The Evolution of a Familiar Quotation
— The business of literature is to find truth; and nothing is so but a poet shall some time get hold of it. And what was old yesterday is lost to-day, and shall bo set up for a startling novelty to-morrow. It was, we suppose, apparent to Adam that the worst element in his exile was the Paradise which had been. From him it is a far cry to Tennyson’s
Is remembering happier things.”
It is not uninteresting to make a partial list (for what reader extant knows the full roll-call ?) of the lessees of this pathetic idea, a favorite one in the Latin literatures. Dante’s Francesca utters it magnificently in her Nessun maggior dolore of the Fifth Canto : —
Of joy, when misery is at hand.”
One of the German commentators, on the watch for analogies, compares this with the beginning of the famous and beautiful speech Virgil assigns to Æneas, —
as we cannot but think, erroneously ; for Æneas means only that to speak of old wounds opens them afresh. Seneca’s “ Nemo miser est, nisi comparatus ” is a much closer prototype. Boethius thought it out, in his time, “that in any hard pass of fortune, the most bitter thing to the unfortunate one is to have been happy, and to be so no longer.” Chaucer, in his Troilus and Cressida, makes a conscious copy of Boethius : —
The worst kind of infortuné is this:
A man that hath been in prosperitie,
And it remember when it passed is.”
A couple of centuries later than Dante, his countryman, Marini, sings what we venture to translate as
Till she recall old bliss between the throes.”
And promptly he is followed by Fortiguerra with a yet prosier couplet : —
Grief now feels all the more forsaken ; ”
but not before some brilliant Englishmen had got ahead of him. Beaumont and Fletcher put on the lips of their Baptista, —
Margaret of Anjou had been thinking this, though she did not fully express it, when she cried to the widow of King Edward, in Shakespeare’s Richard III., —
A contemporary of the Elizabethans, Bishop Jean Bertaut, uses the old saw with charming idiomatic grace : —
Qui ne peut rerenir,
Tourment de ma pensée,
Que n’ai-je, en fit peril ant, perdu le souvenir ?
George Wither, in his very lovely Shepherd’s Hunting, sighs over
That more makes than mends my grief ; ”
and again, ludicrously enough, but graphically, in Fidelia : —
As the remembrance of those joys I had.”
Drummond of Hawthornden has left us one sweet archaic line in a sonnet : —
In the Georgian day, Blair, in The Grave, embodied the same sentiment : —
Not to return, how painful the remembrance ! ”
After which Lord Tennyson’s music fills the air, and settles the shape in which a very ancient conviction shall forever be quoted. Observe how ornate, yet how obvious, is its last rendering. The order of development has not always been in the due chronological line ; the actual data of our search are of small value ; but in point of excellence and permanence it looks as if the laureate’s verses may stand as representative of the other twelve. It is to be noted that he sets out to quote his passage, not to recast it; to praise Dante, not to bury him. Still, to English readers, he supersedes his master, and the haunting memory of his words must color all that shall be said upon the subject hereafter ; must eventually drown out, even to a scholar, the fair and serviceable sayings both of Beaumont and Fletcher and of Drummond. Difficult is the task of the aspiring soul of the twentieth century who would fain philosophize on the sadness of lost gladness. It may have been a comfort once to give an intelligent groan without feeling that you were doing it out of a book. But that privilege was sacred to Adam aforesaid. For the present, modern retrospective repiners, who are hard up, indeed, inasmuch as they can revert to better days, have nothing to do but to quote Tennyson. As poets will, he steals the plaint out of our mouths, and makes us forget that anybody ever “ said his good things before him.”