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OXFORD TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES
The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature
GENERAL EDITORS
Elaine Treharne Greg Walker
The Idea of the Book and the
Creation of Literature
STEPHEN ORGEL
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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© Stephen Orgel 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
Impression: 1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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ISBN 978–0–19–287153–4 (hbk.)
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referenced in this work.
For John Mustain
S E R I E S E D I TO R’ S P R E FA C E
List of Illustrations
A Note on Quotations
1 Introduction
2 Some Plays
3 Some Works: The Jonson and Shakespeare Folios
4 Poetry and Drama
5 How To Be a Poet
6 What Is a Book?
Bibliography
Index
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
Introduction
[As with painting, so with poetry: there are those which will impress you more if
you stand near them, and others, if you stand farther away…]
“Ut pictura poesis” means literally that poetry is like painting. But in
what way? Sir Philip Sidney, following a tradition of many centuries,
took it to mean that poetry and painting had essential qualities in
common, and that poetry was, as Simonides put it in the fifth
century bc, “a speaking picture”—this assumption, with classical
authority behind it, informs a great deal of Renaissance aesthetic
theory. If we read Horace’s dictum in context, however, we will find
that it means nothing of the sort. All it says is that just as some
paintings are designed to be viewed from afar, and therefore
presumably need not be scrupulous about detail, and some are
designed to be closely scrutinized, and must be composed with
meticulous attention to detail, so it is with poetry. The only similarity
claimed for the two arts has to do with the necessity for both poet
and artist to keep the purpose of the work of art in mind.
Does this mean that Sidney was ignorant of the context—had he
not read the rest of the passage? No doubt he had; but in his
defence, we might observe that the phrase as a dictum actually
makes better sense than the phrase in context: modern attempts to
derive a useful critical principle from the phrase require a great deal
of interpretive lattitude.9 Horace seems to argue that some poems
need not be as carefully written as other poems. Can this be right?
What poems? Long poems versus short poems, epics on the one
hand and lyrics on the other? Did Virgil not need to worry about
details? (It is difficult to come up with untendentious examples—
perhaps the Roman equivalents of rap lyrics and sonnets, whatever
these might be; poetry that is immediately pleasing, versus poetry
that repays close attention.) In any case, the only way to claim that
Sidney’s reading of this passage is incorrect is to argue that Horace
did not mean it to be read that way. This is doubtless true, but
surely no critic would want to limit the possibilities of reading to
those defined by the author’s intentions—an especially problematic
move when the example is the Bible.
There are, of course, many books that are not designed to be
read consecutively; books are not only literature: they are
dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, handbooks of all sorts. Most
modern books of information depend for their usefulness not on
their narrative coherence or the persuasiveness of their argument,
but on the capaciousness of their indexes. We go to them to find
what we are looking for, and the coherence is that of the reader’s
narrative, not the author’s.
Constructing readers
If readers construct books, books also construct readers. Formats
keep changing. We know what a book is because the title page tells
us, but initially, books did not have title pages. Why did these
develop, and what information do they convey? Whitney Trettien
writes that the history of the title page “neatly illustrates the impact
of print.”
Simply put, before the advent of movable type, books did not have title
pages; within fifty years of print’s emergence, they did. The story of how
books developed from medieval manuscripts with no title page, to
incunables with a simple label-title, to printed books coming with a title
page as standard, seems to index every technological shift in the history of
printing…. The title page is the site of a book’s self-presentation to its
potential audience, where it informs readers about a text by in-forming—
moulding into structured information—the facts of its production. This
process of bibliographic encoding is full of friction. On the one hand, the
book trade needs readers (and authorities) to trust its products, and the
architecture of the title page serves a critical role in generating confidence
in a text. On the other, precisely because it functions in this way, the title
page is susceptible to manipulation by printers and publishers eager to
advertise a book’s contents, skirt regulations, and bypass censors.10
Paratexts are thresholds in the sense that they are ways into the
book, guides to the material; but over the years what sort of
information has the potential buyer required to turn her or him into
a reader?—women become increasingly visible as readers and book
collectors from the sixteenth century on. To begin with, not
necessarily the author’s name, which for a modern reader would be
a primary attraction. Despite the fact that by the early seventeenth
century Shakespeare’s name was sufficiently famous to sell a
number of books with which in fact he had no connection, most of
the early quartos of his own plays were issued anonymously.
Shakespeare’s name first appears on the title page of a play in the
1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost—he had been writing plays for
seven or eight years at that point, and both Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece, which include his name (though not on their
title pages), were selling well. Would his name on the 1597 quartos
of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and Richard III not have attracted
purchasers? But what the title pages advertise are the acting
companies—Romeo and Juliet adds the information that the play is,
like Love’s Labour’s Lost, excellent conceited (that is, very witty and
poetical) and was played with great applause. But there is nothing
about the witty, successful author: plays were not yet literature;
moreover, literature could still be anonymous.12
For Shakespeare in print, 1598 was the watershed: in that year in
addition to Love’s Labour’s Lost, his name appears on new editions
of the two Richard plays, and thereafter regularly (though not
invariably) on the title pages of his plays and poetry, as well as on
those of some other people’s. But in general, the author remains an
elusive character in book publishing well into the seventeenth
century. Sometimes the concealment is deliberate, of course, for
example in satires and polemics. But consider some less obvious
examples.
Figure 1.8 shows the title pages of the first editions of Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella and Donne’s collected poems. The initials tell
you that the author is somebody important, too important to want
his name revealed (that is, not simply a professional writer); but if
you belong to the right social or intellectual circle, you will know
whom the initials stand for. The mystery, then, flattered those in the
know, and assured other readers that the book was prestigious. The
title page of the first two editions of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of
Melancholy (1621, 1624) offered purchasers a different sort of
nominal tease. Here the name of the author is given only as
“Democritus Junior,” hence an epigone of the pre-Socratic
philosopher-scientist Democritus, who postulated the existence of
atoms, and thereby got to the heart of matter.
Illustration
One obvious way of making books more attractive to a purchaser,
and more valuable to an owner, was to decorate and illustrate them:
the consumer is the end point of the book trade. When books were
manuscripts, they were expensive to produce. They were not only
texts, they were valuable commodities, and even utilitarian
manuscripts were decorated. Figure 1.10 is the first page of a school
text, a thirteenth-century Ovid.14
FIGURE 1.10 Opening page of a thirteenth-century Ovid manuscript. Courtesy of
the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
There is no title; it starts at the top with a bit of commentary.
This was a working copy; it has students’ marginal and interlinear
notes. It is not a grand book; the scriptorium used vellum of odd
sizes and with some damage, but even this schoolbook has some
lovely rubrication. Connoisseurs made their manuscripts significantly
more valuable by having them elaborately embellished. The
embellishment was generally commissioned by the purchaser; the
finished book was a complex collaboration of publisher, scribe,
purchaser, and artist. The first owner of such a book would have
been actively involved in its production.
Illustrations can be an essential element in many kinds of books—
bestiaries, herbals and such—but in medieval examples they are
often more imaginative than informative: this has everything to do
with what we want books to tell us, what we want out of reading;
most of all, what kinds of possessions we consider them. The
imagery in books often has a life of its own—manuscripts regularly
include little vignettes, often jokey and sometimes obscene, hiding in
the decorative foliage, even in the margins of psalters and saints’
lives. Recreation, fun, everyday life takes place in the margins.
Medieval bestiaries regularly involve a combination of taxonomy
and fantasy, but very little observation: Figure 1.11 shows a turtle
from a fourteenth-century manuscript, by an artist who had probably
read a description, but had apparently never seen one.
FIGURE 1.11 Jacob van Maerlant, Der Naturen Bloeme, Utrecht, c.1340–50.
Tortuca (turtle); miniature from folio 110v. KB KA 16; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den
Haag.
The book also shows how to swim without moving your arms,
though it is not explained why you would need to do that. The
pictures are embellishments for an entertaining book. There are
some exceptions, such as architectural treatises; and travel books
are increasingly based on observation—in Figure 1.14 Venice in the
Nuremberg Chronicle is full of recognizable buildings—but it is often
difficult to tell how much images like this are based on observation
and how much on the traditions of illustration (rather in the way the
first photographic illustrations were doctored to look like paintings).
FIGURE 1.14 Liber Cronicarum (The Nuremberg Chronicle), 1493, view of Venice.
Language: English
GOSPEL OF FREEDOM
BY
ROBERT HERRICK
AUTHOR OF “THE MAN WHO WINS,” “LITERARY
LOVE-LETTERS AND OTHER STORIES”
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1898
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
To
The Memory of
P. S. A.
“Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, it practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm!”
THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM
PART I
CHAPTER I
Simeon Erard tiptoed deftly across the room, tugging at his thin,
sandy heard. Fumbling among the curtains which draped one corner
of the best light, he pulled the cord, after carefully eyeing his visitors
to see that all were placed properly. The light silk folds fell apart,
revealing a small canvas,—a cool deep slit of grey water let into a
marble floor, which was cut in two by the languorous reach of a
woman’s back done in hard green. The large masses of auburn hair
of the bent head floated on the creamy slab. The artist coughed.
“Well!” exclaimed Mrs. Anthon, in a puff of surprise. “A bath-room, I
declare!”
“Is that your exhibition-picture?” inquired her brother-in-law,
Sebastian Anthon, a little dubiously. Erard took no notice of these
wavering remarks. To him they were the necessary comment of the
world, to which he habitually paid as marked disrespect as he dared.
“You see, don’t you, Miss Anthon,” his voice was persuasively
patronizing, “what I have tried to do? You grasp the difficulties, don’t
you? Of course to the crowd it’s nothing but a modern bath, half full
of water, with a young woman in it, whose hair is red. But you see
the vigor of that leg, the coolness of that water shot with light. You
feel it. The artist—and the rare person—will stop before that picture;
he will know what it means. And the artist paints for the artist;
shouldn’t he, Miss Anthon?”
The young woman thus distinguished by the special appeal waived
the responsibility of assent to the last proposition. But she moved
away from the little group of suspicious critics, drawing near to the
picture, as if she were willing to represent the sympathetic
intelligence.
“Yes,” she murmured slyly, “that leg half in the water, half out, is
subtle. The flesh gives itself to the coolness.”
Mrs. Anthon began ostentatiously to use her lorgnette on the room.
Sebastian Anthon turned one or two canvases to the light.
“Ah!” the young artist responded, “my dear Miss Anthon, you are the
right sort; you understand. Don’t you feel that back rippling into the
new medium? To do the little bit where the lights change,” he
indicated hastily a patch of rough brushwork, “that was the keenest
delight of the past year, the best minutes of intense existence, and
for that we artists live, don’t we?”
The girl half smiled as if something vaguely humorous crossed her
mind, yet again her impulse was to take his part against his
antipathetic fellow-countrymen.
“Well, that cornfield didn’t grow in the States, I’d bet!” This
ejaculation came from a young man, who had unearthed a sketch in
bright yellows. He stood with his cane behind his back, his light coat
thrown open, in an attitude of eager expectation, and anxiety to lose
nothing that was going on, while hunting for appropriate expression.
The dull Paris sunlight of a November afternoon sobered the robust
hue of his face and his broad hands. “Eh!” Erard remarked
indifferently, “that’s a sketch I made in Calabria, an effort in yellows.”
He turned the canvas back to the wall, as if he would take from a
child a fragile toy.
“This impressionistic business is beyond me,” the young man
remarked defiantly, addressing Mrs. Anthon for support.
“Adela hasn’t done much in it yet,” Mrs. Anthon answered. “You
know, Mr. Wilbur, she’s at Jerome’s. He’s good for the drawing, they
say, and then he has so many studios, and one is up our way, just
behind the Madeleine. And Jerome has such a good class of young
women. I couldn’t have Adela running about and living as the
common art-students do. No Trilby stuff for me, I said to Sebastian,
when he advised me to take Adela over here and let her have a
chance to culture herself. Adela rather wanted to try it by herself for
a year, but her father made her keep on at Bryn Mawr, that school
down near Baltimore, where they wear caps and gowns. But when
her father died,—her elder brother was married and living out to
Denver, and Walter was just finishing school at Harvard,—I said I
couldn’t be left alone. What are children good for, if they’re going to
run away to college and to art-schools? It is bad enough to have
them marry, but a girl, when she isn’t obliged to work,—and Addie
won’t have to teach, I guess—”
Mrs. Anthon was fast unwinding her philosophy of life, in the
sympathetic manner of Western Americans, that takes for granted a
neighbour’s interest in one’s affairs and does not comprehend
reticence. Wilbur was apparently interested. But Miss Anthon, who
had practised the power of watching ever for her mother’s garrulous
tongue, while she attended to other matters, interfered.
“Mr. Erard will show us his den, mamma. Isn’t the apartment
delightful and interesting? It’s an old swell’s house. Louis seize
complete, just as it was, without any change. Mr. Erard found it quite
by accident, he says, one day when he was wandering about in this
quarter among the convents. He came down a side lane that runs
into the rue Vaugirard. Just as he was leaving it, his eye happened to
fall upon that old cypress in the court. He prowled about and found
this nest.”
Animation returned once more to the party. Erard led them from the
studio—a fine old room, with open-timbered ceiling, left almost
ostentatiously bare—into the adjoining salon. In the sombre studio
there had been only the warm woodwork; here were many living
qualities,—the lofty windows hung with dark stuffs, the fireplace
adorned by a delicate relief of nymphs. In one corner was a spinet,
and along the sides of the room couches, with a few low tables and
aristocratic chairs. Some little bronzes, one or two pastels, and a
cast of a group by a young American sculptor, completed the
obvious contents.
The ladies exclaimed. Wilbur observed thoughtfully, “I should think
you would rattle around a little.”
“Ah! I don’t live here,” Erard answered airily, pushing open the large
folding doors beside the fireplace. “This is my den, and beyond are
the bedrooms.”
The inner room was of the same dignified height as the rest of the
apartment. A bit of tapestry on one side, and shelves for books and
photographs on another, hid the walls. In one corner was a simple
ormolu table, where notes lay half opened, and beside it a lounge. A
few high-backed chairs, each one a precious find, were ranged like
solemn lackeys along the walls. A second piece of tapestry cut off a
dimly lighted alcove, where a bed of state could be seen,—“also of
the period,” as Erard remarked complacently. The visitors were still
admiring when the servant opened the door into the dining salon.
“We will have some punch,” Erard sighed, throwing himself into the
deep chair at the head of the table, in which his small figure seemed
engulfed. While Pierre, like an attentive mouse, passed the punch
and cakes, the Americans let their eyes roam over the room. It was
sombre with heavy furniture, but scrupulously confined to “the
period,” from the few plates that looked down from the lofty
sideboard, to the andirons on the hearth.
“An ideal nest,” Miss Anthon murmured.
“Your man makes such good punch,” Mrs. Anthon added.
“You must have put a mine into this,” Wilbur commented, as he
sipped his punch. “Fixed it up for a permanent residence?”
“Ah! I can’t say,” the artist replied negligently. “Paris bores me a good
deal. I do my best work at Giverney or San Geminiano. This is a kind
of office.”
“Not much like the old garret where genius was once supposed to
blossom,” Sebastian Anthon reflected in his weary voice, as if
making propositions for himself.
Erard moved uneasily. The gentle old man’s remark contained a
special sting.
“That doesn’t go nowadays. To do his best work, the workman must
have his proper atmosphere. It was all well enough in the
Renaissance for those old fellows to bang about; there was so much
going on that was inspiring; so much beauty in the world! But to-day
he must cover himself up from the horrid impressions of reality. If he
fought with cold and hunger and bad wall-paper, and all that, he
would never be fit for his fine work. Either the harsh actualities would
blunt his sensitiveness, or he would show that he hadn’t any, that he
wasn’t of the temperament.”
Erard turned from the attentive old man to the young woman, whose
fortune of contemporaneous birth might render her intelligent to the
force of his remarks. Moreover, she was a woman, and Simeon
Erard’s strong point was his management of women. He got at them
on impersonal, sexless grounds. His rambling physique and flattened
face were almost repulsive, and he had never quite lost the traces of
the dull back alley in Jersey City, whence he had emerged upon the
circle of patrons and patronesses who were to attend him on towards
fame. With a subtle insight into his own resources, he knew that
women would always be useful to him; that they were most excellent
working-partners of fame. To have a chorus of women at your
command was like subsidizing the press: it was a dangerous
weapon to use, but its range was incalculable. And in manipulating
women he was skilful enough to exclude the sexual basis. He never
appeared to them in the light of a possible husband or lover. Further,
he never included a stupid woman in his chorus merely because she
made court to him.
Just now it seemed to him better worth while securing a new ally
than opening the dangerous question started by the old man. So he
led the party back to the salon and begged Miss Anthon to try the
spinet. While he explained the working of the instrument, he threw
out casually some remarks about music. The young woman struck a
few thin chords, that rustled like yellowed parchment in the lofty
room; her glance followed the artist as he looked after his guests.
Now he was talking to Wilbur, who was eagerly loquacious. She
could catch phrases: “... run over for a few months ... business dull ...
had a chance to be fixed up in a little job ... pretty good place ... am a
University of Michigan man.” Erard’s little eyes were coolly judging
the expansive young man, assigning him to his species, and
calculating the exact amount of significance he might contain.
Who was this Erard? She had heard her mother refer often enough
to Sebastian Anthon’s “folly” over that “painter-fellow” he had picked
up in New York as a tutor for his daughter. She remembered many
little details of his career: how her uncle had found him in a print-
shop behind the counter, and had encouraged him in his efforts to
worm his way through the art-school. Later he had come to
Sebastian Anthon’s summer home, on the half-intimate footing of a
tutor, and she remembered to have seen him there,—a sullen, ugly
lad, with his material and stupid charge. Then Erard had gone
abroad, first with Uncle Sebastian, then again for a long period by
himself. And her mother accused him of “getting Sebastian to waste
good money on pictures and such stuff.”
She was not aware that Erard had done much to justify all the
Anthon money that had gone into his career. At least if you counted
by tangible evidences! She did not know that one of the first precepts
which the protégé had inculcated had been that you should not count
by vulgar or tangible proofs, such as books published, pictures
painted and sold, articles appearing in magazines, with
accompanying checks and drafts.
For Erard’s initial ambition—to paint—had expanded in the
atmosphere of Paris, until now it would be hard to say just where he
proposed to apply his force.
A professorship in aesthetics, the editorship of a magazine devoted
to the arts, the curatorship of a museum,—one or all, might have
satisfied his present ambition. Yet he had never quite abandoned
actual creative work. Now and then, whenever Sebastian Anthon
was becoming unusually restless, some one “evidence” appeared to
justify the interest that old Anthon was taking in him. Some clever
article on the Salons for an American journal, a little essay on an
early Italian master in an English magazine, a portrait of Mrs. George
Payne,—the editor’s young wife,—which set the American colony in
Paris agog with talk; at the worst, some bit of encouraging gossip
from “a man who knew.” Perhaps Erard had been right in not forcing
himself; Sebastian Anthon shivered at the thought of how he himself
had been forced.
It had been superb in its way, Erard’s campaign thus far, or
preparation for campaign. Once in Paris, the very pavement seemed
familiar to him, the air in the streets to be intimate. “You are one of
us,” it whispered. He prepared leisurely to realize far-reaching
projects. He was never idle, and he was rarely dissipated. Quite
early, it is probable, he suspected that his organism was not the
artist’s; his blood was too thin. But his power was to comprehend, to
enjoy and relate. Or, to use the phrase that he found for his patron,
“to know the background.” So he had had the audacity to proceed
from capital to capital, establishing large siege-lines,—the audacity,
when to-morrow might find him at the pawn-shop with nothing to
pawn. Perhaps he knew his world better than most; had he had more
scrupulous doubts, he would have failed at the outset.
To-day he had asked the Anthons to see his apartment and his new
picture; for he still painted, cleverly aware that the world, after all,
pays a certain homage to the mystery of creation that it denies to
mere knowledge. His guests, however, seemed to be impressed
more with the apartment in which he had enveloped himself, by the
very vulgar facts of physical appointments, than by his excellent
picture. The afternoon had engendered a moral opposition which he
must overcome in some way. Sebastian Anthon was especially
necessary to him just now; he must spend this winter in Spain. And
he would like to have this nice old man fall in with the plan, even if it
necessitated including his niece, and, at the worst, the voluble lady
her mother.
That person could be heard, above the notes of the spinet, in her
monologue to the patient Wilbur. “I shall take Adela to Aix-les-Bains
as soon as the season opens. I tell her that what she wants is to
know people, to meet pleasant friends, not to spend her year over
here fooling about in a studio. I guess she hasn’t any great talent.
Walter has set his heart on making a writer of himself, and I guess
one genius in the family is enough.” The purple bows on Mrs.
Anthon’s new Parisian hat tossed in time with the vehement
workings of her short, thick body. She had settled into an aggressive
pace.
Erard paused for a moment by her side, and then, as the music
faded out, stepped back to Miss Anthon. Her face, which was turned
towards the light, wore a look of tolerance, and the restless tapping
of one foot upon the marquetry betrayed a stifled criticism of her
mother’s chatter.
The young artist noted that the moulding of the face had been begun
freely and graciously. Nothing was final. It might be interesting to
know where the next few years would place the emphasis. Meantime
the impulse of life was throbbing in that face actively, generously. To
feel, to understand, and—what is more—to act swiftly,—a promise of
such powers it held forth.
“You are working here?” Erard observed. Miss Anthon turned to him
with relief.
“Oh! fooling, as the rest do. It seems so utterly silly, but it is better
than shopping perpetually, or running about to see things you don’t
understand.”
“Did you do much—earlier?” Erard assumed easily the catechist’s
place.
“Never—much—of anything,” she confessed slowly. “But I liked it
awfully, only papa wanted me to have a sound education first.”
“Quite wise—that papa.”
“Why?”
“Because the chances are that you may know something some day,
but there isn’t much chance of your ever doing anything.”
Miss Anthon flushed at this cool estimation of her range by her
uncle’s protégé. Yet her good sense and her curiosity kept her from
betraying any foolish annoyance, and the two were soon far on in an
intimate conversation. Erard’s finality in judgments, and his
conjuror’s trick of knowing all about herself without detailed
confession, impressed Miss Anthon.
At last the visitors gathered themselves up, and Mrs. Anthon said a
distant good-by to their host. Miss Anthon added to her mother’s
conventionally expressed hope that they might see Erard again, a
pointed invitation. “Come and show me what I ought to know.”
“Would you care to see Degas’s new picture?”
The girl answered with a look, with a flutter of astonishment. Who
was this young man who could take her to Degas’s studio? As they
moved into the hall, Erard found an opportunity to hand her the last
Revue Internationale. “Perhaps you will care to look this over; it’s an
article on Degas I wrote last spring.”
Then Pierre, the solemn man-servant, appeared with an old horn
lantern, pulled back the long iron bolt, and prepared to escort the
guests to the courtyard. In the hall a slender crane, supporting a
flickering candle, reached out above the stairs. Erard stood under its
shrine-like glimmer, wafting courtly cordialities to the descending
guests. As Miss Anthon passed the bend in the stairs Pierre’s lantern
threw a dash of light upon her dark strong form, while the plumes in
her hat made magnificent shadows upon the stone walls. She swung
her loose cape about her, as a young officer years before might have
wrapped himself in his military cloak before venturing into the night-
blast below. She looked up at him and smiled with the frank
recognition one gives to a possible master. The last sound Erard
heard, as the great doors creaked open below, was Mrs. Anthon’s
shrill babble about dinner.