John Sparrow, Bibliographer
In John Lowe’s biography of John Sparrow, The Warden (1999), there are several anecdotes about Sparrow’s bibliophilia, literary correspondences, and bibliographic scholarship. The following is particularly worth sharing: in one of Sparrow’s self-publications, a humorous account of his bibliophilic expertise entitled Some Reflections of a Bibliophile (1986), he offers four ‘golden rules’ to aspiring book collectors.
1. Never lend anyone a book
2. Never sell a book
3. Never give anyone a book
4. Never read a book
He does confess to not always obeying these rules.
Before Sparrow was elected as a prize fellow of All Souls in 1929, he had already published an edited volume of John Donne’s meditations, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1923), before he turned 18. It might tentatively be said that this was the height of Sparrow’s literary achievements, and to have peaked so early is perhaps the mark of a tragic hero -- at least, of one whose later decline would overshadow the brilliances which enjoyed their full luminescence in his youth.
Sparrow’s dogged bibliographic work continued throughout his life; not everything was published, let alone widely read. Last year, I came across a catalogue of literary manuscripts which he bequeathed to the Bodleian upon his death. The catalogue is currently in the Weston library, containing poetic materials dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries. All of the poetry is by men of note, including the great seventeenth century English poet and Royalist in exile during the Civil War, Abraham Cowley (a particular obsession of Sparrow’s); troubled protegee of King Charles II, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Alfred Lord Tennyson; William Butler Yeats, whom Sparrow knew; Robert Bridges, and others. Several MSS are annotated by the poets in question.
Clearly, Sparrow read the early modern poetry manuscripts he owned several times and with great care. In this catalogue, there are two manuscript copies of Cowley’s satire ‘The Puritan and the Papist’ and a print copy dating to 1643; there are also two print copies of the text from 1934 with Sparrow’s bibliographic notes entitled ‘Variant Readings’ attached. ‘Variant Readings’ is a collation of four 17th century manuscript copies of the poem, in which Sparrow lists every variant word across all copies. The catalogue also includes a bundle of correspondence dating to 1983 between Sparrow and Thomas Calhoun, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, about a planned five-volume edition of Cowley’s complete works. Calhoun notes the ‘significant contributions’ to Cowley scholarship for which Sparrow was renowned – this included an edition of The Mistress with other Select Poems of Abraham Cowley 1618-1667 published by Nonsuch Press in 1926 (once again, when Sparrow was a very young man, several years before his election to All Souls). Calhoun authored the latest scholarship I can find discussing ‘The Puritan and the Papist’ at length; it’s a great article.
‘The Puritan and the Papist’ is composed in heroic couplets. As is typical of English early modern English satire, it follows a classical model: in this case, that of Horatian satire. In English satire in the 16th and 17th centuries, Horatian satire was defined against a second Roman model, that of Juvenal – this distinction was popularised by Elizabethan satirists like Joseph Hall. Juvenalian satire was considered a mordant, ‘biting’ form of satire which took a focused stance against one chief party or vice, while the more balanced, two-sided satire in the Horatian vein was called ‘toothless’ (notice the canine language referring to the Cynics).
As Calhoun explains,
Cowley wrote ‘The Puritan and the Papist’ at Cambridge and probably completed most of it by March 1643, when he was ejected from Trinity College Cambridge and left for Oxford (the 1643 edition notes the author as ‘a scholler at Oxford’). By March 1643, the battles at Powick Bridge, Edgehill, and Brentford, all mentioned in the poem, had taken place. An authorized edition of the satire was printed in 1643. The context of this satire on puritans was a claim made by John Pym made in Parliament that Popish factions in the Royal court were sundering the King from his people.
It’s not often the layperson laughs heartily at seventeenth century satire, but the opening of the poem is actually funny to the reader possessing a basic understanding of the religious backdrop of the Civil War:
SO two rude waves, by stormes together throwne,
Roare at each other, fight, and then grow one.
Religion is a Circle; men contend,
And runne the round in dispute without end.
Now in a Circle who goe contrary,
Must at the last meet of necessity.
The Roman to advance the Catholicke cause
Allowes a Lie, and calls it Pia Fraus
The Puritan approves and does the same,
Dislikes nought in it but the Latin name.
For a much longer time than their Puritan counterparts, Catholics had been a universal target in satire by authors belonging to the Reformed religion (i.e. the majority of statesmen-poets with the standing to publish under their own names). Here, the idea is that Puritans are not so different from papists, commonly castigated for corruption, idolatry, hypocrisy, impiety, etc. The rhymes and antitheses of the couplets illustrate this ironic likeness – perhaps Cowley is setting forth a kind of early modern ‘horseshoe theory’.
Sparrow’s collation of four variant copies of this satire is meticulous, attesting to his keen interest in promoting Cowley scholarship and disseminating true and faithful editions of his poems. It appears he helped Calhoun in his project by sending him several books and MSS (including those in the Weston collection) via Lawrence Heyworth. In one of the letters between them, Calhoun mentions ‘The Puritan and the Papist’, stating ‘we located this inside the cover of your Pindar’ (recall that Cowley was important in reinventing the Pindaric Ode).
What were the results of the collaboration? Calhoun and Heyworth produced two volumes of Cowley’s collected works, but not the promised five. An obituary to Calhoun reveals that he died of heart failure in 1994, at only 54 years old, presumably pausing the production of the edition indefinitely. To this day, there is still a pressing need for an updated edition of Cowley’s complete surviving works in poetry and prose.
One of the manuscript copies of ‘The Puritan and the Papist’ appears in a commonplace book of poetry in English and Latin dating to the late 17th century. The commonplace book, which clearly prizes satire, also contains such titanic poems as Edmund Waller, 'On the Lord Protectors dying in a storm', Rochester’s ‘A Satyre upon Reason and Mankind’ and his brilliant encomium 'Upon Nothing', and John Dryden, 'Heroick Stanzas consecrated To the memory of Cromwell'. Sparrow composed several poems of his own, some of which are published in a collection Grave Epigrams and Other Verses (1974). One of these epigrams, written about himself, reads
Here, with his talents in a napkin hid,
Lies one who much designed, and nothing did;
Postponing and deferring, day by day,
He quite procrastinated life away,
And, when at length the summons came to die,
With his last breath put off – mortality.
I was struck by this poem’s similarity with some miscellaneous poems by Rochester (known for being brilliantly witty and precocious, producing age-defining satires, ruining himself with wine, and instigating brawls). Take the little poem ‘Rochester Extempore’:
And after singing psalme the 12th
He layd his booke uppon the shelfe,
And lookd much simply like himselfe;
With eyes turn'd up as white as ghost
He cryd ah lard, ah lard of Hosts!
I am a rascall, that thou know'st.
Both poems are about the constraints of being oneself; they accompany penitence with humour; epigrams which read like epitaphs, they dance along the boundary between laughter and dread. The latter was composed just after Rochester and his troupe got in a late-night scuffle with the night watch of Charles II’s court in 1676, and one of Rochester's companions, Roger Downes, was killed in the fight. Rochester was reported to have fled the scene of the incident. He didn’t have as much time as Sparrow to rise and fall; already debauched at Wadham College at 14, he died at 33 of venereal disease.
A poet with whom Sparrow had a more concrete relationship was W. B. Yeats: they crossed paths and corresponded several times. I have another fitting anecdote (cited in Brian Arkins, Builders of my Soul (1990)):
In a 1931 conversation with John Sparrow, Yeats cited and expanded on Lucretius’ lines from the end of the long passage (1037–1191) on sexual love concluding Book IV of De rerum natura:
The finest description of sexual intercourse ever written was in John Dryden’s translation of Lucretius, and it was justified; it was introduced to illustrate the difficulty of two becoming a unity: ‘The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.’ Sexual intercourse is an attempt to solve the eternal antinomy, doomed to failure because it takes place only on one side of the gulf. The gulf is that which separates the one and the many, or if you like, God and man.
This written conversation has been transformed into a slightly different anecdote which can be found in several places, and which I’ve heard from several mouths: that Yeats and Sparrow were dining in The Mitre on Oxford High Street, waiting to be joined by Kenneth Clark, when Yeats began to discourse about Epicurus before exclaiming loudly ‘Isn’t the tragedy of sexual intercourse the perpetual virginity of the soul?’ within earshot of several aghast parents who were taking their undergraduate sons out for a meal.
Sparrow also owned several MSS - typescripts of Yeats’ both poetry and prose - previously owned by Yeats and revised by his own hand. Annotating typescripts was a common practice among the modernist poets – c.f. the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, a display of how Eliot would produce several clear, widely-spaced draft copies of the poem before attacking them with a pen. Yeats does the same in these pages, which were reportedly taken from his wastepaper basket and preserved by his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees.
The first poem is a copy of ‘More Songs of an Old Countryman’, with the original title ‘More song of an Old Pensioner’ amended by hand. Then comes ‘All Souls’ Night’ and ‘Upon a Dying Lady’. A meditation on friendship, and dead friends in particular, ‘All Souls’ Night’ is the best poem in the catalogue. It was published in Yeats’ 1928 collection The Tower. ‘Mind’ is a central motif. Yeat’s mysticism shines through even in the minute details, like the lack of definite articles designating ‘mind’. ‘The mind’ would be prosaic.
The speaker declares that he needs a resolute mind as armour against the ‘cannon sound’ of the frenetic world, a mind wrapped up in itself like a mummy; recall the ‘mummy-cloth’ of ‘Byzantium’. His ‘marvellous thing to say’ is his occult knowledge: the poem is an epilogue to his Kabbalistic book A Vision, written while Yeats was experimenting with automatic writing, a method which was supposed to accompany the writer’s guidance by something extra-conscious (a muse? a ghost?).
One of the revisions to ‘All Souls’ Night’ occurs in the second stanza:
I need some mind that, should World beat on the ground springs
and blustering Time all his shows can stay
Wound in minds pondering
As mummies in the mummy cloth are wound
Because I have a marvellous thing to say
A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Yeats replaces the second part of the first line and the following line with what is now the official version:
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay…
He also adds all the punctuation in the poem by hand at the ends of the lines, which was common for him to do (as shown in his letters, he was not known for standardised spelling or punctuation).
He renders in the present tense what was typed in the past:
And I call up MacGregor from the grave
For in my first hard spring-time we were friends,
Although of late estranged.
I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
And told him so, but friendship never ends;
And what if mind seem changed,
And it seem changed with the mind,
When thoughts rise up unbid
On generous things that he did
And I grow half contented to be blind.
This copy is slightly different in some print editions where he is named as ‘MacGregor Mathers’, or Samuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers, who was a British occultist and one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the ceremonial magical order to which Yeats belonged (and, at one time, led).
If I were trying to be clever I might say that the revisional impulse in Yeats, shown in his typescripts, affirms that no amount of experimentation with automatic writing – Yeats’ modernist iteration of the Romantic ideal of spontaneous poetic composition – can undermine the truth about writing: we have to do it in several drafts. Sparrow, who worked scrupulously but lamented his output, knew the same.