Essays in Miniature. Agnes Repplier
But surely the readers of Christopher North do not require information like this. "Douce" and "parritch" and "guffaw" are not difficult words to understand, and "in a jiffy" would seem to come within the intellectual grasp of many who have not yet made the acquaintance of the alphabet.
It may be, however, that there are people who really like to be instructed in this manner, just as there are people who like to go to lectures and to organ recitals. It may even be that a taste for notes, like a taste for gin, or opium, or Dr. Ibsen's dramas, increases with what it feeds on. In that tiny volume of Selected Poems by Gray which Mr. Gosse has edited for the Clarendon Press, there are forty-two pages of notes to sixty pages of poetry; and while some of them are valuable and interesting, many more seem strangely superfluous. But Mr. Gosse, who has his finger on the literary pulse of his generation, is probably the last man in England to furnish information unless it is desired. He knows, better than most purveyors of knowledge, what it is that readers want; he is not prone to waste his precious minutes; he has a saving sense of humor; and he does not aspire to be a lettered philanthropist fretting to enlighten mankind. If, then, he finds it necessary to elucidate that happy trifle, On the Death of a Favorite Cat, with no less than seven notes, which is at the rate of one for every verse, it must be that he is filling an expressed demand; it must be that he is aware that modern students of Gray—every one who reads a poet is a "student" nowadays—like to be told by an editor about Tyrian purple, and about Arion's dolphin, and about the difference between a tortoise-shell and a tabby. As for the seven pages of notes that accompany the Elegy, they carry me back in spirit to the friend of my childhood, Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond, who was expected to understand every word of every poem she studied. What a blessing Mr. Gosse's notes would have been to that poor, dear, misguided little girl, who rashly committed the Elegy to memory because, in honest, childish fashion, she loved its pretty sound! Who can forget the pathetic scene where she attempts to recite it, and has only finished the first line,
"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,"
when Godfrey, whom I always thought, and still think, a very disagreeable boy, interrupts her ruthlessly.
"'What is meant by the "curfew"? What is meant by "tolls"? What is a "knell"? What is meant by "parting day"?'
"'Godfrey, I cannot tell the meaning of every word, but I know the general meaning. It means that the day is going, that it is evening, that it is growing dark. Now let me go on.'
"'Go on,' said Godfrey, 'and let us see what you will do when you come to "the boast of heraldry," to "the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault," to the "village Hampden," to "some mute inglorious Milton," and to "some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood," you who have not come to Cromwell yet, in the history of England.'"
No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened and silenced by such an array of difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself comes to grief, a little later, with The Bard, and that even the wise and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines,
"If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear."
"Oaten stop" was a mystery, and "eve" she thought—and was none the worse for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother.
No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary, well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth's little people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a book framed for their especial joy, like The Children's Treasury of English Song, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the Elegy, and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved it a great deal less. It is healthy and natural for a child to be forcibly attracted by what she does not wholly comprehend; the music of words appeals very sweetly to childish ears, and their meaning comes later—comes often after the first keen unconscious pleasure is past. I once knew a tiny boy who so delighted in Byron's description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over, and over, and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real man, described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the "Dacian mother," or "a Roman holiday." Historically and geographically, the boy's mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent or sagacious in his enjoyment; only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of strong words, and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts. But what child who reads Cowper's pretty remonstrance to his spaniel, and the spaniel's neat reply, wants to be told in a succession of dismal notes that "allures" means "tempts," that "remedy" means "cure," that "killing time" means "wasting time," that "destined" means "meant for," and that "behest" means "command"? Cowper is one of the simplest of writers, and the little boys and girls who cannot be trusted unarmed in his company had better confine their reading to Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable, or to the veracious pages of Mother Goose. But perhaps the day is not far distant when even Mother Goose will afford food for instruction and a fresh industry for authors, and when the hapless children of the dawning century will be confronted with a dozen highly abbreviated and unintelligible notes referring them to some Icelandic Saga or remote Indian epic for the bloody history of the Three Blind Mice.
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