Across the narrow casement, curtain-wise;
Now by the bed her petticoat glides down,
And when did woman look the worse in none?
I have heard since who paid for many a gown,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.
See Thackeray’s Ballads and Tales, Scribners, 1904, pp. 103–4.
15 It is a comfort to know, though, that two hundred and ninety of Palgrave’s own poems are on these disks. Reading the poetry of people famous for their anthologies is a melancholy but instructive task.
16 Optical scanning isn’t feasible for old typefaces and foxed paper, and even when the material is in a modern edition and hence legible to scanning software, the raw output still demands, just as it did for the disillusioned Pope concordancers in the seventies, a considerable amount of labor-intensive “markup”—to distinguish things like titles, epigraphs, footnotes, and side-notes from text, for instance, and stanza breaks from page breaks — not to mention the inevitable manual fiddling afterward to fix small errors, like dashes that were read as hyphens.
17 Manilius being the Roman astrological poet who gave Johnson the tag he applied to Cowley and the rest of the Metaphysicals, discordia concors (not to be confused with Horace’s concordia discors, or Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum): you can find the Manilian reference in a footnote to the life of Cowley in G. Birkbeck Hill’s 1905 edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, a lovely example of old-fashioned scholarship, or you can search the Saturnian rings of the Latin CD-ROM published by the Packard Humanities Institute and Silver Mountain Software, which takes about five minutes.
18 No Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome? Only one of Daniel Defoe’s poems? Nothing by Lewis Theobald?
(ii)
Having borrowed a copy of the English Poetry Database from Douglas Roesemann, manager of Chadwyck-Healey’s U.S. base in Alexandria, Virginia, with the rash pledge that I would review it for The New York Review of Books, I stuck the tip of my index finger in the center hole of Disk 2 on a summer afternoon in 1994. This is one of the safer ways to handle a CD-ROM, especially one with a suggested retail value of over ten thousand dollars. (The whole multidisk kit goes for $47,500 in the U.S., according to the last price list I saw.) I was thus able to flourish, to flaunt, around the first joint of a single finger, like one of those living collars certain reptiles unfurl to frighten away predators, “all” of English poetry from 1660 to 1800.
On the point of popping open my computer’s spring-loaded tray and laying the Pierian pancake in its circular bed — about to enclose its infinite riches in a little CD-ROM drive1 —Inoticed that my finger was a little unsteady, and so too was the iridescently flared CD-reflection of my overbooked room. I was aware of the possibility that my private quote-stash, my typewritten cullings, my heaps of coffee-splashed and ant-jaywalked photocopies on the floor, some of which I had grown quite fond of, would appear embarrassingly skimpy and unmethodical when ranked against the neat, single-sourced lumber-list I knew I would get in minutes using the English Poetry Database. Would the speed and thoroughness of one-stop searching overwhelm my project with easy erudition (airudition, perhaps) and inhibit my will to finish? Dilettante and scholar-pretender though I was content to remain, I didn’t like the idea that readers of The New York Review of Books would assume, merely because I was an admitted Chadwyck-Healeyan, that I had read even less than I had read in the paginal sprints and leg-stretches I had performed to lumber up for my chosen task. I was reminded of A. E. Housman’s contemptuous footnote about a German classicist:
Wolf, like all pretenders to encyclopedic knowledge, had a dash of the impostor about him, and we have no assurance that he had read the book which he thus presumes to judge.
Of Housman, D. R. Shackleton-Baily wrote in 1959:
I have always suspected that the animus which he sometimes seemed to show against the great German dictionary, the
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
, had partly to do with a feeling that such compilations help lazy scholars to conceal their lack of reading.
2
In literary history as elsewhere, a find is valuable to the degree that it is hard to come by, and the frightening thing about a huge full-text poetry stockpile like Chadwyck-Healey’s is that any word or phrase in it, regardless of the bespidered and dust-fledged remoteness of the book from which it was taken, is as easily unearthed as any other. Barring variant spellings, or typos in the original poem or in the transcription, which may help it elude literal searching, no thought, no image anywhere in it is out of the way. Richard Bentley (whom the hard-to-please Housman praised for the “firm strength and piercing edge and arrowy swiftness of his intellect, his matchless facility and adroitness and resource”), when compelled to defend his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris from an attack by Charles Boyle and friends, wrote:
I am charg’d with several faults; as first, for citing Passages
out of the way
An Accusation I should wish to be True, rather than False. For I take it to be a Commendation, to entertain the Reader with something, that’s
out of the common way
; and I’ll never desire to trouble the World with
common Authorities
, as this Gentleman would have me do.
But on the level playing field of the CD-ROM, Amhurst, Bickersteth, and Smedley are “common Authorities” equal in weight to Butler, Dryden, and Pope: the scholar gets no earned learnedness credits for quoting them. And yet there they are up on the screen even so — blandly, blindingly obscure, insisting on assimilation.
Unsure of my ability to digest the sudden hairball of new fascinations that Disk 2 was sure to deposit at my feet,3 I postponed the worrying search, and turned instead to my stereo system. Removing the Suzanne Vega CD that was slumbering in my Magnavox portable CD-player (featuring Dynamic Bass Boost circuitry), I replaced it with Chadwyck-Healey’s silver poemage. I listened.
It may not be universally known that you can play CD-ROM software disks on ordinary audio CD-players. The digital sequence is misread as an analog signal. Eighteenth-century English poetry, as interpreted by my Yamaha stereo receiver and peripherals, generated an edgy square-wave buzz, around a low E-natural, a discordia concors lower than a table saw (except when it is cutting a piece of wood with a split end), more like one of those neck hair trimmers that the stylist pulls out of a drawer in the final phase of a haircut, but with excellent spatial separation and some gratuitous conch-shell oceania on top. Disk 3 (1800–1900, poets A — K) sounded much the same. Every so often the power-substation effects would let up a little and there would be some shortlived but lyrical swooshing, as of several cooling hoses playing over the mind at once, although this was not nearly as pronounced as in the excellent Library of the Future CD-ROM, Version 3 (which offers the complete texts of “over 1,750 historical, classical, and cultural titles” for $149.95): this has some very well-defined swooshing intervals that put me in mind of the circular-sander finishes that David Smith used for his big minimalist sculptures, finishes that as you stare into them become three-dimensional, and yet, like some works of science fiction, yield little in real brain-nourishment.