Tacitus and Bracciolini Part 17

"O G.o.d! whose thunder shakes the sky, Whose eye this atom globe surveys, To thee, my only rock, I fly, Thy mercy in thy justice praise.

The mystic mazes of thy will, The shadows of celestial," &c.:

as good as Tate and Brady, to be sure,--but verses so common-place in ideas and so prosaic in expression--that any youth in the sixth form at Eton or Winchester College would be ashamed to produce them as a school exercise. Everything that is marvellous has its history as well as everything that is comprehensible; and the story of the poems is as follows:--A bridge at Bristol was completed in 1768; thereupon a ballad of a friar crossing a Bristol bridge in the reign of Edward IV. was inserted in a local journal as appropriate to the occasion: it was so sweet in its simplicity and rich in poetry while so much judgment tempered the composition and such correctness was shown in every archaeological detail that it struck with amazement all persons of literary taste who read it: the author being inquired after was found to be an attorney's snub-nosed apprentice who copied precedents: the inquirer, becoming the victim of a thousand-fold multiplied admiration and wonder, was astounded that such a queer boy turned out to be the author of such a fine ballad! The world marvelled too, but became, and remains to this day, a believer that Chatterton composed all the fragments which he himself, in the first instance, truly and honestly ascribed to Rowley and other poets, who flourished in different centuries; the consequence of which is that their poems form a very curious and interesting medley of various archaic words belonging to several mediaeval periods. From the poems ascribed to Lydgate (wrongly written by Chatterton, Ladgate) not being printed elsewhere, we must infer that those fragments of his, and, by induction, the fragments of the other poets, were not multiplied in copies; consequently we must conclude that they were all so highly prized by their possessor in the fifteenth century, the rich Bristol merchant, Canynge, the founder of St. Mary Redcliffe, that in his last will he bequeathed the whole of these protographs, to be locked up in strong iron coffers, and deposited for safety in the church he had erected, believing, no doubt, and with much propriety, that if he placed them in a sacred edifice their preservation would be secured for the benefit of posterity. Unfortunately, if so, the stupidity of the Town Clerk and the Mayor and Aldermen of Bristol in 1727 frustrated the intention of the enlightened merchant; for when in that year those civic functionaries examined the papers in the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe for the purpose of reserving only those that were valuable, they threw away as worthless all but the t.i.tle deeds relating to the church.

They thus secured an immortal fame for Chatterton by enabling him (through the aid of his uncle, the s.e.xton), to get at the contents of the chests, select what parchments he pleased, and place before the world poems which he candidly acknowledged were not his own, but which he seems to have modernised, to have smoothed the verse (his own common-place rhymes showing that he had an exquisite ear for harmony; but nothing else); and here and there to have interpolated (or supplied missing, erased, and undecypherable) words, which spoilt lines, but could not spoil the poems as masterpieces, from the cla.s.sic form in which they are cast, their power of thought, brilliance and vigour of imagination, happiness of invention, and extraordinary depth of sensibility. One cannot help recalling Dogberry's saying that "good looks come by Fortune and learning by Nature" when contemplating the universal belief that Chatterton wrote the poems of Rowley.

[Endnote 297] I cannot help thinking that some confusion may arise in the mind of the reader from misunderstanding the concluding expression of Bracciolini: literally he says: "provision is made for me in the way of food and clothing with which I am satisfied, for out of _this_ very great costliness of the means of living even the king does not get more": from such language one is almost induced to think that, in common with the sovereign, he had the use of the royal kitchen and the royal wardrobe; in other words, that he was living in the royal palace, and faring just as the king himself; but this was not the case: during his stay in England, he resided with Cardinal Beaufort in the London Palace of the Prince Prelate: he means that in eatables and raiment he was as well off as the king: he is alluding to the circ.u.mstance that, notwithstanding his means and position, he was not bound down to the style of apparel and meals as regulated by the law, which, for more than half a century, (since the days of Edward III.,) had prohibited all who were not possessed of more than 100 a year (as was the case with himself) from using gold and silver in their dress, and had limited their grandest entertainment to one soup and two dishes.

[Endnote 303] "To place the Moon in the Ram!" Well, the expression certainly in its eccentricity is quite equal to the phraseological excursion to the moon of Madame de Sevigne, who, meaning to speak of attempting an impossibility, writes "lay hold of the moon with the teeth"--prendre la lune avec les dents!"

Bracciolini, who, in his letters to Niccoli puts me in mind of Dean Swift in his letters to Dr. Arbuthnot, (as far as using words and inventing terms to bother and perplex his friend,) has here fairly put his editors at a non plus from the first in Basle to the last in Florence; he is up in a balloon--clean out of their sight,--so they all print Aries in the accusative and with a small a--"poneres lunam in arietem,"--which not at all understanding, I have changed the phrase to what it is in the text. Bracciolini by the Ram is referring neither to the male sheep nor the battering instrument of war among the Romans, but the vernal sign: he had evidently read Roger Bacon, and believed with the "Somersets.h.i.+re Magician," (as the Brother of the Minor Order was styled by his contemporaries), that a man's neck is subject to the power of the Bull, his arms to that of the Twins, and his head or brains to that of the Ram: When "the Moon" then, "is in the Ram," a lunatic is surely doubly mad, suffering, as he does, from the combined influences of the Moon, (especially when full), and of the Ram, --particularly at the beginning of April, the first day of which is amusingly consecrated to fools, and has been so wors.h.i.+ppingly set apart in consequence of the belief that was entertained by the Benedictine man of science respecting the Constellation of the Zodiac that is the sign of April--"caput est de complexione Arietis" (Rog. Bacon. Opus Majus. p. 240).

[Endnote 357] The way in which Bracciolini wrote Latin verse will be seen in the following epitaph which he composed in honour of his preceptor in the Greek language, Emanuel Chrysolarus:--

Hic est Emanuel situs Sermonis decus Attici, Qui dum quaerere spem patriae Afflictae studeret, huc iit; Res belle cecidit tuis Votis Italia. Hic tibi Linguae rest.i.tuit decus, Atticae ante reconditae.

Res belle cecidit tuis Votis Emanuel. Solo Const.i.tutus in Italo Aeternum decus, et tibi Quale Graecia non dedit Bello perdita Graecia.

The fact, then, is that,--putting aside false quant.i.ties,--he was more eloquent and poetic when he was writing prose than when he was writing poetry.

[Endnote 401] Don Pio Mutio in his "Meditations upon Tacitus"

forms a very different estimate of this description; he places the account of this tempest which carried Germanicus into the ocean in that part of his dissertation where he speaks of Tacitus as "marvellous in description",--"nelle descrittioni maraviglioso", --portraying things with such magnificent clearness that you can see them as distinctly on his page as if you were looking at a picture on canvas or cardboard done by an eminent artist;--"portando egli le cose con tanta maesta e chiarezza, che quasi ce le fa vedere nella sua scrittura, come farebbe eccellente pittore in una tela o tavolo" (Considerationi sopra Cornelio Tacito. p. 481 Brescia Ed.

1623). Mutio's "Meditations" are no meditations on Cornelius Tacitus but Poggio Bracciolini; for they are not meditations upon all the historical productions that pa.s.s under the name of Tacitus,--not even upon the whole of the Annals, but only the first book of it; almost every pa.s.sage of which,--certainly, every sentiment is elucidated, or rather, expatiated upon with signal originality and shrewdness of view, so as to have won the admiration and praise in no fewer than five of his epigrams of Benedetto Sossago, Mutio's fellow-countryman and contemporary, well skilled in scholastic acquirements, philosophy and theology, a doctor of the Ambrosian College at Milan, and a writer distinguished princ.i.p.ally for poems in Latin,--"Sylvae"; "Opuscula Sacra"; two books of "Odes"; seven books of "Epigrams"; and according to the Abbot Picinelli, in his "Atenco de i Letterati Milanesi", Sossago would have added to these an epic about Borromeo, had he not died in the midst of composing the "Caroleis", which was to have made his name a "familiar household word" to all posterity. The "Biographie Universelle", which Madame Desplaces's editor of it, M. Charles Nodier, says, is "one of the greatest and most useful conceptions of our age" ought, (because it is so useful and great), to have contained a memoir of Mutio, for he was a most accomplished politician: in addition to these "Meditations on Tacitus" which are filled with political wisdom, he wrote another treatise also on politics and also in Italian: he was Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Casino, and went on several important emba.s.sies to the French Court during the reign of Louis XIII. His work on the First Book of the Annals, --which is a commentary divided into 358 meditations or considerations comprised in a quarto of over 600 closely printed pages,--goes a long way in proving the truth of my theory, because it is one of the half-dozen or so of substantive books, (and bulky tomes, too), which were devoted exclusively to a consideration of the Annals in less than a century after the whole of that work was first placed before the world, showing its remarkable attractiveness, and what great attention MUST have been paid to it, had it been as old as it is generally supposed to be; but, (as I have observed in the text, p. 16), there not having been a word said about it from the second to the fifteenth century is all but proof positive of its non-existence during those 1,300 years.

[Endnote 408: "What has rendered 'Tacitus' obscure", says the Rev. Thomas Hunter in that book of his from which I have so frequently quoted, "is the refinement of his sentiments; which, like some minims in Nature, require uncommon sagacity and artificial power to a.s.sist you in the knowledge of." I cannot help thinking that these remarks are much more, if not solely applicable to the author of the Annals, (consequently, Bracciolini), than to Tacitus, as well as these further observations on the difficulty of the Latin:--"Let a reader take Livy in hand without translation or notes, if he is but a moderate adept in the Latin tongue, he will find little difficulty in many chapters together, except where some plodding editor brings in an awkward word to confound common sense and spoil a beautiful ant.i.thesis. If he is a proficient in the Roman language, he will read a book from end to end, with little hesitation or doubt concerning his meaning in any place: but a good cla.s.sical scholar, who sits down to Tacitus, disclaiming the a.s.sistance of commentary or translation, will meet with difficulties in every book, and frequently in every page". (Observations upon Tacitus. pp. 218-9.) Archdeacon Browne, speaking of the style of "Tacitus," says (in his "History of Roman Cla.s.sical Literature," p. 487), "his brevity ... is the necessary condensation of a writer whose thoughts flow more quickly than his tongue could express them. Hence his sentences are suggestive of far more than they express: they are enigmatical hints of deep and hidden meaning, which keep the mind active and the attention alive, and delight the reader with the pleasures of discovery and the consciousness of difficulties overcome." "The thoughts flowing more quickly than the tongue"

(that is, the pen) "can express them," is an apt phrase, (without the Archdeacon knowing how truthfully he was speaking), for the embarra.s.sment under which a fabricator labours when endeavouring, not only to write like an ancient, but to a.s.similate his style to that of another, which being quite different to his own, he is conscious that, strive as he may, he will never come up to a close resemblance to the original. The reader no doubt recalls Bracciolini's own description of his task when he first set about forging the Annals: "Beginnings of any kind are arduous and difficult; as what the ancients did pleasantly, quickly and easily to ME is _troublesome, tedious and burdensome_":--"In quibusvis quoque rebus principia sunt ardua et difficilia; ut quod antiquioribus in officio sit jucundum, promptum ac leve, MIHI sit _molestum, tardum, onerosum_." (See pages 192 and 266 of this work).