Part 12 (1/2)
THE MISERIES OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COMMENTATOR.
DR. ZACHARY GREY, the editor of ”Hudibras,” is the father of our modern commentators.[74] His case is rather peculiar; I know not whether the father, by an odd antic.i.p.ation, was doomed to suffer for the sins of his children, or whether his own have been visited on the third generation; it is certain that never was an author more overpowered by the attacks he received from the light and indiscriminating shafts of ignorant wits. He was ridiculed and abused for having a.s.sisted us to comprehend the wit of an author, which, without that aid, at this day would have been nearly lost to us; and whose singular subject involved persons and events which required the very thing he gave,--historical and explanatory notes.
A first thought, and all the danger of an original invention, which is always imperfectly understood by the superficial, was poor Dr. Grey's merit. He was modest and laborious, and he had the sagacity to discover what Butler wanted, and what the public required. His project was a happy thought, to commentate on a singular work which has scarcely a parallel in modern literature, if we except the ”Satyre Menippee” of the French, which is, in prose, the exact counterpart of ”Hudibras” in rhyme; for our rivals have had the same state revolution, in which the same dramatic personages pa.s.sed over their national stage, with the same incidents, in the civil wars of the ambitious Guises, and the citizen-reformers. They, too, found a Butler, though in prose, a Grey in Duchat, and, as well as they could, a Hogarth. An edition, which appeared in 1711, might have served as the model of Grey's Hudibras.
It was, however, a happy thought in our commentator, to turn over the contemporary writers to collect the events and discover the personages alluded to by Butler; to read what the poet read, to observe what the poet observed. This was at once throwing himself and the reader back into an age, of which even the likeness had disappeared, and familiarising us with distant objects, which had been lost to us in the haze and mists of time. For this, not only a new mode of travelling, but a new road was to be opened; the secret history, the fugitive pamphlet, the obsolete satire, the ancient comedy--such were the many curious volumes whose dust was to be cleared away, to cast a new radiance on the fading colours of a moveable picture of manners; the wittiest ever exhibited to mankind. This new mode of research, even at this moment, is imperfectly comprehended, still ridiculed even by those who could never have understood a writer who will only be immortal in the degree he is comprehended--and whose wit could not have been felt but for the laborious curiosity of him whose ”reading”
has been too often aspersed for ”such reading”
As was never read.
Grey was outrageously attacked by all the wits, first by Warburton, in his preface to Shakspeare, who declares that ”he hardly thinks there ever appeared so execrable a heap of nonsense under the name of commentaries, as hath been lately given us on a certain satyric poet of the last age.” It is odd enough, Warburton had himself contributed towards these very notes, but, for some cause which has not been discovered, had quarrelled with Dr. Grey. I will venture a conjecture on this great conjectural critic. Warburton was always meditating to give an edition of his own of our old writers, and the sins he committed against Shakspeare he longed to practise on Butler, whose times were, indeed, a favourite period of his researches. Grey had antic.i.p.ated him, and though Warburton had half reluctantly yielded the few notes he had prepared, his proud heart sickened when he beheld the amazing subscription Grey obtained for his first edition of ”Hudibras;” he received for that work 1500_l._[75]--a proof that this publication was felt as a want by the public.
Such, however, is one of those blunt, dogmatic censures in which Warburton abounds, to impress his readers with the weight of his opinions; this great man wrote more for effect than any other of our authors, as appears by his own or some friend's confession, that if his edition of Shakspeare did no honour to that bard, this was not the design of the commentator--which was only to do honour to himself by a display of his own exuberant erudition.
The poignant Fielding, in his preface to his ”Journey to Lisbon,” has a fling at the gravity of our doctor. ”The laborious, much-read Dr. Z.
Grey, of whose redundant notes on 'Hudibras' I shall only say that it is, I am confident, the single book extant in which above 500 authors are quoted, not one of which could be found in the collection of the late Dr. Mead.” Mrs. Montague, in her letters, severely characterises the miserable father of English commentators; she wrote in youth and spirits, with no knowledge of books, and _before_ even the unlucky commentator had published his work, but wit is the bolder by antic.i.p.ation. She observes that ”his dulness may be a proper ballast for doggrel; and it is better that his stupidity should make jest dull than serious and sacred things ridiculous;” alluding to his numerous theological tracts.
Such then are the hard returns which some authors are doomed to receive as the rewards of useful labours from those who do not even comprehend their nature; a wit should not be admitted as a critic till he has first proved by his gravity, or his dulness if he chooses, that he has some knowledge; for it is the privilege and nature of wit to write fastest and best on what it least understands. Knowledge only enc.u.mbers and confines its flights.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Dr. Zachary Grey was throughout a long life a busy contributor to literature. The mere list of his productions, in divinity and history, occupy some pages of our biographical dictionaries. He was born 1687, and died at Ampthill, in Bedfords.h.i.+re, in 1766. In private he was noted for mild and pleasing manners. His ”Hudibras,” which was first published in 1744, in two octavo volumes, is now the standard edition.--ED.
[75] Cole's MSS.
THE LIFE OF AN AUTh.o.r.eSS.
Of all the sorrows in which the female character may partic.i.p.ate, there are few more affecting than those of an auth.o.r.ess;--often insulated and unprotected in society--with all the sensibility of the s.e.x, encountering miseries which break the spirits of men; with the repugnance arising from that delicacy which trembles when it quits its retirement.
My acquaintance with an unfortunate lady of the name of ELIZA RYVES, was casual and interrupted; yet I witnessed the bitterness of ”hope deferred, which maketh the heart sick.” She sunk, by the slow wastings of grief, into a grave which probably does not record the name of its martyr of literature.
She was descended from a family of distinction in Ireland; but as she expressed it, ”she had been deprived of her birthright by the chicanery of law.” In her former hours of tranquillity she had published some elegant odes, had written a tragedy and comedies--all which remained in MS. In her distress she looked up to her pen as a source of existence; and an elegant genius and a woman of polished manners commenced the life of a female trader in literature.
Conceive the repulses of a modest and delicate woman in her attempts to appreciate the value of a ma.n.u.script with its purchaser. She has frequently returned from the booksellers to her dreadful solitude to hasten to her bed--in all the bodily pains of misery, she has sought in uneasy slumbers a temporary forgetfulness of griefs which were to recur on the morrow. Elegant literature is always of doubtful acceptance with the public, and Eliza Ryves came at length to try the most masculine exertions of the pen. She wrote for one newspaper much political matter; but the proprietor was too great a politician for the writer of politics, for he only praised the labour he never paid; much poetry for another, in which, being one of the correspondents of Della Crusca, in payment of her verses she got nothing but verses; the most astonis.h.i.+ng exertion for a female pen was the entire composition of the historical and political portion of some Annual Register. So little profitable were all these laborious and original efforts, that every day did not bring its ”daily bread.” Yet even in her poverty her native benevolence could make her generous; for she has deprived herself of her meal to provide with one an unhappy family dwelling under the same roof.
Advised to adopt the mode of translation, and being ignorant of the French language, she retired to an obscure lodging at Islington, which she never quitted till she had produced a good version of Rousseau's ”Social Compact,” Raynal's ”Letter to the National a.s.sembly,” and finally translated De la Croix's ”Review of the Const.i.tutions of the princ.i.p.al States in Europe,” in two large volumes with intelligent notes. All these works, so much at variance with her taste, left her with her health much broken, and a mind which might be said to have nearly survived the body.
Yet even at a moment so unfavourable, her ardent spirit engaged in a translation of Froissart. At the British Museum I have seen her conning over the magnificent and voluminous MS. of the old chronicler, and by its side Lord Berners' version, printed in the reign of Henry VIII. It was evident that his lords.h.i.+p was employed as a spy on Froissart, to inform her of what was going forward in the French camp; and she soon perceived, for her taste was delicate, that it required an ancient lord and knight, with all his antiquity of phrase, to break a lance with the still more ancient chivalric Frenchman. The familiar elegance of modern style failed to preserve the picturesque touches and the _nave_ graces of the chronicler, who wrote as the mailed knight combated--roughly or gracefully, as suited the tilt or the field. She vailed to Lord Berners; while she felt it was here necessary to understand old French, and then to write it in old English.[76] During these profitless labours hope seemed to be whispering in her lonely study. Her comedies had been in possession of the managers of the theatres during several years. They had too much merit to be rejected, perhaps too little to be acted. Year pa.s.sed over year, and the last still repeated the treacherous promise of its brother. The mysterious arts of procrastination are by no one so well systematised as by the theatrical manager, nor its secret sorrows so deeply felt as by the dramatist. One of her comedies, _The Debt of Honour_, had been warmly approved at both theatres--where probably a copy of it may still be found. To the honour of one of the managers, he presented her with a hundred pounds on his acceptance of it. Could she avoid then flattering herself with an annual harvest?
But even this generous gift, which involved in it such golden promises, could not for ten years preserve its delusion. ”I feel,”
said Eliza Ryves, ”the necessity of some powerful patronage, to bring my comedies forward to the world with _eclat_, and secure them an admiration which, should it even be deserved, is seldom bestowed, unless some leading judge of literary merit gives the sanction of his applause; and then the world will chime in with his opinion, without taking the trouble to inform themselves whether it be founded in justice or partiality.” She never suspected that her comedies were not comic!--but who dare hold an argument with an ingenious mind, when it reasons from a right principle, with a wrong application to itself? It is true that a writer's connexions have often done a great deal for a small author, and enabled some favourites of literary fas.h.i.+on to enjoy a usurped reputation; but it is not so evident that Eliza Ryves was a comic writer, although, doubtless, she appeared another Menander to herself. And thus an author dies in a delusion of self-flattery!
The character of Eliza Ryves was rather tender and melancholy, than brilliant and gay; and like the bruised perfume--breathing sweetness when broken into pieces. She traced her sorrows in a work of fancy, where her feelings were at least as active as her imagination. It is a small volume, ent.i.tled ”The Hermit of Snowden.” Albert, opulent and fas.h.i.+onable, feels a pa.s.sion for Lavinia, and meets the kindest return; but, having imbibed an ill opinion of women from his licentious connexions, he conceived they were slaves of pa.s.sion, or of avarice. He wrongs the generous nature of Lavinia, by suspecting her of mercenary views; hence arise the perplexities of the hearts of both. Albert affects to be ruined, and spreads the report of an advantageous match. Lavinia feels all the delicacy of her situation; she loves, but ”she never told her love.” She seeks for her existence in her literary labours, and perishes in want.
In the character of Lavinia, our auth.o.r.ess, with all the melancholy sagacity of genius, foresaw and has described her own death!--the dreadful solitude to which she was latterly condemned, when in the last stage of her poverty; her frugal mode of life; her acute sensibility; her defrauded hopes; and her exalted fort.i.tude. She has here formed a register of all that occurred in her solitary existence.