Marginalia — 1902 historical reading — reading text

Marginalia Historical reading from James A. Harrison’s 1902 Complete Works, volume XVI. This is a later collected edition, not the first periodical printing. The selected historical work sections are preserved locally; modern website commentary and double-bracketed corrections are excluded. Paragraph and verse-line boundaries are retained, with simplified typography. No independent word-by-word proofreading is claimed. MARGINALIA. I. [Democratic Review, November, 1844.] IN getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste. All this may be whim; it may be not only a very hackneyed, but a very idle practice; — yet I persist in it still; and it affords me pleasure; which is profit, in despite of Mr. Bentham, with Mr. Mill on his back. This making of notes, however, is by no means the making of mere memoranda — a custom which has its disadvantages, beyond doubt. “Ce que je mets sur papier,” says Bernardin de St. Pierre, “je remets de ma mémoire et par conséquence je l’oublie;” — and, in fact, if you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. But the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value. They have a rank somewhat above the chance and desultory comments of literary chit-chat — for these latter are not unfrequently “talk for talk's sake,” hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought; — however flippant — however silly — however trivial — still a thought indeed, not merely a thing that might have been a thought in time, and under more favorable circumstances. In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonnement — without conceit — much after the fashion of Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Sir William Temple, and the anatomical Burton, and that most logical analogist, Butler, and some other people of the old day, who were too full of their matter to have any room for their manner, which, being thus left out of question, was a capital manner, indeed, — a model of manners, with a richly marginalic air. The circumscription of space, too, in these pencillings, has in it something more of advantage than of inconvenience. It compels us (whatever diffuseness of idea we may clandestinely entertain), into Montesquieu-ism, into Tacitus-ism (here I leave out of view the concluding portion of the “Annals”) — or even into Carlyle-ism — a thing which, I have been told, is not to be confounded with your ordinary affectation and bad grammar. I say “bad grammar,” through sheer obstinacy, because the grammarians (who should know better) insist upon it that I should not. But then grammar is not what these grammarians will have it; and, being merely the analysis of language, with the result of this analysis, must be good or bad just as the analyst is sage or silly — just as he is a Horne Tooke or a Cobbett. But to our sheep. During a rainy afternoon, not long ago, being in a mood too listless for continuous study, I sought relief from ennui in dipping here and there, at random, among the volumes of my library — no very large one, certainly, but sufficiently miscellaneous; and, I flatter myself, not a little recherché. Perhaps it was what the Germans call the “brain-scattering” humor of the moment; but, while the picturesqueness of the numerous pencil-scratches arrested my attention, their helter-skelter-iness of commentary amused me. I found myself at length forming a wish that it had been some other hand than my own which had so bedevilled the books, and fancying that, in such case, I might have derived no inconsiderable pleasure from turning them over. From this the transition-thought (as Mr. Lyell, or Mr. Murchison, or Mr. Featherstonhaugh would have it) was natural enough: — there might be something even in my scribblings which, for the mere sake of scribbling, would have interest for others. The main difficulty respected the mode of transferring the notes from the volumes — the context from the text — without detriment to that exceedingly frail fabric of intelligibility in which the context was imbedded. With all appliances to boot, with the printed pages at their back, the commentaries were too often like Dodona's oracles — or those of Lycophron Tenebrosus — or the essays of the pedant's pupils, in Quintilian, which were “necessarily excellent, since even he (the pedant) found it impossible to comprehend them”: — what, then, would become of it — this context — if transferred? — if translated? Would it not rather be traduit (traduced) which is the French synonym, or overzezet (turned topsv-turvy) which is the Dutch one? I concluded, at length, to put extensive faith in the acumen and imagination of the reader: — this as a general rule. But, in some instances, where even faith would not remove mountains, there seemed no safer plan than so to re-model the note as to convey at least the ghost of a conception as to what it was all about. Where, for such conception, the text itself was absolutely necessary, I could quote it; where the title of the book commented upon was indispensable, I could name it. In short, like a novel-hero dilemma'd, I made up my mind “to be guided by circumstances,” in default of more satisfactory rules of conduct. As for the multitudinous opinion expressed in the subjoined farrago — as for my present assent to all, or dissent from any portion of it — as to the possibility of my having, in some instances, altered my mind — or as to the impossibility of my not having altered it often — these are points upon which I say nothing, because upon these there can be nothing cleverly said. It may be as well to observe, however, that just as the goodness of your true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability, so is nonsense the essential sense of the Marginal Note. ————— Who has seen the “Velschii Ruzname Naurus,” of the Oriental Literature? ————— There is about the same difference between the epicyclic lines of Shelley, et id genus, and the epics of Hell-Fire Montgomery, as between the notes of a flute and those of the gong at Astor's. In the one class the vibrations are unequal but melodious; the other have regularity enougn, but no great deal of music, and a trifle too much of the tintamarre. ————— The Bishop of Durham (Dr. Butler) once asked Dean Tucker whether he did not think that communities went mad en masse, now and then, just as individuals, individually. The thing need not have been questioned. Were not the Abderians seized, all at once, with the Euripides lunacy, during which they ran about the streets declaiming the plays of the poet? And now here is the great tweedle-dee tweedle-dum paroxysm — the uproar about Pusey. If England and America are not lunatic now — at this very moment — then I have never seen such a thing as a March hare. ————— I believe that Hannibal passed into Italy over the Pennine Alps; and if Livy were living now, I could demonstrate this fact even to him. ————— In a rail-road car, I once sat face to face with him — or, rather, προσωπον κατα προσωπον, as the Septuagint have it; for he had a tooth-ache, and three-fourths of his visage were buried in a red handkerchief. Of what remained visible, an eighth, I thought, represented his “Gaieties,” and an eighth his “Gravities.” The only author I ever met who looked even the fourth of his own book. ————— But for the shame of the thing, there are few of the so-called apophthegms which would not avow themselves epigrams outright. They have it in common with the fencing-school foils, that we can make no real use of any part of them but the point, while this we can never get fairly at, on account of a little flat profundity-button. ————— I make no exception, even in Dante's favor: — the only thing well said of Purgatory, is that a man may go farther and fare worse. ————— When music affects us to tears, seemingly causeless, we weep not, as Gravina supposes, from “excess of pleasure”; but through excess of an impatient, petulant sorrow that, as mere mortals, we are as yet in no condition to banquet upon those supernal ecstasies of which the music affords us merely a suggestive and indefinite glimpse. ————— One of the most deliberate tricks of Voltaire, is where he renders, by Soyez justes, mortels, et ne craignez qu’un Dieu, the words of Phlegyas, who cries out, in Hell, Dicite justitiam, moniti, et non temnere Divos. He gives the line this twist, by way of showing that the ancients worshipped one God. He is endeavoring to deny that the idea of the Unity of God originated with the Jews. ————— The theorizers on Government, who pretend always to “begin with the beginning,” commence with Man in what they call his natural state — the savage. What right have they to suppose this his natural state? Man's chief idiosyncrasy being reason, it follows that his savage condition — his condition of action without reason — is his unnatural state. The more he reasons, the nearer he approaches the position to which this chief idiosyncrasy irresistibly impels him; and not until he attains this position with exactitude — not until his reason has exhausted itself for his improvement — not until he has stepped upon the highest pinnacle of civilisation — will his natural state be ultimately reached, or thoroughly determined. ————— Our literature is infested with a swarm of just such little people as this — creatures who succeed in creating for themselves an absolutely positive reputation, by mere dint of the continuity and perpetuality of their appeals to the public — which is permitted, not for a single instant, to rid itself of these Epizœ, or to get their pretensions out of sight. We cannot, then, regard the microscopical works of the animalculæ in question, as simple nothings; for they produce, as I say, a positive effect, and no multiplication of zeros will result in unity — but as negative quantities — as less than nothings; since − into − will give +. ————— I cannot imagine why it is that Harrison Ainsworth so be-peppers his books with his own dog Latin and pig Greek — unless, indeed, he agrees with Encyclopædia Chambers, that nonsense sounds worse in English than in any other language. ————— These gentlemen, in attempting the dash of Carlyle, get only as far as the luminousness of Plutarch, who begins the life of Demetrius Poliorcetes with an account of his death, and informs us that the hero could not have been as tall as his father, for the simple reason that his father, after all, was only his uncle. ————— To persist in calling these places “Magdalen Asylums” is absurd, and worse. We have no reason to believe that Mary Magdalen ever sinned as supposed, or that she is the person alluded to in the seventh chapter of Luke. See Macknight's “Harmony,” — p. 201 — part 2. ————— Nothing, to the true taste, is so offensive as mere hyperism. In Germany wohlgeborn is a loftier title than edelgeborn; and, in Greece, the thrice-victorious at the Olympic games could claim a statue of the size of life, while he who had conquered but once was entitled only to a colossal. ————— The author(1) speaks of music like a man, and not like a fiddler. This is something — and that he has imagination is more. But the philosophy of music is beyond his depth, and