interest, and even that motives to self-suppression of several entire classes have been here unexemplified. But of this we might feel confident, that the more and more this subject were opened up, personal as it appears to the authors themselves, the more and more would one be struck with the duty of the State, and no less than of the State of professed critics and of friends of the hearth, not only not to discourage the expressions of genius if even somewhat errant, but where there is the true appeal – then, as Walpole says, to hasten to praise. —Gentleman’s Magazine.