Essays in Miniature. Agnes Repplier

on receiving the following lines from Southey, whose principal income for years had been derived from the magazine's most liberal and open-handed payments. "It is a great price," writes the author of Thalaba, who has just pocketed a comfortable sum, "and it is very convenient for me to receive it. But I will tell you, with that frankness which you have always found in my correspondence and conversation, that I must suspect my time might be more profitably employed (as I am sure it might be more worthily) than in writing for your journal, even at that price."

      I am not wont to peer too closely into the secrets of the human heart, but I would like to know exactly how Murray felt when he read that letter. "Let me at least be eaten by a lion!" says Epictetus. "Let me at least be insulted by a genius!" might well have been the publisher's lament.

      1 ↑ "The Pilgrims of the Sun."

      ​

      THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES

      THAT innocent nondescript, the average reader, is suffering very sorely at the present day from what might be justly called the oppression or tyranny of notes. I hear, indeed, from time to time, bitter complaints of editorial inaccuracy, of the unscholarly treatment of quite forgotten masterpieces by the industrious gentlemen who seek to reintroduce them to the public; but such inaccuracy can wound only the limited number who know more than the editor, and who in their secret souls are not sorry to prove him wrong. The average reader, even though he hold himself to be of moderate intelligence, is happily ignorant of such fine shadings, and only asks that he may enjoy his books in a moderately intelligent manner; that he may be helped over hedges and ditches, and allowed to ramble unmolested where the ground seems ​tolerably smooth. This is precisely the privilege, however, which a too liberal editor is disinclined to allow. He will build you a bridge over a raindrop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side with ingenious alpenstocks and climbing-irons; yet when, perchance, you stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold, he is never there to grasp it. He merely refers you, with some coldness, to a remote authority who will give you the assistance you require when you have reached the end of your journey. Mr. Ritchie, for example, who has recently edited a volume of Mrs. Carlyle's early letters, expects you patiently to search for the information you want in Mr. Froude's pages, which is always a disheartening thing to be asked to do. Yet when Jeanie Welsh, writing cheerfully of an inconstant lover, says, "Mais n'importe! It is only one more Spanish castle demolished; another may start up like a mushroom in its place;" an explanatory note carefully reveals to you that "Spanish castle" really means "château en Espagne"—a circumstance which even ​Macaulay's schoolboy would probably have deciphered for himself.

      If it be hard on the average reader to be referred chillingly to modern writers who are at least within approachable distance, it is harder still to be requested to look up classical authorities. If it be hard to be told occasionally by that prince of good editors, Mr. Alfred Ainger, to please turn elsewhere for the little bits of information which we think he might give us about Charles Lamb, it is harder still to have Mr. Wright refuse to translate for us Edward Fitzgerald's infrequent lapses into Greek. What is the use of saying in a note "v. 9" when Fitzgerald quotes Herodotus? If I can read the quotation for myself, I have no need to hunt up v. 9; and if I can't, v. 9 is of no use to me when found. Even "Hor. Od. I. 4, 14, 15," is not altogether satisfactory to the indifferent scholar, for whom Fitzgerald himself had such generous sympathy, and for whom his translations were avowedly undertaken.

      These are merely cases, however, in which ​notes refuse to be helpful; they are apt to become absolutely oppressive when accompanying older writers. A few years ago I bought a little English edition of the Religio Medici, to which are added the Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals. The book is one of Macmillan's Golden Treasury Series, and is edited by Mr. W. A. Greenhill, who opens with an "Editor's Preface," eighteen pages long, and fairly bristling with knowledge points. After this come a "Chronological Table of Dates, Connected with Sir Thomas Browne," two pages long; "Note on the Discovery of the Remains of Sir Thomas Browne in 1840," two pages; "Brief Notices of Former Editors of the Religio Medici" four pages; "List of Editions of Religio Medici," thirteen pages; "Collations of Some Old Editions of Religio Medici," three pages; "List of Editions of Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals," five pages; "Addenda et Corrigenda," one page. Having thus laboriously cleared the way, we are at last gladdened by a sight of the Religio Medici itself, which, together with the Letter and Christian Morals, occupies ​two hundred and thirty pages. Then, following close, like the mighty luggage of a Persian army, come an array of "Notes Critical and Explanatory," eighty-eight pages; and an Index just sixty-nine pages long. Thus it will be seen that two hundred and five pages of editorial work are deemed necessary to elucidate two hundred and thirty pages of Sir Thomas Browne, which seems like an intolerable deal of sack for such a quantity of bread. To compress all this into a small volume requires close printing and flimsy paper, and the ungrateful reader thinks in his hardened heart that he would rather a little more space had been given to the author, and a little less to the editor, who is for most of us, after all, a secondary consideration. It is also manifestly impossible, with such a number of notes, even to refer to them at the bottom of the page; yet without this guiding finger they are often practically useless. We are not as a rule aware, when we read, what information we lack, and it becomes a grievous duty to examine every few minutes and see if we ought not to be finding something out.

      ​A glance at the notes themselves is very discouraging:

      "P. 10, l. 14, directed, A to E, G; direct, F, H to L.

      "P. 10, l. 16, rectified, A to I; rectifie, J, K, L.

      "P. 10, l. 28, consist, A to J; resist, K, L."

      Reading with such helps as these becomes a literary nightmare:

      "P. 8, l. 8, distinguished] Chapman (R) and Gardiner (W) read 'being distinguished.'

      "P. 8, l. 8, distinguished not only] Wilkin (T) read 'not only distinguished.'"

      And this is weirder still:

      "P. 59, l. 4, antimetathesis, C to M; antanaclasis, A, B; transposition of words, N, O."

      It may easily be surmised that eighty-eight pages of such concentrated and deadly erudition weigh very heavily on the unscholarly soul. We are reminded forcibly of the impatience manifested by Mr. E. S. Dallas, in The Gay Science, over Porson's notes on Euripides, from which he had hoped so much and gleaned so little; which were all about words and less ​than words—syllables, letters, accents, punctuation.

      "Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigiensis and Codex Cottonianus, were ransacked in turn to show how this noun should be in the dative, not in the accusative; how that verb should have the accent paroxytone, not perispomenon; and how, by all the rules of prosody, there should be an iambus, not a spondee, in this place or that." The lad who has heard all his college life about the wonderful supplement to the Hecuba turns to it with wistful eyes, expecting to find some subtle key to Greek tragedy. "Behold, it is a treatise on certain Greek metres. Its talk is of cæsural pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, of isochronous feet, of enclitics and cretic terminations; and the grand doctrine it promulgates is expressed in the canon regarding the pause which, from the discoverer, has been named the Porsonian—that when the iambic trimeter after a word of more than one syllable has the cretic termination included either in one word or in two, then the fifth foot must be ​an iambus. The young student throws down the book thus prefaced and supplemented, and wonders if this be all that giants of Porsonian height can see or care to speak about in Greek literature."

      But then be it remembered that Euripides, as edited by Porson, was intended for the use of scholars, and there exists an impression—perhaps erroneous—that this is the sort of food for which scholars hunger and thirst. Sir Thomas Browne has, happily, not yet passed out of the hands of the general reader, whose appetite for intellectual abstraction and the rigors of precision is distinctly moderate, and in whose behalf I urge my plea to-day.

      After the oppressively erudite notes come those which interpret trifles with painstaking fidelity, and which reveal to us the meaning of quite familiar words. In Ferrier's