Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature (17 page)
One indication of the midcentury canonization of Donne is the proliferation of titles of works of fiction and memoir taken from his works. Thomas Merton’s
No Man Is an Island
, Ernest Hemingway’s
For Whom
the Bell Tolls
(both allusions to the same work, Donne’s “Meditation XVI”), John Gunther’s memoir of his son’s early death from cancer,
Death Be Not Proud
—all of these have become classics in their genres. Like Shakespeare, and unlike Spenser and Dryden, Donne crossed over into the allusive mainstream with not even a pair of quotation marks needed to distinguish his seventeenth-century phrases from the lingua franca of modern culture.
I’ve instanced the fluctuating critical fortunes of Donne’s poetry as one example of lost and found. Another, equally canonical, might be the forgetting and the subsequent remembering or re-creating of Chaucer’s metrics and scansion. For many years, poets, critics, and readers misunderstood the verse of
The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde
, and other major poems by this foundational English author. Signally, readers like Dryden failed to understand that the “final e” was sounded (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”), until the scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt (1720–86) identified what one literary history of the period called “the strange delusion of nearly three centuries.”
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Thus Dryden could write, famously (and erroneously):
equality of numbers in every verse which we call
heroic
, was either not known, or not always practiced in Chaucer’s age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses, which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men.
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This passage from the preface to Dryden’s
Fables Ancient and Modern
, suggesting that the history of literature is a “progress narrative,” starting with the primitive past and progressing to a more sophisticated or grown-up present (that category in motion called modernity), will ultimately be proved a fable. Not that Dryden thought Chaucer wasn’t literature—quite the contrary, he was “the father of English poetry,” to be regarded in the same honorific light “as the Grecians held Homer, or
the Romans Virgil.” Nonetheless, Dryden undertook to translate Chaucer, turning his tales “into modern English,” despite the objections of some that Chaucer was “dry, old-fashioned wit” not worth the effort, and the complaints of others that much of the beauty of the text would be lost. To the latter, he replied roundly that “not only their beauty, but their being is lost, where they are no longer understood, which is the present case. I grant that something must be lost in all transfusion, that is, in all translations; but the sense will remain, which would otherwise be lost, or, at least, be maimed, when it is scarce intelligible, and that but to a few. How few are there who can read Chaucer so as to understand him perfectly? And if imperfectly, then with less profit, and no pleasure.”
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Dryden accused the purists, who argued that one should read Chaucer in the original or not at all, of being like misers who hoard up their treasures rather than spending or sharing them. He was pleased, though, to note that “Mademoiselle de Scudéry” was at the same time translating Chaucer into modern French (though he speculated that she must be using an old Provençal translation, “for how she should come to understand old English, I know not”). Still, the moment seemed fated: “that, after certain periods of time, the fame and memory of great Wits should be renewed.”
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The example of Donne is one kind of rediscovery of a lost or neglected text, and the example of Chaucer’s metrics, another. But what happens when the text supposedly lost from one era and found in another is discovered to be a new creation? One striking example took place at the end of the eighteenth century, when a teenage boy living in Bristol, England, produced (on parchment or vellum), circulated, and published poems supposedly written by a fifteenth-century priest—poems that, even after the imposture was detected, attracted the attention and admiration of several major Romantic poets.
The young poet was Thomas Chatterton, whose tragic early death—he poisoned himself with arsenic at the age of seventeen, despairing of success in London, starving, and unwilling to return in defeat to Bristol—was surely part of his romantic appeal. Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems, attributed to the fifteenth-century personage Thomas Rowley, were much superior, critics have agreed, to the modern poems written
in his own voice and name. He had access to a number of old pieces of parchment and to a mysterious chest of documents in the Bristol church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and in his early teens, he set about, imaginatively and industriously, creating for himself a history and a lexicon for Rowley’s ancient writings. Interestingly, his Rowley dictionary was based to a significant extent on the glossary to the same edition of Chaucer (edited by Thomas Speght in 1598) that had led John Dryden to conclude that Chaucer’s metrics were irregular and deficient. Another of Chatterton’s sources, apparently, was the old spelling in Percy’s
Reliques
, a repository of early ballads from England and Scotland and which was published in 1765, just as Chatterton began to work on his Rowley project.
Chatterton committed suicide in 1770. Debates about the authenticity of the Rowley poems continued throughout the next decade, with almost all scholars and editors of the period attributing them to Chatterton. Horace Walpole jokingly called the poems Chatterton’s “trouvaille” in a conversation at the Royal Academy in 1771—though Oliver Goldsmith maintained that the poems were genuine and that Rowley was their author.
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Dr. Samuel Johnson, also present at this gathering, was “a stout unbeliever in Rowley, as he had been in Ossian,”
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the supposed author of a cycle of early Gaelic poems that the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have discovered in the Highlands of Scotland in the same years, and translated into English.
In 1776 Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell, traveled to Bristol; Boswell’s lively account of his learned friend’s investigations is worth quoting in some detail:
I was entertained with seeing him enquire upon the spot, into the authenticity of “Rowley’s Poetry,” as I had seen him enquire upon the spot into the authenticity of “Ossian’s Poetry.” George Catcot, the pewterer, who was as zealous for Rowley as Dr. Hugh Blair was for Ossian, (I trust my Reverend friend will excuse the comparison,) attended us at our inn, and with a triumphant air of lively simplicity called out, “I’ll make Dr. Johnson a convert.” Dr. Johnson, at his desire, read aloud some of Chatterton’s fabricated verses, while Catcot stood at the back of his chair, moving himself like a pendulum, and beating time with his feet, and now and then looking into Dr.
Johnson’s face, wondering that he was not yet convinced. We called on Mr. Barret, the surgeon, and saw some of the
originals
as they were called, which were executed very artificially; but from a careful inspection of them, and a consideration of the circumstances with which they were attended, we were quite satisfied of the imposture, which, indeed, has been clearly demonstrated by several able criticks.
Honest Catcot seemed to pay no attention whatever to any objections, but insisted, as an end of all controversy, that we should go with him to the tower of the church of St. Mary, Redcliff, and
view with our own eyes
the ancient chest in which the manuscripts were found. To this, Dr. Johnson good-naturedly agreed; and though troubled with a shortness of breathing, laboured up a long flight of steps, till we came to the place where the wondrous chest stood. “
There
, (said Catcot, with a bouncing confident credulity,)
there
is the very chest itself.” After this
ocular demonstration
, there was no more to be said. He brought to my recollection a Scotch Highlander, a man of learning too, and who had seen the world, attesting, and at the same time giving his reasons for the authenticity of Fingal:—“I have heard all that poem when I was young.”—“Have you, Sir? Pray what have you heard?”—“I have heard Ossian, Oscar, and
every one of them.
”
Johnson said of Chatterton, “This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.”
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Notice that the “ocular demonstration” of the supposed provenance of the poems is viewed, by both Boswell and Johnson, with the scorn it deserves. The chest is no more evidence of the authenticity of the documents than is the floor jabbed repeatedly by the tourists of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Henry James’s short story (“ ‘And is this really’—when they jam their umbrellas into the floor—‘the very
spot
where He was born?’ ”
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). What was required was textual evidence of authenticity, one way or another, which was shortly to be provided, as it happened, by the same Thomas Tyrwhitt who had edited Chaucer and corrected earlier impressions about the pronunciation of his verse. In 1777 Tyrwhitt produced an edition of
Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and others, in the fifteenth century
. In the third edition,
published a year later, he added—and issued as a separate publication—an
Appendix: containing some observations upon the language of the poems attributed to Rowley; tending to prove that they were written, not by any ancient author, but entirely by Thomas Chatterton
.
At the same time, though, we might note that Johnson, whatever his incredulity about Rowley, was quite willing to praise Chatterton, the poet Wordsworth would later call “the marvelous boy”
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to whom Keats would dedicate his “Endymion,” whose modern poems were so unsuccessful, became a sensation, beloved of the early Romantics, and a herald of the new medievalism that would interest Lamb, Hazlitt, Rossetti, and William Morris. Undoubtedly, his tragic death had something to do with it—Wordsworth describes him as “The sleepless soul that perished in his pride”—but Keats’s friend Benjamin Bailey stressed the fact that Keats was taken with Chatterton’s poetry:
Methinks I now hear him recite, or
chant
, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the “Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella”:
“Come with acorn cup & thorn,
Drain my hertys blood away;
Life & all its goods I scorn,
Dance by night or feast by day.”
The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; & in none more than in numerous passages of his Endymion.
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The issue of the authorship and authenticity of the Rowley poems continued to be debated in some circles at least until W. W. Skeat’s edition in 1871, a hundred and one years after Chatterton’s death. But we should note that by that time, the context was a volume called
The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, with an essay on the Rowley poems
. The “trouvaille” about which Walpole had jested, the “found” poems and “found” poet of the fifteenth century, were now proudly repackaged as the works of Chatterton. Somewhat ironically, we may think, Skeat’s introduction noted that the spelling in the longest and most important
of the Rowley poems had been modernized, an improvement he thought long overdue, “so as to render them at last, after the lapse of a century, accessible
for the first time
to the general public.”
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The inventive orthography that had distinguished these poems as “authentically” of the fifteenth century, painstakingly gleaned by Chatterton from a Chaucer glossary, from the ballads collected by Bishop Percy, and from the words marked
obsolete
in two etymological dictionaries, was now, by an editorial decision about accessibility to the general public, made to disappear.
As for the fictional Ossian (the same Celtic hero Yeats would write of as Oisin), James Macpherson had claimed that he translated authentic documents written by a third-century Irish bard. No manuscripts were ever produced or found, and Dr. Johnson, never a fan of Scots or Scotland, famously (and accurately) accused Macpherson of “imposture.”
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Chatterton died a spectacular death and become a celebrity; Macpherson lived almost till the end of the eighteenth century, traveled briefly to Florida, worked for Lord North’s government, wrote history, and ended as a member of Parliament, buried in Westminster Abbey a short distance from his detractor, Dr. Johnson. But
The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal
, purportedly translated and edited by Macpherson, would continue to appear from 1765 through the end of the following century, usually reprinted with an essay by Hugh Blair, a celebrated professor of rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, defending the authenticity of the works.
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Ossian’s other admirers included Walter Scott, the young J. W. von Goethe (who translated sections of it for
The Sorrows of Young Werther
), Johann Gottfried von Herder, and the emperor Napoleon (who read the works in Italian translation). The enthusiastic Napoleon forthwith commissioned Ingres to paint a canvas called
The Dream of Ossian
, and many other painters found inspiration in the topic in the early years of the nineteenth century, producing representations of
Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of a Harp
, and
Ossian Receiving Napoleonic Officers
. Not only had Ossian become literature, his work produced other literature; indeed, it produced or generated national literatures. Lost or found? Imposture though Ossian might be, this “found” poet had a huge effect on the spread of European romantic
nationalism. The fame and influence of his poetry extended from Scotland to France, Germany, and Hungary. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde owes his first two names to the heroes of Ossianic poems—and in his own compelling fiction about forgery and poetry, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” he cites both Chatterton and Macpherson.
