Painfulness

 

A factor almost universally ignored nowadays by critics and readers is the extent of the pains a writer, or any artist at times, went to in assembling the created work. Critics behave as though the work is there primarily as a test of their superior reading skills, their special criteria for praise or dismissal. The intellectual, experiential, and emotional realities that made the work possible count for nothing much, or so it appears. The common reader, similarly, too often seems to talk about works in the same way they treat other phenomena, as consumables whose existence arrived on the shelf purely by chance, there for an hour’s passing distraction. This factor came to mind today re-reading a favourite Victorian author, Richard Chenevix Trench. He writes: ‘[Thomas] Fuller, our Church historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims, “Oh the painfulness of his preaching!” We might assume at first hearing, and if we did not know the former uses of ‘painfulness,’ that this was an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the pain which he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had more ‘painful’ preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who took pains themselves, we should have fewer ‘painful’ ones in the modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as “the painful writer of two hundred books” – not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.’ (‘English, Past and Present: Five Lectures.’ 3^rd Edition, Revised. London, 1856, page 180.) The Revd Trench of Itchen Stoke calls this “a very easy misapprehension,” adding it to the many in his lectures he went to pains in tracing, in order to illustrate how meanings change over the centuries. Linguistics, or philology, was a second string to Trench’s bow, whose several painful books of theology and biblical interpretation assisted his eventual advance to the position of Archbishop of Dublin. In fact, his mind- and time-expanding skills of etymology are one of the original inspirations for the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the supreme results of that Age of dedicated painfulness. He hadn’t time to help compile the OED, but he is regarded as one of its three founders. His different word studies books enunciated a complete and erudite rationale for collecting instances of word change in the literature, formulated before the genesis of the Dictionary itself in 1857. An entire literature has since evolved around OED editors and contributors past and present, lucid and less so, readers of this biographical literature avid to admire the extreme painfulness of their scholarship. Some of it on a par with Bishop Grosthead, better known by Trench’s time as Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, one of England’s foremost medieval statesmen, theologians and philosophers, as well as being thought the real founder of the scientific method at Oxford.