Searching for Manuscripts

Books and Men

by WILMARTH S. LEWIS

1

ALMOST everyone is impressed by the manuscripts of celebrated persons. “Think of it,” people will say, “Washington wrote that letter with his own hand!” They will marvel at the freshness of the paper and the ink in which perhaps the sand the author scattered across the page still sparkles. While they peer into the exhibition case at the manuscript of Bleak House or Adonais they may fancy they feel the warmth of the creative fires out of which the manuscript before them emerged.

In normal times collectors and scholars, booksellers and librarians, spend much thought and money in running down the manuscripts of poets and novelists and the letters and journals of statesmen, scientists, clerics, and other persons of mark. Collectors are likely to be moved to the quest by sentimental impulses. Curiosity, on the other hand, is what usually inspires the scholar. What did the author actually write? What is the significance of these changes in the text?

It is not always clear what is meant by “original manuscript.” Usually it is held to be the copy which the author sent to the printer after long hours of pedestrian alteration and recopying. But what of the many drafts which preceded it? Except in rare instances the author throws these preliminaries away. There is, it would seem, no such thing as an “original manuscript” of a poem, play, essay, or novel. “Final draft ” is a more accurate description, and “ fair copy” describes the lines from “ Crossing the Bar” and “The Chambered Nautilus” which Lord Tennyson and Dr. Holmes obligingly inscribed in their admirers’ albums.

The manuscripts of letters and journals (particularly of journals) usually are the originals, and the quest for them has, I think, a sharper interest. The scholar bent upon a new edition of an author’s journals and letters must see them if possible, to be certain that he is editing the text as the author wrote it. Earlier editors lacked many of the aids of modern scholarship photostats and microfilm, for example. With a few exceptions they were indifferent to minutiae and were careless in transcription. At their worst, they suppressed and altered passages; nor did some of them (when conscious of posterity’s sensibilities) hesitate to apply that final corrective of the text, a pair of scissors and the fire.

So before the scholar writes his first footnote he must make every effort to see the originals of the journals and letters he is going to edit. He must seek them out and secure permission to use them if he cannot buy them. He will have to blaze his own trail through what may occasionally be hostile territory, a labor for which no course leading to his Ph.D. degree will have prepared him.

It is a strange sort of expedition which seeks to recover in a distant corner of a house the object placed there years ago, in an hour of clearing out and putting away, by a person long since dead. it is a form of hide-and-seek with the past. The one who hid the treasure — most likely a woman — sat with the books or letters in her lap. What to do with them? Are they worth keeping? Should she give the books away and burn the letters?

She discards and destroys some of the letters — “they were much too personal” — and decides to keep the rest; they may be of interest one day to somebody, and so far as she can see, there is no harm in them. But where should she put them? The room at the end of the passage on the fourth floor? The cupboard in the garden house? She chooses a remote burying-place, and years later posterity stumbles along in search of them, poking about here and there, getting hot and dirty and tired and eventually finding what she has put away, finding it this morning or tomorrow afternoon or twenty years from yesterday, at last finding what was lost; and perhaps what is recovered will change the lives of two young people in Nebraska or North Carolina.

2

How,” the hunter of manuscripts is asked, “do you go about finding them?”

One can do worse than to suggest a study of Henry James’ Aspern Papers, even though that quest ended in failure. One should note that the unnamed hunter had courage, patience (although not quite enough), and a little extra money. He had good manners, a knowledge of the world, and he was an American abroad, a great advantage. Above all, he had a consuming passion for the author of the quarry. Without that the seeker is nothing: he is a mere drudge, unfit to enter the magic land where the commonplace becomes luminous and the guardians of the treasure take on the stature of gods and giants.

The quest, of course, rarely encounters romance and fairy-tale. Before the locked chest is opened, even before the halls of the palace have been entered, hours and months must have been spent in careful preparation for the climax, and when the chest is opened it may be found empty, or more bitter still, its precious contents may have been reduced to a heap of waste by rats and damp.

At the beginning of his quest the hunter probably knows of the whereabouts of certain of the sought-for manuscripts. Editors of them have named some of their owners, the new seeker may have found other manuscripts in libraries or in private hands. If he is a collector he has doubtless acquired some himself. In the beginning, that is, he will know where a certain number of the sought-for manuscripts are, but if he is an editor he must find all there are in existence. How does he do it?

What the new editor usually does at the outset of his task, if he is collecting an Englishman’s letters, is to write a letter to the London Times Literary Supplement, stating that the undersigned has embarked upon an edition of so-and-so’s letters and will be very grateful for the loan of any which the reader may have. A similar announcement may appear in the Saturday Review of Literature in New York. The writer explains that the letters will be copied and returned promptly.

Having served notice on the world that he has staked out a claim to so-and-so, he may sit back and wait for the letters to arrive, but he will be lucky if he gets a single response, let alone a letter, for, unfortunately, the owners he is trying to reach do not, as a rule, see those journals, and if they do, they will want to know more about him before entrusting him with their manuscripts. The problem is not to be solved by any such cross-cut.

There are three chief repositories of letters and manuscripts: bookshops, public libraries, and private owners, in the order of accessibility.

It may be said that the more costly an author’s manuscripts, the easier they are to discover in a bookshop, since only a comparatively few dealers will have them. If the new editor is able to buy them he will run the market up against himself, thus demonstrating the operation of an inexorable law. (He will gain friends for himself if he yields to it gracefully and abstains from clucking and squawking.) If he does not buy the manuscripts, but asks permission to copy or photostat them, he will find that some dealers will refuse to give him the permission he requests. The reason is not that they are cross-grained and ungenerous persons. There is a real question whether publication hurts the value of a letter.

If the seeker of manuscripts has become a specialist, he has a great advantage over booksellers who deal in the manuscripts of a large number of persons. I was recently shown some verses in the hand of Thomas Gray. They were written on the margins and back of a quarto sheet on the front of which were verses in another hand. These verses the bookseller waved aside as of no interest. He had had the manuscript for many years, he said; it was marked much too high; would I care to have it at a third of the price? I would, with that swiftness which non-collectors call predatory. The price was, in my opinion, still high for the Gray, but not in conjunction with the verses which were of “no interest,” since they were in the youthful hand of Horace Walpole.

Such experiences are dividends paid to specialists, who will also receive what might be called negative dividends. They will avoid manuscripts which are “wrong.” The most honorable and careful of booksellers may attribute a manuscript to an author by mistake. There is a family resemblance in handwriting of a single generation, and handwriting experts are few. The specialist will find innocent misrepresentation in the most reputable bookshops, and he should not make the serious error of assuming that he is the intended victim of a fraud. “The booksellers,” said Dr. Johnson, “are generous liberal-minded men.” The seeker of manuscripts will do well to cultivate “the Trade,” among whom are well-disposed men of learning.

The new editor will have an uneasy realization that there are letters of his man in public libraries he has not visited, and he may send out a circular letter to them asking for photostats to be made at his expense. In my own case, I sent out eight hundred such letters. The results were meager: a short note in a library at Melbourne, and a receipt for money received by Walpole from the Exchequer in the Prussian State Library, Berlin. Six other librarians replied that they had nothing; thus I received eight replies to eight hundred inquiries.

It may seem surprising that librarians will not respond willingly to a circular letter, that they require something more personal, but the librarian is a busy, hard-pressed man with much responsibility. Circular letters asking for his help suffuse through him the gentle irritation which is as much as librarians permit themselves to feel. A circular letter is too easy; let the seeker come and show he is in earnest.

Private owners may be divided into two groups: those who have bought their manuscripts, and those who have inherited them. As virtually all auction sales are to the Trade, the name of the ultimate purchaser cannot often be obtained from auction sale records. Booksellers are reluctant to disclose the identity of their clients, but if they like the applicant, they will write to the owner for permission to do so.

Collectors of autographs are the bane of the editor. As a rule, they are content with one or two letters, to find which may cause the editor as much trouble as to find an entire correspondence. Anglo-Saxons have been enthusiastic collectors of letters for generations. They are also migratory, with the result that the editor may find manuscripts of his man anywhere on earth. So he must travel about the world, not only to call on librarians and woo them into coöperation, but to meet private collectors and see their collections.

There may be a letter for the editor at Pretoria or a collection of them at Vancouver. (I have found Walpole letters in Dunedin and Lima.) Other letters may be lying in the albums or boxes of a tea planter in Darjeeling or a rubber king at Iquitos. When the owner dies, if the letters find their way into an auction room, perhaps the editor will hear about them, but they may not reach him until his edition is published. Then they will appear to mock all his best efforts, and those who have never gone farther than Forty-Second Street to find their materials for themselves will say, “He never tried Iquitos!”

There remain the owners who have inherited their manuscripts and letters, the most promising and inaccessible group of all. How is one to reach them?

3

THE man who could give the best answer to that question between the two wars was the late Seymour de Ricci, the great authority on “ provenance,” on the pedigrees of books and manuscripts, pictures, coins, objects of art. By means of his catalogues, his filing system, and his fabulous memory he performed miracles of discovery. I went to him as soon as I could when I embarked upon the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence in 1933.

He lived in Paris, in a flat on the ground floor. Only a ground floor could support the weight of his 30,000 auction sale catalogues. They were everywhere, those catalogues; in the rooms, in the halls. “Would you like to see my bedroom?” asked Mme. de Ricci. She threw open the closet door dramatically and there, leaving no space for a single dress, were rows and rows of auction sale catalogues.

My immediate problem was to find the originals of William Cole’s letters to Horace Walpole. They had been sold at the Strawberry Hill Sale in 1842 to Henry Colburn, the publisher. So much I knew, but de Ricci went on rapidly from there: Colburn’s partner was Richard Bentley, who brought out many eighteenthcentury memoirs and collections of letters. I should write his grandson, Richard Bentley, who was living at The Mere, Upton, Slough, and who was reputed to have vast collections of manuscripts inherited from the great days of his family’s firm.

When, in London, I wrote Mr. Bentley to inquire about Cole’s letters to Walpole, he replied that he did not have them and knew nothing about them. This reply is a formula much used by owners to put off inquirers, but Mr. Bentley showed his sincerity by calling on my wife and me at Brown’s Hotel and asking us down to Slough for lunch. We were out when he called, the date of our sailing for home was approaching, and we felt that we could not take a day off for a visit which promised nothing in the way of missing letters.

While I was thus employed abroad, my assistant, Dayle Wallace, working in the Yale Library, discovered the whereabouts of Cole’s letters to Walpole — from the catalogue of the Forster collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The letters had got to “South Kensington” by a short route: Colburn had left them to his widow, who married Forster. The search for manuscripts may be done quietly at home.

And there my connection with Mr. Bentley and The Mere, Upton, Slough, might have ended if I hadn’t one day during the following year glanced into a book I seldom opened, and read by chance a footnote which answered another question I had been asking. The question was: Where are the letters of Horace Mann to Walpole? I knew where Walpole’s letters to Mann were, but what of Mann’s side of the correspondence?

Mann was the English Minister to Tuscany. Walpole and he corresponded for forty-five years, without a meeting, from 1741, when Walpole’s visit to Florence ended, until 1786, when Mann died. This correspondence is the backbone of the entire Walpolian structure. Mann’s letters had been published in part in 1876, in an unsatisfactory book called Mann and Manners in Florence. It was of the last importance to find the originals. Where were they? The answer was furnished by the footnote: In the possession of Mr. Richard Bentley, The Mere, Upton, Slough, Bucks.

In my original letters to him I had asked only about Cole’s letters to Walpole. Before volunteering further information Mr. Bentley had, naturally, wished to have a look at the inquirer. Failing to meet him, he returned to Slough and said nothing about Mann’s letters to Walpole.

My discovery that Mr. Bentley owned them, all 892 of them, awakened our correspondence. It proceeded cautiously at first; on Mr. Bentley’s side it might be said to have yawned and stretched. A postal card which I sent from California that summer stimulated it; a postal card of a palm tree, it was. (The pulse of any Englishman is quickened by the sight of a palm tree.) I began by assuming that he would not care to part with Mann’s letters, but could I have them photostated? He was troubled by the expense which that course would put me to, and became more and more impressed by my need to have the letters themselves. They arrived in Farmington in time for Christmas for a sum considerably less than the cost of photostating would have been.

Six months were to pass before we met, but in the interval our correspondence rose to the regularity and fullness of Mann’s and Walpole’s. They had been concerned with the rise and fall of ministries and the marching and counter-marching of armies across Europe; Mr. Bentley and I were concerned with the minutiae of editing. We were merely Walpole’s trainbearers, but train-bearing is an office which ensures its holders a good view of what is taking place.

Mr. Bentley’s epistolary style was rich and Victorian (he was born in 1854), but it soared up out of its solid origins into the exuberance of block letters and red ink. Mr. Bentley darted off into delightful bypaths from the main highway of our subject - bypaths which might lead to the Duke of Wellington or Henry VII’s Queen. A stream of books and pamphlets of his authorship began arriving: A brief Note upon the Battles of Sainte and Mauron, 1351 and 1352; Upwards of Sixty Years’ Rainfall at Upton, Slough, Buckinghamshire, including hail, sleet, snow, hoar frost or mist, and so on. Our acquaintance was well advanced when my wife and I made our next annual visit to England and he wrote to Brown’s: —

“The 12:15 from Paddington on Tuesday next [in red ink]. Excellent.

“You should discover on the platform at Slough an octogenarian with white whiskers (and a projecting white moustache) looking out as passengers descend from the train — on the lookout for you.”

This visit had a double mission. I wanted to meet Mr. Bentley and thank him in person for his great kindness in letting me have Mann’s letters, and I wanted to see if he had other Walpole manuscripts. I had already learned one of the axioms of manuscript-collecting: where there is one good thing there will be others.

Specifically, I had in mind Walpole’s correspondence with William Mason, the poet and biographer of Gray. The Bentley firm had published it in 1851, and the originals had not been seen since. It began to appear that it was the practice of the first Bentley to buy letters and journals of eighteenth-century men and women of celebrity and publish them. The fact that no subsequent editor had seen either side of the Walpole-Mason correspondence suggested that one or both sides of it might still be at Upton. That is, this second mission was an Aspern Papers mission.

There was at Upton, so Michael Sadleir told me, a book in which was recorded a brief history of each of the Bentley publications. Mr. Bentley was loath to show this book; but he would if pressed, one might almost say cornered, remove it from its hiding place, answer the specific question asked, and put it away again.

The success of the second of my two missions depended upon my discovering what that book had to say about the Walpole-Mason correspondence.

4

THERE was no mistaking Mr. Bentley, even without the identifying whiskers. The stout figure in a bright checked waistcoat and a square bowler hat could be no other. We got into a massive automobile and rolled away to Upton, to a large “black and white” house built in the 1890’s and set in ample grounds.

In the hall was a grandfather’s clock with a notice, “True Time— False Time is one hour in advance.” We were led into a large room on the left. At a long table in the center was a lifelike Negro boy in iron, dressed as a jockey. It was so lifelike that in the rather dim light we were startled. Mr. Bentley was enchanted.

“What do you think he once did?” he asked. We couldn’t imagine. “Blew up,” announced Mr. Bentley delightedly, “when a parlormaid moved him too near the fire! ” He had been so skillfully mended that, as wc could see for ourselves, there was hardly a trace of the accident. We were not told of the repairs to the parlormaid.

At the end of the table were sherry and biscuits. We sat ceremoniously, and Mr. Bentley launched forth upon the story of Queen Victoria’s wedding. He dropped into dialogue at the climax when the organ refused to work, and acted out the consternation of Sir Somebody Something, who was responsible for the failure. During this narration a lady entered the room and hurried around to sit beside Mr. Bentley. Since the English are casual about introductions, it was some time before we discovered that she was Mrs. Bentley.

It was clear that our host was in no hurry to reach the subject of Walpole, and that being so, importunity was to be avoided. Nothing could be less like the Venetian palace where the Aspern Papers were housed than The Mere, but in it on that day there was the same expectancy and something of the same reticence in gratifying it.

When presently we wandered into the neighboring drawing room, an opening occurred. On the walls of the drawing room were several copies of miniatures formerly at Strawberry Hill. Not to notice or comment on them would have been Quixotic. The comment having been made and no ill-effects being evident, I went on to observe that very often owners of books and manuscripts and objects of art did not know that they owned them. “There might be, for example,” I said, “manuscripts of Walpole right here in this house.” Mr. Bentley’s steady stare suggested that I had perhaps been precipitate and I did not proceed to the subject of the Walpole-Mason correspondence until at lunch, when a second opening offered itself.

This time, greatly daring, I asked about the Walpole-Mason correspondence. “It was published by Bentley’s,” I said. “Could the manuscripts be here?”

“ I have a book here,” said Mr. Bentley, brushing the subject away as if it were a crumb, “which will answer that question.”

We were interrupted by a message from the gardener. An earlier message had read, “ Upton, Slough, Bucks, July 16, 1935, 2:05, True Time. 79½° F.”

“You see,” Mr. Bentley had said, “it’s almost 80!”

The second message reported that the thermometer had crossed 80, and congratulations went round the table. A very hot day!

With the disappearance of the strawberries I ventured to ask our host, “And now the book?”

He looked at me stonily. “ You must see the house first.”

We wandered through the bedrooms and settled in an upstairs sitting room. Mr. Bentley opened a cabinet filled with curiosities. He gave my wife a purse. “Money, it is said, is the root of all evil; yet we can’t do without money, and a purse is as convenient a way to carry it as any other. Now, madam, look inside that purse.” She opened it and out flew a spring.

After more surprises of a similar nature, we left the room. Mr. Bentley anticipated my question. “But you haven’t seen Windsor!” he cried.

We climbed up into a cupola from which we could see Windsor through the trees.

Mr. Bentley had prudently remained below, and as we came down the stairs he pointed to the wall and began rapidly, “You would say, Mr. Lewis, that this is the end of the house?”

“Yes, I would.”

“ Let us see.” He pressed a button, a door slid back, and there was another portion of the house fitted up as a ship: port and starboard lights, oars, staterooms, life preservers. A dumb-waiter which led to the kitchen — or galley when approached from this quarter— received orders which began with “Ahoy!”

“Now,” said Mr. Bentley, “the book!” and he gave me a crafty look.

We went back to the dining room, where the book had been the whole time during lunch. He took it and sat on the arm of a large stuffed chair.

“What year were the Mason letters published?” “1851.”

He struggled with the book, but it was hard to handle sitting in that position. “Here, you take it,” he said.

I turned to “The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, and the Rev. William Mason. Now first published from the original MSS. Edited, with notes, by the Rev. J. Mitford. In Two Volumes. London: Richard Bentley, Publishers in. Ordinary to Her Majesty. 1851.” I came to the end of the page and read, “The originals of Mason’s letters to Walpole are now [1900] in the possession of Mr. Richard Bentley of Upton, Slough, Bucks.” As I read this last aloud Mr. Bentley fell over into the chair, his short legs sticking above the arm. He was breathing heavily. “ What a very pertinacious young man!” I heard him say.

“Have you given the letters away?” I asked. “No.”

“Have you sold them?”

“No.”

“Then they must still be here!”

There was a pause. “Time for tea,” said Mr. Bentley firmly, struggling up out of the chair and taking the book from me.

Letters sped back and forth from Upton to Brown’s. On the 18th, in answer to my letter written on our return after tea, came this one: —

“Six possible fields of research are open. (Four libraries in the House itself, one hundred yards away easterly and one hundred yards distant — north westerly. Total six. . . .”

Five days later he wrote: “The chase goes on — at intervals — between inrushes of visitors — because I feel that you are RIGHT, i.e. if the books have not left Upton (which I am sure is the case) — they must be here still [in red].”

Another letter arrived on the 28th. Libraries 1 to 6 had drawn blank, but a friend had seen Mason “somewhere upstairs.” “Now the search light has to be turned at every free interval upon subsidiary or supplemental collections — and now with a certainty of ultimate success.”

That week-end we spent in Norfolk, and on our return I wrote to Mr. Bentley (in the clairvoyant style his correspondents acquired) that as we approached Liverpool Street my wife and I had said to each other, “Mr. Bentley will find the letters this week.”

On the following Tuesday came a “Greetings Telegram” with a gold border and in a gold envelope with the message printed by hand: “Eureka! Mason. Bentley,” which was soon followed by two letters, both written on the 31st. The second was in acknowledgment of my greetings telegram to him, which reminded him, because it was so different, of the manner in which the Duke of Marlborough sent the news of Blenheim to Queen Anne. He brought the letters up to London and turned them over to me for a nominal sum a few days later.

Letters and postal cards continued to arrive with excellent advice about editing and with remarkably shrewd guesses and surmises about Walpolian problems. He was a constant reader of Notes and Queries, in which dozens of our queries relating to the Cole correspondence had begun to appear, and he never failed to send me a reply when he had something which he thought might be of interest. Then, quite suddenly, in February, 1936, he died.

5

IT WAS Robin Flower at the British Museum who first told me on our arrival, in 1937, of the cache of Walpole manuscripts which he had found at Upton when he had gone down to appraise the library for tax purposes. Piled away in a box in a remote passageway— not in Libraries 1 to 6 — was a collection of letters and manuscripts which correspond roughly in importance to that part of the Boswell cache which turned up in the croquet box at Malahide Castle.

There were one hundred letters to and from Walpole, all unpublished, and a large collection of manuscripts— the manuscript of Walpole’s Short Notes of My Life (the most important Walpole manuscript extant, I think); his first unpublished attempt at writing history, The War with Spain, 1739; his last unpublished Memoires; Hieroglyphic Tales, with two unpublished Tales; essays, verses, and a mass of notes for his earlier Memoires. All this the first Richard Bentley had bought from Miss Berry, Walpole’s literary executrix.

Thanks to the good offices of Mrs. Bentley and Mr. John Hodgson, her trustees let me have the lot en bloc. Even so, the Upton saga was not finished, for Mrs. Bentley kept finding Walpolian bits here and there — Peter Cunningham’s letters to the first Bentley about his edition of Walpole’s letters, Miss Berry’s letters to him about her books. Mrs. Bentley sent these documents to me as soon as they were discovered.

I owe all this to de Ricci, who first suggested that I write to Mr. Bentley. Because of my inattention, I nearly missed the richest find I have yet made and one of the most delightful chapters of my collecting life. Walpole’s letters to Mason are still undiscovered, in spite of extensive efforts to find them. Promising leads have come to naught. Doubtless these letters are in existence awaiting their appointed hour to re-emerge into the light. The searcher for manuscripts never reaches the end of the quest.