Literature Through a Knothole: A Preface to Bartlett

I

WHAT makes words memorable? It would be useful if we knew, but I doubt we ever shall. The subtle adhesions of adult memory are unintentional and unconscious; that is the true Learning by Heart we were told of in school, when they really meant Learning by Rote. Grown minds have an abated regard for the operations of conscious intelligence. We have found (in many a secret surprise) that the images which sink deepest are often those we scarcely knew, at the time, we were noticing at all. Like a skillful diver, they went through the outer film of sense with very little splash.

The mind has a delicate property of surface tension, a retracting and tightening function, which creates a superficial envelope against too easy interruption or dispersion of the precious Me within. Whatever somehow punctures that protection is latent for memory. All we dare say about it is that it satisfies some inner necessity of our own, whether it be Milton or Eddie Guest. It is most likely to be metrical, because we are ourselves. Well did the word ‘incantation,’ meaning speech singable, come to assume the suggestion of witchcraft. One can melodize words for years without stopping to consider how silly they are. Who cares? The magic happens: —

The iniquity of oblivion — willfully translating Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase to mean the unfairness of man’s forgettings — weighs heavy on anthologists. In Bartlett the problem is at least double: not only to preserve as many as possible of those Household Words which were the original editor’s prime search, but to seize also some of the Mindhold Words (even of our own day) which the world hardly yet knows it has absorbed. This is in no sense a collection of personal choices. It is foremost a salvage of those words which users of the English tongue have shown evidence not willingly to let die. This involves a debatable proportion of adipose sentiment and mediocre art — certainly not the least valuable part of the work for any student of intellectual coefficients. The Public must love bad verse, it reads so much of it. It is not often that one finds the

or

One of the pleasures of this reëditing has been that one collaborator, by long experience with inquiries for the affable familiar ghosts of print, knows acutely what readers want; and the other believes himself to know what they ought to want. They have striven for a happy compromise; in the final decisions I must take full responsibility.

So we have here, within evident fallibilities, a viva voce of English confession from Cædmon, bashful in the byre, down to Nathalia Crane, equally bashful at the paper-box factory in Brooklyn. Chronological arrangement sets the whole story in perspective. My own choice would be to read backward, beginning with moods familiar to-day and tracing upstream and uphill to the far woodlands where still tingles the voice of that first cuckoo-singer. When I was a boy in Baltimore I used to hear often of a place called Blue Ridge Summit. I never went there; it would probably disillusion; but what a picture of mystic beauty was in the name! To this day I think of the earliest masters of our tongue as not merely a beginning but also a goal. Chaucer is to me truly a Blue Ridge Summit. No poet was in the least astonished by Professor Einstein’s pronouncements about the relativity of Time. We knew it always: here is Chaucer thinking the very thoughts that come to us, so hot and immediate and self-englamoured, to-day of days. It is not we who think, but life that thinks us, and Chaucer seems more modern to me than most radio announcers.

(In fact I’m not at all sure that the present era is ‘modern’ at all. We seem to be sliding rapidly into mediævalism, the Thirty Years’ War kind of thing. The poets are the most savage historians. There have been plenty who thought ‘The world falls asunder, being old’ — and ends ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ And in this preface, by the way, I’m going to quote whatever comes into my head without always grieving to identify. I’ve done enough identifying for a lifetime.)

II

You don’t labor in a Pandect like this without perceiving that it’s not just a scrapbook of belles-lettres, but also a sort of anthropology; a social history; a diary of the race. Here are the Now It’s Got To Be Tolds of a good many generations. What is the quality of permanence that makes it worth-while to pack in our scanty baggage, for one more trudging hike forward, the remarks of our predecessors? Man is a sententious animal, splendid in syllables and pompous in afterthought; nothing makes so bewildered an impression on him as the disparity between his words and his behavior. He shrewdly learns not to put too much of what he thinks into writing, lest he be held responsible. Therefore he is the more astonished, touched with delight and compunction, when he observes that what he himself had hidden someone else has uncovered. Having learned so much of the cunning of concealment, he is fit to appreciate the joy of exposure. One of the most appealing phases of the entertainment called Literature is a psychological strip-tease.

It would be hard to aver which gives us more pleasure when we find it in print: what we wanted to say, or what we wanted not to say. The most familiar dictum of course is that of Pope: —

Our satisfaction lies in that delicate divergence between the words before us and the words we ourselves would have used for the same thought (if we had had the same thought). We must not quite have had it; but we must have been troubled by its approach. The happy man lives subconsciously to-day among thoughts that he will render articulate to-morrow. Nothing is more exciting (you can see hints and murmurs of it in all sorts of places) than to watch the world getting ready to think ideas quite different from those it is at the moment openly proclaiming.

A book like this can be the bliss of solitude; but solitude is chiefly a bliss when it can be terminated at will. Probably the ‘quality of permanence’ is most often found in those passages that strike through into the central loneliness of the heart, for which it scarcely expected any relief. Rilke, the brilliant young German, once said, ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’ And literature is at its happiest in that function of companionship. It offers us the verification of our own secrets without any possible embarrassment. The same Rilke wrote a book, a very moving one for a few readers, called The Journal of My Other Self. I like to think that for some this Bartlett can be the journal of another self, continuing over some six or seven hundred years. Not just a work of reference, but a work of conference; a nest egg for the mind. I have occasionally imagined the editors as Huck and Tom on the raft, floating down the big river and trying to pull aboard, from so much miscellaneous jetsam, what would be enduringly useful.

The shock of accuracy is not the only quality that helps words to live; there is also the shock of surprise. And there is the haphazard contingent of mere chance. The great saying requires wit, occasion, and — good luck. Many such have undoubtedly gone into the record wrongly ascribed. Most of our hodiernal instinctive palavers were already old when Heywood collected them in 1546. As the title-page of a famous eighteenth-century volume of erotica put it: Prostant apud Neminem, sed tamen Ubique.¹ This can hardly be duly translated; as every lover of language knows, nothing ever can. One can render, but there is always a shrinkage in carrying across. The more volatile the wine, the more ullage.

Still pursuing — just for the joy of speculation — this quiddity of endurance in written thought. The pleasure of self-identification; the delight of ideas shrewdly or beautifully put; and then how about a certain overtone of sincerity? Hard to define, but recognizable to intuition. There has been much lamentation lately about the decline of poetry, the unintelligibility of modern verse, a general feeling that (as Roy Campbell said) the young poet is an angry man wearing his liver on his sleeve. Then one evening this spring I listened to the radio (I don’t often) and heard (feeling that significant chilblain on the withers) voices saying something new in a new way. It was Archibald MacLeish’s remarkable fable, The Fall of the City — the first time (I think) that a play in verse, written designedly for that oral medium, had been broadcast. Here was a true poet using a fresh technique with beauty and power, saying things of meaning, adapting all the resources of an ancient skill to the opportunities of to-day. The ear is an unsophistered recipient. Among so vast a listening there must have been many who were not likely to observe the conscious efficacy of the poet’s devices, or even his political wit, but they must have felt the thrill of that drama on the clairaudient nerve. I said to myself with delight, Here begins a whole new era for poetic drama. And I shall continue to disregard, as I always have, any grievances about the failure of the arts. True, they are painfully subject to imitative corruptions of mode, but (as the Chinaman said) in due season we are granted the artists we require; and they the emotions they need. The emotion comes first.

Sincerity — passion — the sense that the man has something to say — the old alarm, ‘There’s something burning’— these rise above, or make unnecessary, ‘pretty little tricks of style.’ How it pleases to hear Sir Walter Raleigh (the modern one, distinguished learner and teacher of letters) confess in a fine sonnet, ‘I never cared for literature as such.’ He continues: —

But there is one kind of writing, he says, that surely blasts our indifference: —

Of these personal outcries, wrung from men and women in the strong twist of life, there are plenty in Bartlett. There is also more laughter than you might suppose. The English-speaking peoples are considered sombre-minded, but they often have a way of making a joke when no one is listening. They even laugh at themselves, which makes it unanimous. It often strikes me as odd, by the way, that some of the most amusing books in the world have no reputation for humor. I have seen a roomful of people in the purest mirth over Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, which is not commonly thought of as a work of merriment. But, as Swift suggested in the ‘Voyage to Laputa,’ extracting sunshine from cucumbers is an unlikely project, and too many of the professionals of letters have the cucumber temperament. The sudden glory that maketh those grimaces called laughter (Hobbes) must always remain rare, though a man who retains any of the impressible gust of childhood can scarcely walk along a city street without at least a twitching cheek. But, taken in print, we are mostly a solemn crowd. As Dr. Johnson said of Pope’s grotto, ‘An Englishman has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun.’ And I think that in this new edition Bartlett is a little less gloomy than before. But old John Bartlett himself, as his letters show, had his lighter moments. His first edition appeared while he was a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and only a creature of humor can survive the difficulties of that exacting trade. Let the others hanker, as Jeremy Taylor said, for ‘strange flesh and heaps of money and popular noises.’

III

The arts, we were saying, are specially susceptible to changes of fashion. One of the prime values of chronological arrangement is that it’s possible to trace the diverse tastes, the prevailing moods, of different epochs; and to see how zigzag are the frontiers between periods which textbooks mark off (for convenience only) so net and clear. Everything has to be said all over again, in its own tone of voice, for each succeeding generation. (And thank goodness: if people realized, for instance, that almost everything conceivably sayable had been said in Montaigne, why should they ever buy another book?) I suppose it is natural for the very young to resent, or reject, the thought that everything has already been said; at any rate a strong instinct bids them listen to it only from some of their own kidney. Take for instance the note of lacrimae rerum. About every thirty or forty years some singer is likely to pluck that string with just the touch the human ear craves. Toward 1790 it was Robert Burns. In the 1820’s, Byron. About 1860 FitzGerald was adapting the tune from Omar. In the late nineties it was A. E. Housman; in the twenties of our own century, Miss Millay. It will be due again presently, and will be (quite rightly) hailed by its contemporaries as thrillingly new, poignant, unique.

In the condensation of Bartlett the reader has the pleasure of tracing down his own paths of affiliation and literary genealogy; and the rather frequent cross references often show the same thought expressed in different ways, which is the supreme vintage-tasting luxury of the connoisseur. I have smiled a good many times at a remark made by the publishers on the wrapper of a recent book of verse by a young writer. ‘——,’they said, ‘scorns the devices of his poetic elders.’ As if that were conceivably so of anyone sensitive enough, or grateful enough to our inheritance, to be worth the name of poet. Certainly no one ever undertook the task of editing an anthology without saluting old footprints in joy and reverence, as Chaucer himself did in that exquisite passage at the close of his Troilus. Let me quote a word from the king of critics in our lifetime, the magnificent Saintsbury, who spoke of ‘the most degrading of intellectual slaveries — that of the exclusive Present.’

So much may be said as reassurance for those who might have feared that our good old Bartlett had too violently Gone Modern. At the same time rather extensive clearances have been made. The job, I have said to myself many times, is really that of sweeping the hearth of literature. A menial service, in one sense, yet also in any civilized household an important one. We serve here, no matter how many the errors of judgment and oversight, as proxy for Posterity. It costs a pang to sweep out some worthy who ‘flourished’ in his time and was a hearty favorite fifty years ago but is plainly no longer necessary. (Humanity can’t go on carrying all its baggage forever.)

Ancient footnotes that have come downstream through former editions have often been dropped when they seemed pointless: one remembers the man (I forget who) described by Dr. Johnson as having ‘a rage for saying something when there was nothing to be said.’ A good many shrill huzzas from the patriots of ’76 (especially around Boston) have faded out, and perhaps some allusions to unfamiliar names such as Axel Oxenstiern and Von Münch Bellinghausen. Wordsworth’s bleatings when he was fecund rather than facund; lozenges from the original Smith Brothers (of the Rejected Addresses); lesser bits of Byron, once so fashionable; Robert Pollok, a meteor in his day and confidently consigned to immortality by his epitaph — how much of that sort of thing is still essential to this wallowing world? How about the mysterious ‘Miss Wrother,’ to whom Hope ‘told a flattering tale,’ but disappointment followed? Sometimes mere chance intervened to prolong someone’s foundering clutch on futurity. I was about to throw Letitia Landon overboard when Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas was nominated to the Presidency (in 1936). So I pulled L. E. L. back on to the raft as a small kindness toward keeping the name going. (L. E. L. may yet live longer than that candidacy.) Sometimes an old tidbit was left in with perhaps a little touch of malice, to emphasize the ironies of time—for instance Nat Willis’s ‘The Death of Harrison,’ who

But there are awkward questions to ask one’s self. How much of AuroraLeigh is still desirable? Who was Thomas Kibble Hervey, and how did he get into Bartlett, Tenth Edition, when his exact contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne did n’t? For there were some curious gaps in the Tenth Edition. No Herman Melville, no Emily Dickinson, no O. Henry — most astonishing of all, not a line of William Blake. Even De Quincey and Hazlitt appeared only in footnotes.

The questions we asked ourselves just above are ill to answer; however answered, there is sure to be grievance somewhere. In such a job one resigns one’s self to being the most reprobated editor in print. Perhaps even, to the observer twenty-three years hence, present oversights will seem as fantastic as those of 1914 do now. Previous editors adhered, almost with pedantry, to the touchstone of familiarity. Only phrases or quotations that had gained wide recognition, become hypodermic, were admitted. It becomes then a significant footnote in literary history to observe that in 1914 neither Melville nor Emily Dickinson had gained enough currency to catch the eye of our toastmaster. In the matter of new inclusions this edition is not so stringent: we have tried to make literary power the criterion rather than width and vulgarity of fame.

But the hearth must be swept; the new clean fire is not to be choked by too much débris of the past. Every fire builder knows that a bed of ashes and used coals helps the fresh blaze, catches the glow and radiates warmth, gives depth and bottom to the flame — up to a point. But there comes a time to open the chute and rake out old cinders.

I breathe a small secret sigh over some of the vanished authors, and keep their names to myself. Unless some morbid scholiast compares the indexes of the Eleventh and Tenth Editions they will never be missed. And there continues to be joy in those who go bravely on toward the unknown future by the glory of one great line alone — for instance John William Burgon, with his ‘rose-red city half as old as Time.’ As for Axel Oxenstiern and Von Münch Bellinghausen, they deserve a footnoted or marginal immortality for their names alone, and as far as I can help them toward it I shall. They fascinate me as the pale anonymous curate (squelched by Dr. Johnson) fascinated Max Beerbohm. See Beerbohm’s essay, ‘A Clergyman’ — indeed, see all his essays.

IV

The tactful editor does not too intrusively nudge his guests. What a genial impudence was that of the magazine that used to allot ‘reading time’ — so many minutes and seconds — for its customers to accomplish a given piece. Suppose, in the middle of an article or story, one actually paused to meditate? If we had to specify any limited duration for this work, I suppose it would have to be twenty-three years, since that seems to be the established elapse between editions of Bartlett: 1891-1914-1937 — we should be ripe for another about 1960. I observe that longevity has been vouchsafed to Bartlett editors. Old J. B. died at eighty-five, and Dr. Dole at eightyfour. The present editors are hopeful. I like the letter J. B. wrote to his publisher on June 4, 1891, when correcting proof for the Ninth Edition. He then described his book as ‘a middle-aged gentleman of thirty-six years, with the tallow which age brings. . . . There never was such a repertory before and it can never be superseded. You will be troubled at not finding some of your good things, but what could I do? The sensation of fulness is agreeable, that of repletion is painful.’

We have eased the old gentleman of some spiritual tallow; but the interesting thing is to see how well the senior matter persists. I have not used a tape measure on the galley proofs, but with one portentous exception the order of the leaders in space allotted runs pretty much as it did. Shakespeare and the King James Bible are far in the lead. After them come Milton and Pope. The excitement is to see that Kipling now stands, in the matter of space conceded, just about abreast of Tennyson and Byron. Then come Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Browning, Emerson, and Longfellow. This reckoning has not been precisely calculated, but I think no fair-minded observer will deny that it approximates the general human suffrage up to date. And, more than our predecessors, we have paid willing homage to the Muse of our own day. How vast a world of doing and saying (and doubting) has come to view since Dr. Dole wrote the Tenth Edition preface in — mark the date — July 1914. Of the modern short-buskined goddess we have at least been able (with Herrick)

Dr. Dole spoke of himself as Elisha inheriting the mantle of Elijah. The successor of Elisha, one remembers, was Jehu; of whom I only know that they broke a box of oil over his head and he drove (or was driven) furiously.

One does not without a twinge of sentiment say good-bye to so long a pastime. I can’t help feeling like Old Kaspar in Southey’s poem, who sits at his cottage door in the sunset while the grandchildren are playing with the skulls — the skulls of dead authors. The cottage is actual, too: I built myself a pinewood cabin, as aloofly jungled as a Long Island suburb would permit, to consort with the shade of John Bartlett. And my mind goes back to a bitter wintry day when an unexpected visitor joined me. I went out to the cabin to work, and was startled to see sheets of MS. all over the floor, pictures fallen from the top of the shelves, and a certain 1855 Overholt bottle (long empty, but souvenir of an old literary pilgrimage) toppled over but fortunately undamaged. At first I supposed some human mischief, but, picking up Miss Everett’s folios of beautiful typescript, I saw unmistakable proof that the intruder was a bird. Then, from a shadowy perch just under the roof, he swooped across and gave me a start. It was an owl, a handsome fellow with tall ears and speckled breast. He must have come down the chimney. Flattened warily in the triangle of the rafters, he watched me steadily. I whistled at him, tried to frighten him through the open door, but he only coasted from side to side — coming too near my head for comfort. I had no mind to sit there with him perched above me, so I gathered papers and left him in charge, with the door open for exit.

Was it, or was it not, the shade of J. B. himself, offering suggestions? There was a certain facial resemblance . . . and the 1855 bottle was a coincidence: that was the year of Bartlett’s first publication (also Leaves of Grass). And the book he had chosen for most frequent perching was the Webster’s Unabridged. At any rate it was suggestive to be visited by the bird of wisdom in person. We have tried to adhere to the admirable motto long used on the publisher’s colophon, Non refert quam multos sed quam bonos habeas. Though there have been times when the editors felt like the Elizabethans described by Virginia Woolf — ‘Thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.’ And I have smiled too at a passage in Melville’s preface to Moby Dick: —

This mere painstaking burrower and grubworm of a poor devil appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and streetstalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.