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Title: Books and Bookmen

Author: Ian Maclaren  [Pseudonym of the Rev. John Watson]

Release Date: June, 2002  [Etext #3256]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
[The actual date this file first posted = 02/28/01]

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Language: English

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This etext was produced from the 1912 James Nisbet & Co. edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

by Ian Maclaren  [Pseudonym of the Rev. John Watson]




They cannot be separated any more than sheep and a shepherd, but I am
minded to speak of the bookman rather than of his books, and so it
will be best at the outset to define the tribe.

It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many books,
for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which
a gentleman's library is not complete.  And in the present imperfect
arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books,
since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them.  It is the
foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming
dress, and his fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-
halfpenny edition.  The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other
people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an
illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman
which I think is apropos.  As he was to preside at a lecture I was
delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner, which was
excellent, and as he proposed to take the role that night of a man
who had been successful in business, but yet allowed himself in
leisure moments to trifle with literature, he desired to create an
atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain imposing air that we
should visit what he called "my library."  Across the magnificence of
the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of
walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his
income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the
rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner.  "There,"
he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, "what do
you think of that?" And THAT was without question a very large and
ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors.  Before I saw
the doors I had no doubt about my host, but they were a seal upon my
faith, for although a bookman is obliged to have one bit of glass in
his garden for certain rare plants from Russia and Morocco, to say
nothing of the gold and white vellum lily upon which the air must not
be allowed to blow, especially when charged with gas and rich in
dust, yet he hates this conservatory, just as much as he loves its
contents.  His contentment is to have the flowers laid out in open
beds, where he can pluck a blossom at will.  As often as one sees the
books behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked, then
he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with them
in the evening hours when the work of the day is done, but their
jailer, who has bought them in the market-place for gold, and holds
them in this foreign place by force.  It has seemed to me as if
certain old friends looked out from their prison with appealing
glance, and one has been tempted to break the glass and let, for
instance, Elia go free.  It would be like the emancipation of a
slave.  Elia was not, good luck for him, within this particular
prison, and I was brought back from every temptation to break the
laws of property by my chairman, who was still pursuing his
catechism.  "What," was question two, "do you think I paid for THAT?"
It was a hopeless catechism, for I had never possessed anything like
THAT, and none of my friends had in their homes anything like THAT,
and in my wildest moments I had never asked the price of such a thing
as THAT.  As it loomed up before me in its speckless respectability
and insolence of solid wealth my English sense of reverence for money
awoke, and I confessed that this matter was too high for me; but even
then, casting a glance of deprecation in its direction, I noticed
THAT was almost filled by a single work, and I wondered what it could
be.  "Cost 80 pounds if it cost a penny, and I bought it second-hand
in perfect condition for 17 pounds, 5s., with the books thrown in--
All the Year Round from the beginning in half calf;" and then we
returned in procession to the drawing-room, where my patron
apologised for our absence, and explained that when two bookmen got
together over books it was difficult to tear them away.  He was an
admirable chairman, for he occupied no time with a review of
literature in his address, and he slept without being noticed through
mine (which is all I ask of a chairman), and so it may seem
ungrateful, but in spite of "THAT" and any books, even Spenser and
Chaucer, which THAT might have contained, this Maecenas of an evening
was not a bookman.

It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a pleasant
anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having made his pile
and bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to an old friend to
send him out some chests of books, as many as he thought fit, and the
best that he could find.  His friend was so touched by this sign of
grace that he spent a month of love over the commission, and was
vastly pleased when he sent off, in the best editions and in pleasant
binding, the very essence of English literature.  It was a
disappointment that the only acknowledgment of his trouble came on a
postcard, to say that the consignment had arrived in good condition.
A year afterwards, so runs the story, he received a letter which was
brief and to the point.  "Have been working over the books, and if
anything new has been written by William Shakespeare or John Milton,
please send it out."  I believe this is mentioned as an instance of
barbarism.  It cannot be denied that it showed a certain ignorance of
the history of literature, which might be excused in a bushman, but
it is also proved, which is much more important, that he had the
smack of letters in him, for being turned loose without the guide of
any training in this wide field, he fixed as by instinct on the two
classics of the English tongue.  With the help of all our education,
and all our reviews, could you and I have done better, and are we not
every day, in our approval of unworthy books, doing very much worse?
Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time,
some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one
should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder
judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy
for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the
preciosity of some fantastic critic.

There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the
commonwealth of bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the sign
of the free-born is, that without critics to aid him, or the training
of a University, he knows the difference between books which are so
much printed stuff and a good book which is "the Precious life-blood
of a Master Spirit."  The bookman will of course upon occasion trifle
with various kinds of reading, and there is one member of the
brotherhood who has a devouring thirst for detective stories, and has
always been very grateful to the creator of Sherlock Holmes.  It is
the merest pedantry for a man to defend himself with a shamed face
for his light reading:  it is enough that he should be able to
distinguish between the books which come and go and those which
remain.  So far as I remember, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and John
Inglesant came out somewhat about the same time, and there were those
of us who read them both; but while we thought the Hansom Cab a very
ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway
journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves.
Certainly it is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and
The Mayor of Casterbridge.  But some of us venture to think that in
that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot
through both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of the
seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a certain place in English
literature.

When people are raving between the soup and fish about some popular
novel which to-morrow will be forgotten, but which doubtless, like
the moths which make beautiful the summer-time, has its purpose in
the world of speech, it gives one bookman whom I know the keenest
pleasure to ask his fair companion whether she has read Mark
Rutherford.  He is proudly conscious at the time that he is a witness
to perfection in a gay world which is content with excitement, and he
would be more than human if he had not in him a touch of the literary
Pharisee.  She has NOT read Mark Rutherford, and he does not advise
her to seek it at the circulating library, because it will not be
there, and if she got it she would never read more than ten pages.
Twenty thousand people will greedily read Twice Murdered and Once
Hung and no doubt they have their reward, while only twenty people
read Mark Rutherford; but then the multitude do not return to Twice
Murdered, while the twenty turn again and again to Mark Rutherford
for its strong thinking and its pure sinewy English style.  And the
children of the twenty thousand will not know Twice Murdered, but the
children of the twenty, with others added to them, will know and love
Mark Rutherford.  Mr. Augustine Birrell makes it, I think, a point of
friendship that a man should love George Borrow, whom I think to
appreciate is an excellent but an acquired taste; there are others
who would propose Mark Rutherford and the Revelation in Tanner's Lane
as a sound test for a bookman's palate.  But . . . de gustibus . . .
!

It is the chief office of the critic, while encouraging all honest
work which either can instruct or amuse, to distinguish between the
books which must be content to pass and the books which must remain
because they have an immortality of necessity.

According to the weightiest of French critics of our time the author
of such a book is one "who has enriched the human mind, who has
really added to its treasures, who has got it to take a step further
. . . who has spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which
finds itself the style of everybody, in a style that is at once new
and antique, and is the contemporary of all the ages."  Without doubt
Sainte-Beuve has here touched the classical quality in literature as
with a needle, for that book is a classic to be placed beside Homer
and Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare--among the immortals--which has
wisdom which we cannot find elsewhere, and whose form has risen above
the limitation of any single age.  While ordinary books are houses
which serve for a generation or two at most, this kind of book is the
Cathedral which towers above the building at its base and can be seen
from afar, in which many generations shall find their peace and
inspiration.  While other books are like the humble craft which ply
from place to place along the coast, this book is as a stately
merchantman which compasses the great waters and returns with a
golden argosy.

The subject of the book does not enter into the matter, and on
subjects the bookman is very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of
all sects.  He does not require Mr. Froude's delightful apology to
win the Pilgrim's Progress a place on his shelf, because, although
the bookman may be far removed from Puritanism, yet he knows that
Bunyan had the secret of English style, and although he may be as far
from Romanism, yet he must needs have his A'Kempis (especially in
Pickering's edition of 1828), and when he places the two books side
by side in the department of religion, he has a standing regret that
there is no Pilgrim's Progress also in Pickering.

Without a complete Milton he could not be content.  He would like to
have Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to
consider the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and
will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of
high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living
and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini.
While he counts Gibbon's Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in
8 vols., blue cloth, the very model of histories, yet he revels in
those books which are the material for historians, the scattered
stones out of which he builds his house, such as the diaries of John
Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that scandalous book, Grammont's
Memoirs, and that most credulous but interesting of Scots annalists,
Robert Wodrow.

According to the bookman, but not, I am sorry to say, in popular
judgment, the most toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and you
will find close to his hand a dainty volume of Lamb open perhaps at
that charming paper on "Imperfect Sympathies," and though the bookman
be a Scot yet his palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's description
of his national character--Lamb and the Scots did not agree through
an incompatibility of humour--and near by he keeps his Hazlitt, whom
he sometimes considers the most virile writer of the century:  nor
would he be quite happy unless he could find in the dark The Autocrat
of the Breakfast Table.  He is much indebted to a London publisher
for a very careful edition of the Spectator, and still more to that
good bookman, Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction.  As
the bookman's father was also a bookman, for the blessing descendeth
unto the third and fourth generation, he was early taught to love De
Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has
read every page in all the fifteen volumes--roxburghe calf--yet he
knows his way about in that whimsical, discursive, but ever
satisfying writer, who will write on anything, or any person, always
with freshness and in good English, from the character of Judas
Iscariot and "Murder as a Fine Art" to the Lake Poets--there never
was a Lake school--and the Essenes.  He has much to say on Homer, and
a good deal also on "Flogging in Schools"; he can hardly let go
Immanuel Kant, but if he does it is to give his views, which are not
favourable, of Wilhelm Meister; he is not above considering the art
of cooking potatoes or the question of whether human beings once had
tails, and in his theological moods he will expound St. John's
Epistles, or the principles of Christianity.  The bookman, in fact,
is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare not claim that
he searches for accurate information in his books as for fine gold,
and he has been known to say that that department of books of various
kinds which come under the head of "what's what," and "why's why,"
and "where's where," are not literature.  He does not care, and that
may be foolish, whether he agrees with the writer, and there are
times when he does not inquire too curiously whether the writer be
respectable, which is very wrong, but he is pleased if this man who
died a year ago or three hundred years has seen something with his
own eyes and can tell him what he saw in words that still have in
them the breath of life, and he will go with cheerful inconsequence
from Chaucer, the jolliest of all book companions, and Rabelais--
although that brilliant satirist had pages which the bookman avoids,
because they make his gorge rise--to Don Quixote.  If he carries a
Horace, Pickering's little gem, in his waistcoat pocket, and
sometimes pictures that genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he has
none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius.  The bookman has a
series of love affairs before he is captured and settles down, say,
with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged married
man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are perilous
to his inflammable heart.

In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the sweetness of
literature in two of the best novels ever written, as well as two of
the best pieces of good English.  One is Robinson Crusoe and the
other the Pilgrim's Progress.  Both were written by masters of our
tongue, and they remain until this day the purest and most appetising
introduction to the book passion.  They created two worlds of
adventure with minute vivid details and constant surprises--the foot
on the sand, for instance, in Crusoe, and the valley of the shadow
with the hobgoblin in Pilgrim's Progress--and one will have a
tenderness for these two first loves even until the end.  Afterwards
one went afield and sometimes got into queer company, not bad but
simply a little common.  There was an endless series of Red Indian
stories in my school-days, wherein trappers could track the enemy by
a broken blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by coming down the
river under a log, and the price was sixpence each.  We used to pass
the tuck-shop at school for three days on end in order that we might
possess Leaping Deer, the Shawnee Spy.  We toadied shamefully to the
owner of Bull's Eye Joe, who, we understood, had been the sole
protection of a frontier state.  Again and again have I tried to find
one of those early friends, and in many places have I inquired, but
my humble companions have disappeared and left no signs, like country
children one played with in holiday times.

It appears, however, that I have not been the only lover of the
trapper stories, nor the only one who has missed his friends, for I
received a letter not long ago from a bookman telling me that he had
seen my complaint somewhere, and sending me the Frontier Angel on
loan strictly that I might have an hour's sinless enjoyment.  He also
said he was on the track of Bill Bidden, another famous trapper, and
hoped to send me word that Bill was found, whose original value was
sixpence, but for whom this bookman was now prepared to pay gold.
One, of course, does not mean that the Indian and trapper stories had
the same claim to be literature as the Pilgrim's Progress, for, be it
said with reverence, there was not much distinction in the style, or
art in the narrative, but they were romances, and their subjects
suited boys, who are barbarians, and there are moments when we are
barbarians again, and above all things these tales bring back the
days of long ago.  It was later that one fell under the power of two
more mature and exacting charmers, Mayne Reid's Rifle Rangers and
Dumas' Monte Christo.  The Rangers has vanished with many another
possession of the past, but I still retain in a grateful memory the
scene where Rube, the Indian fighter, who is supposed to have
perished in a prairie fire and is being mourned by the hero, emerges
with much humour from the inside of a buffalo which was lying dead
upon the plain, and rails at the idea that he could be wiped out so
easily.  Whether imagination has been at work or not I do not know,
but that is how my memory has it now, and to this day I count that
resurrection a piece of most fetching work.

Rambling through a bookshop a few months ago I lighted on a copy of
Monte Christo and bought it greedily, for there was a railway journey
before me.  It is a critical experiment to meet a love of early days
after the years have come and gone.  This stout and very conventional
woman--the mother of thirteen children--could she have been the
black-eyed, slim girl to whom you and a dozen other lads lost their
hearts?  On the whole, one would rather have cherished the former
portrait and not have seen the original in her last estate.  It was
therefore with a flutter of delight that one found in this case the
old charm as fresh as ever--meaning, of course, the prison escape
with its amazing ingenuity and breathless interest.

When one had lost his bashfulness and could associate with grown-up
books, then he was admitted to the company of Scott, and Thackeray,
and Dickens, who were and are, as far as one can see, to be the
leaders of society.  My fond recollection goes back to an evening in
the early sixties when a father read to his boy the first three
chapters of the Pickwick Papers from the green-coloured parts, and it
is a bitter regret that in some clearance of books that precious
Pickwick was allowed to go, as is supposed, with a lot of pamphlets
on Church and State, to the great gain of an unscrupulous dealer.

The editions of Scott are now innumerable, each more tempting than
the other; but affection turns back to the old red and white, in
forty-eight volumes, wherein one first fell under the magician's
spell.  Thackeray, for some reason I cannot recall, unless it were a
prejudice in our home, I did not read in youth, but since then I have
never escaped from the fascination of Vanity Fair and The Newcomes,
and another about which I am to speak.  What giants there were in the
old days, when an average Englishman, tried by some business worry,
would say, "Never mind, Thackeray's new book will be out to-morrow."
They stand, these three sets, Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, the very
heart of one's library of fiction.  Wearied by sex novels, problem
novels, theological novels, and all the other novels with a purpose,
one returns to the shelf and takes down a volume from this circle,
not because one has not read it, but because one has read it thirty
times and wishes for sheer pleasure's sake to read it again.  Just as
a tired man throws off his dress coat and slips on an old study
jacket, so one lays down the latest thoughtful, or intense, or
something worse pseudo work of fiction, and is at ease with an old
gossip who is ever wise and cheery, who never preaches and yet gives
one a fillip of goodness.  Among the masters one must give a foremost
place to Balzac, who strikes one as the master of the art in French
literature.  It is amazing that in his own day he was not appreciated
at his full value, and that it was really left to time to discover
and vindicate his position.  He is the true founder of the realistic
school in everything wherein that school deserves respect, and has
been loyal to art.  He is also certain to maintain his hold and be an
example to writers after many modern realists have been utterly and
justly forgotten.

Two books from the shelf of fiction are taken down and read once a
year by a certain bookman from beginning to end, and in this matter
he is now in the position of a Mohammedan converted to Christianity,
who is advised by the missionary to choose one of his two wives to
have and to hold as a lawful spouse.  When one has given his heart to
Henry Esmond and the Heart of Midlothian he is in a strait, and
begins to doubt the expediency of literary monogamy.  Of course, if
it go by technique and finish, then Esmond has it, which from first
to last in conception and execution is an altogether lovely book; and
if it go by heroes--Esmond and Butler--then again there is no
comparison, for the grandson of Cromwell's trooper was a very
wearisome, pedantic, grey-coloured Puritan in whom one cannot affect
the slightest interest.  How poorly he compares with Henry Esmond,
who was slow and diffident, but a very brave, chivalrous, single-
hearted, modest gentleman, such as Thackeray loved to describe.  Were
it not heresy to our Lady Castlewood, whom all must love and serve,
it also comes to one that Henry and Beatrix would have made a
complete pair if she had put some assurance in him and he had
installed some principle into her, and Henry Esmond might have
married his young kinswoman had he been more masterful and self-
confident.  Thackeray takes us to a larger and gayer scene than
Scott's Edinburgh of narrow streets and gloomy jails and working
people and old-world theology, but yet it may be after all Scott is
stronger.  No bit of history, for instance, in Esmond takes such a
grip of the imagination as the story of the Porteous mob.  After a
single reading one carries that night scene etched for ever in his
memory.  The sullen, ruthless crowd of dour Scots, the grey rugged
houses lit up by the glare of the torches, the irresistible storming
of the Tolbooth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in the hands of
his enemies, the austere and judicial self-restraint of the people,
who did their work as those who were serving justice, their care to
provide a minister for the criminal's last devotions, and their quiet
dispersal after the execution--all this remains unto to-day the most
powerful description of lynch law in fiction.  The very strength of
old Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the Heart of Midlothian.
The rivalry, however, between these two books must be decided by the
heroine, and it seems dangerous to the lover of Scott to let
Thackeray's fine lady stand side by side with our plain peasant girl,
yet soul for soul which was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie
Deans?  Lady Castlewood must be taken at the chief moment in Esmond,
when she says to Esmond:  "To-day, Henry, in the anthem when they
sang, 'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were like them
that dream'--I thought, yes, like them that dream, and then it went,
'They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth
and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his
sheaves with him.'  I looked up from the book and saw you; I was not
surprised when I saw you, I knew you would come, my dear, and I saw
the gold sunshine round your head."

That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, "Bringing
your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you."  And this again, as
Esmond thinks of her, is surely beaten gold.  "Gracious God, who was
he, weak and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured
out upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a
treasure be given him?  What is ambition compared to that but selfish
vanity?  To be rich, to be famous:  what do these profit a year hence
when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away
under the ground along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin?
Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret
blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you.  'Non omnis moriar'-
-if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost and
hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for
me."  This seems to me the second finest passage in English fiction,
and the finest is when Jeanie Deans went to London and pleaded with
the Queen for the life of her condemned sister, for is there any plea
in all literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to human nature
as this, when the Scottish peasant girl poured forth her heart:
"When the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body--and
seldom may it visit your ladyship--and when the hour of death that
comes to high and low--lang and late may it be yours--oh, my lady,
then it is na' what we hae dune for oursels but what we hae dune for
ithers that we think on maist pleasantly.  And the thought that ye
hae intervened to spare the puir thing's life will be sweeter in that
hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the
haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow."  Jeanie Deans is the
strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, and an embodiment of all
that is sober, and strong, and conscientious, and passionate in
Scotch nature.

The bookman has indeed no trouble arranging his gossips in his mind,
where they hold good fellowship, but he is careful to keep them apart
upon his bookshelves, and when he comes home after an absence and
finds his study has been tidied, which in the feminine mind means
putting things in order, and to the bookman general anarchy (it was
the real reason Eve was put out of Eden), when he comes home, I say,
and finds that happy but indecorous rascal Boccaccio, holding his
very sides for laughter, between Lecky's History of European Morals
and Law's Serious Call, both admirable books, then the bookman is
much exhilarated.  Because of the mischief that is in him he will not
relieve those two excellent men of that disgraceful Italian's company
for a little space, but if he finds that the domestic sprite has
thrust a Puritan between two Anglican theologians he effects a
separation without delay, for a religious controversy with its din
and clatter is more than he can bear.

The bookman is indeed perpetually engaged in his form of spring
cleaning, which is rearranging his books, and is always hoping to
square the circle, in both collecting the books of one department
together, and also having his books in equal sizes.  After a brief
glance at a folio and an octavo side by side he gives up that
attempt, but although he may have to be content to see his large
Augustine, Benedictine edition, in the same row with Bayle's
Dictionary, he does not like it and comforts himself by thrusting in
between, as a kind of mediator, Spotswood's History of the Church of
Scotland with Burnett's Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, that
edition which has the rare portrait of Charles I. by Faithorne.  He
will be all his life rearranging, and so comes to understand how it
is that women spend forenoons of delight in box rooms or store
closets, and are happiest when everything is turned upside down.  It
is a slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound
after the taste of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of
small ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a
moment over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler
without tasting again some favourite passage.  It is days before five
shelves are reconstructed, days of unmixed delight, a perpetual whirl
of gaiety, as if one had been at a conversazione, where all kinds of
famous people whom you had known afar had been gathered together and
you had spoken to each as if he had been the friend of your boyhood.
It is in fact a time of reminiscences, when the two of you, the other
being Sir Thomas Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thackeray, go
over passages together which contain the sweetest recollections of
the past.  When the bookman reads the various suggestions for a
holiday which are encouraged in the daily newspapers for commercial
purposes about the month of July, he is vastly amused by their
futility, and often thinks of pointing out the only holiday which is
perfectly satisfying.  It is to have a week without letters and
without visitors, with no work to do, and no hours, either for rising
up or lying down, and to spend the week in a library, his own, of
course, by preference, opening out by a level window into an old-
fashioned garden where the roses are in full bloom, and to wander as
he pleases from flower to flower where the spirit of the books and
the fragrance of the roses mingle in one delight.

Times there are when he would like to hold a meeting of bookmen, each
of whom should be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to invite Cosmo
Medici, who was as keen about books as he was about commerce, and
according to Gibbon used to import Indian spices and Greek books by
the same vessel, and that admirable Bishop of Durham who was as
joyful on reaching Paris as the Jewish pilgrim was when he went to
Sion, because of the books that were there.  "O Blessed God of Gods,
what a rush of the glow of Pleasure rejoiced our hearts, as often as
we visited Paris, the Paradise of the World!  There we long to
remain, where on account of the greatness of our love the days ever
appear to us to be few.  There are delightful libraries in cells
redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses of all sorts
of volumes, there academic meads, trembling with the earthquake of
Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the promontory of
Parnassus and the Porticoes of the Stoics."  The Duke of Roxburghe
and Earl Spencer, two gallant sportsmen whose spoils have enriched
the land; Monkbarns also, though we will not let him bring any
antiquities with him, jagged or otherwise; and Charles Lamb, whom we
shall coax into telling over again how he started out at ten o'clock
on Saturday night and roused up old Barker in Covent Garden, and came
home in triumph with "that folio Beaumont and Fletcher," going forth
almost in tears lest the book should be gone, and coming home
rejoicing, carrying his sheaf with him.  Besides, whether Bodley and
Dibdin like it or not, we must have a Royalty, for there were Queens
who collected, and also on occasions stole books, and though she be
not the greatest of the Queenly bookwomen and did not steal, we shall
invite Mary Queen of Scots, while she is living in Holyrood, and has
her library beside her.  Mary had a fine collection of books well
chosen and beautifully bound, and as I look now at the catalogue it
seems to me a library more learned than is likely to be found even in
the study of an advanced young woman of to-day.  A Book of Devotion
which was said to have belonged to her and afterwards to a Pope,
gloriously bound, I was once allowed to look upon, but did not buy,
because the price was marked in plain figures at a thousand guineas.
It would be something to sit in a corner and hear Monkbarns and
Charles Lamb comparing notes, and to watch for the moment when Lamb
would withdraw all he had said against the Scots people, or Earl
Spencer describing with delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle
of Sale.  But I will guarantee that the whole company of bookworms
would end in paying tribute to that intelligent and very fascinating
young woman from Holyrood, who still turns men's heads across the
stretch of centuries.  For even a bookman has got a heart.

Like most diseases the mania for books is hereditary, and if the
father is touched with it the son can hardly escape, and it is not
even necessary that the son should have known his father.  For
Sainte-Beuve's father died when he was an infant and his mother had
no book tastes, but his father left him his books with many comments
on the margins, and the book microbe was conveyed by the pages.  "I
was born," said the great critic in the Consolations, "I was born in
a time of mourning; my cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father left
me his soul, mind, and taste written on every margin of his books."
When a boy grows up beside his father and his father is in the last
stages of the book disease, there is hardly any power which can save
that son, unless the mother be robustly illiterate, in which case the
crossing of the blood may make him impervious.  For a father of this
kind will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing him to play
beside him in the bookroom, where the air is charged with germs
(against which there is no disinfectant, I believe, except commercial
conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys will give him
an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never depart from
the memory.  By and by, so thoughtless is this invalid father, who
has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that he will
allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection, and
explain to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or show him the
thickness of the paper and the glory of the black-letter in an
ancient book.  Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken ill and
begun on his own account to prowl through the smaller bookstalls, his
father will listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in the
evening, and will chuckle aloud when one day the poor victim of this
deadly illness comes home with a newspaper of the time of Charles
II., which he has bought for threepence.  It is only a question of
time when that lad, being now on an allowance of his own, will be
going about in a suit of disgracefully shabby tweeds, that he may
purchase a Theophrastus of fine print and binding upon which he has
long had his eye, and will be taking milk and bread for his lunch in
the city, because he has a foolish ambition to acquire by a year's
saving the Kelmscott edition of the Golden Legend.  A change of air
might cure him, as for instance twenty years' residence on an
American ranch, but even then on his return the disease might break
out again:  indeed the chances are strong that he is really
incurable.  Last week I saw such a case--the bookman of the second
generation in a certain shop where such unfortunates collect.  For an
hour he had been there browsing along the shelves, his hat tilted
back upon his head that he might hold the books the nearer to his
eyes, and an umbrella under his left arm, projecting awkwardly, which
he had not laid down, because he did not intend to stay more than two
minutes, and knew indeed, as the father of a family, that he ought
not to be there at all.  He often drops in, for this is not one of
those stores where a tradesman hurries forward to ask what you want
and offers you the last novel which has captivated the juicy British
palate; the bookman regards such a place with the same feeling that a
physician has to a patent drug-store.  The dealer in this place so
loved his books that he almost preferred a customer who knew them
above one who bought them, and honestly felt a pang when a choice
book was sold.  Never can I forget what the great Quaritch said to me
when he was showing me the inner shrine of his treasure-house, and I
felt it honest to explain that I could only look, lest he should
think me an impostor.  "I would sooner show such books to a man that
loved them though he couldn't buy them, than a man who gave me my
price and didn't know what he had got."  With this slight anecdote I
would in passing pay the tribute of bookmen to the chief hunter of
big game in our day.

When the bookman is a family man, and I have sometimes doubts whether
he ought not to be a celibate like missionaries of religion and other
persons called to special devotion, he has of course to battle
against his temptation, and his struggles are very pathetic.  The
parallel between dipsomania and bibliomania is very close and
suggestive, and I have often thought that more should be made of it.
It is the wife who in both cases is usually the sufferer and good
angel, and under her happy influence the bookman will sometimes take
the pledge, and for him, it is needless to say, there is only one
cure.  He cannot be a moderate drinker, for there is no possibility
of moderation, and if he is to be saved he must become a total
abstainer.  He must sign the pledge, and the pledge must be made of a
solemn character with witnesses, say his poor afflicted wife and some
intelligent self-made Philistine.  Perhaps it might run like this:
"I, A. B., do hereby promise that I will never buy a classical book
in any tongue, or any book in a rare edition; that I will never spend
money on books in tree-calf or tooled morocco; that I shall never
enter a real old bookshop, but should it be necessary shall purchase
my books at a dry goods store, and there shall never buy anything but
the cheapest religious literature, or occasionally a popular story
for my wife, and to this promise I solemnly set my hand."  With the
ruin of his family before his eyes, or at least, let us say, the
disgraceful condition of the dining-room carpet, he intends to keep
his word, and for a whole fortnight will not allow himself to enter
the street of his favourite bookshop.  Next week, however, business,
so he says at least, takes him down the street, but he remembers the
danger, and makes a brave effort to pass a public-house.  The
mischief of the thing, however, is that there is another public-house
in the street and passing it whets the latent appetite, and when he
is making a brave dash past his own, some poor inebriate, coming out
reluctantly, holds the door open, and the smell is too much for his
new-born virtue.  He will go in just for a moment to pass the time of
day with his friend the publican and see his last brand of books, but
not to buy--I mean to drink--and then he comes across a little
volume, the smallest and slimmest of volumes, a mere trifle of a
thing, and not dear, but a thing which does not often turn up and
which would just round off his collection at a particular point.  It
is only a mere taste, not downright drinking; but ah me, it sets him
on fire again, and I who had seen him go in and then by a providence
have met his wife coming out from buying that carpet, told her where
her husband was, and saw her go to fetch him.  Among the touching
incidents of life, none comes nearer me than to see the bookman's
wife pleading with him to remember his (once) prosperous home and his
(almost) starving children.  And indeed if there be any other as
entirely affecting in this province, it is the triumphant cunning
with which the bookman will smuggle a suspicious brown paper parcel
into his study at an hour when his wife is out, or the effrontery
with which he will declare when caught, that the books have been sent
unbeknown to him, and he supposes merely for his examination.  For,
like drink, this fearsome disease eats into the very fibre of
character, so that its victim will practise tricks to obtain books in
advance of a rival collector, and will tell the most mendacious
stories about what he paid for them.

Should he desire a book, and it be not a king's ransom, there is no
sacrifice he will not make to obtain it.  His modest glass of
Burgundy he will cheerfully surrender, and if he ever travelled by
any higher class, which is not likely, he will now go third, and his
topcoat he will make to last another year, and I do not say he will
not smoke, but a cigar will now leave him unmoved.  Yes, and if he
gets a chance to do an extra piece of writing, between 12 and 2 A.M.,
he will clutch at the opportunity, and all that he saves, he will
calculate shilling by shilling, and the book he purchases with the
complete price--that is the price to which he has brought down the
seller after two days' negotiations--anxious yet joyful days--will be
all the dearer to him for his self-denial.  He has also anodynes for
his conscience when he seems to be wronging his afflicted family, for
is he not gathering the best of legacies for his sons, something
which will make their houses rich for ever, or if things come to the
worst cannot his collection be sold and all he has expended be
restored with usury, which in passing I may say is a vain dream?  But
at any rate, if other men spend money on dinners and on sport, on
carved furniture and gay clothing, may he not also have one luxury in
life?  His conscience, however, does give painful twinges, and he
will leave the Pines Horace, which he has been handling delicately
for three weeks, in hopeless admiration of its marvellous typography,
and be outside the door before a happy thought strikes him, and he
returns to buy it, after thirty minutes' bargaining, with perfect
confidence and a sense of personal generosity.  What gave him this
relief and now suffuses his very soul with charity?  It was a date
which for the moment he had forgotten and which has occurred most
fortunately.  To-morrow will be the birthday of a man whom he has
known all his days and more intimately than any other person, and
although he has not so high an idea of the man as the world is good
enough to hold, and although he has often quarrelled with him and
called him shocking names--which tomcats would be ashamed of--yet he
has at the bottom a sneaking fondness for the fellow, and sometimes
hopes he is not quite so bad after all.  One thing is certain, the
rascal loves a good book and likes to have it when he can, and
perhaps it will make him a better man to show that he has been
remembered and that one person at least believes in him, and so the
bookman orders that delightful treasure to be sent to his own address
in order that next day he may present it--as a birthday present--to
himself.

Concerning tastes in pleasure there can be no final judgment, but for
the bookman it may be said, beyond any other sportsman, he has the
most constant satisfaction, for to him there is no close season,
except the spring cleaning which he furiously resents, and only
allows once in five years, and his autumn holiday, when he takes some
six handy volumes with him.  For him there are no hindrances of
weather, for if the day be sunshine he taketh his pleasure in a
garden, and if the day be sleet of March the fireside is the dearer,
while there is a certain volume--Payne's binding, red morocco, a
favourite colour of his--and the bookman reads Don Quixote with the
more relish because the snowdrift is beating on the window.  During
the hours of the day when he is visiting patients, who tell their
symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about corn, or
composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is thinking
of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and eighty
minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a man
can work or hope to get.  He will spend the time in the good company
of people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with
them.  Some of them of high estate and some extremely low; some of
them learned persons and some of them simple, country men.  For while
the bookman counteth it his chief honour and singular privilege to
hold converse with Virgil and Dante, with Shakespeare and Bacon, and
suchlike nobility, yet is he very happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and
Dandie Dinmont, with Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp; he is proud when
Diana Vernon comes to his room, and he has a chair for Colonel
Newcome; he likes to hear Coleridge preach, who, as Lamb said, "never
did anything else," and is much flattered when Browning tries to
explain what he meant in Paracelsus.  It repays one for much worry
when William Blake not only reads his Songs of Innocence but also
shows his own illustrations, and he turns to his life of Michael
Angelo with the better understanding after he has read what Michael
Angelo wrote to Vittoria Colonna.  He that hath such friends, grave
or gay, needeth not to care whether he be rich or poor, whether he
know great folk or they pass him by, for he is independent of society
and all its whims, and almost independent of circumstances.  His
friends of this circle will never play him false nor ever take the
pet.  If he does not wish their company they are silent, and then
when he turns to them again there is no difference in the welcome,
for they maintain an equal mind and are ever in good humour.  As he
comes in tired and possibly upset by smaller people they receive him
in a kindly fashion, and in the firelight their familiar faces make
his heart glad.  Once I stood in Emerson's room, and I saw the last
words that he wrote, the pad on which he wrote them, and the pen with
which they were written, and the words are these:  "The Book is a
sure friend, always ready at your first leisure, opens to the very
page you desire, and shuts at your first fatigue."

As the bookman grows old and many of his pleasures cease, he thanks
God for one which grows the richer for the years and never fades.  He
pities those who have not this retreat from the weariness of life,
nor this quiet place in which to sit when the sun is setting.  By the
mellow wisdom of his books and the immortal hope of the greater
writers, he is kept from peevishness and discontent, from bigotry and
despair.  Certain books grow dearer to him with the years, so that
their pages are worn brown and thin, and he hopes with a Birmingham
book-lover, Dr. Showell Rogers, whose dream has been fulfilled, that
Heaven, having a place for each true man, may be "a bookman's
paradise, where early black-lettered tomes, rare and stately, first
folios of Shakespeare, tall copies of the right editions of the
Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, uncropped, uncut, and unfoxed
in all their verdant pureness, fresh as when they left the presses of
the Aldi, are to be had for the asking."  Between this man at least
and his books there will be no separation this side the grave, but
his gratitude to them and his devotion will ever grow and their
ministries to him be ever dearer, especially that Book of books which
has been the surest guide of the human soul.  "While I live," says
one who both wrote and loved books and was numbered among our finest
critics, "while I live and think, nothing can deprive me of my value
for such treasures.  I can help the appreciation of them while I last
and love them till I die, and perhaps if fortune turns her face once
more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day,
to lay my overbeating temples on a book, and so have the death I most
envy."





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Books and Bookmen, by Ian Maclaren