II.
As wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding and many civil virtues be imported into our minds from foreign writings.—Milton.
It is pleasant to take down one of the magicians of the shelf, to annihilate my neighbor and his evening parties, and to wander off through quiet country lanes into some sleepy hollow of the past.—Cornhill Magazine, Rambles among Books.
IT was held by Disraeli that literature is in no wise injured by the bibliophile, since though the worthless may be preserved, the good is necessarily protected, he no doubt having in mind the death of the collector and subsequent sale of his library. For though the bibliophile may stint his family and hoard his golden leaves and tooling, at least he abhors dog’s-ears and keeps his treasures clean. La Bruyère, who gave us the delightful maxim, “We only write in order to be heard, but in writing we should only let beautiful things be heard,” referred to these accumulations as “tanneries,” condemning fine bindings, one of the few false dogmas uttered by the sprightly, entertaining author of Les Caractères. Fine bindings not only preserve but beautify fine books; and to the sentiment of La Bruyère I prefer that of Jules Janin: “Il faut à l’homme sage et studieux un tome honorable et digne de sa louange.” (“The wise and studious man should have a volume worthy of his praise.”)
In Edouard Rouveyre’s instructive and beautifully-printed manual on bibliography, the question of bindings is summed up in a sentence, fine bindings naturally referring to books that are worthy of beautiful and permanent coverings: “Binding is to typography what this is to the other arts; the one transmits to posterity the works of the scholar, the other preserves the typographical production for him.... The binding of the amateur,” he continues, “should be rich without ostentation, solid without heaviness, always in harmony with the work that it adorns, of great finish in its workmanship, of exact execution in the smallest details, with neat lines, and a strongly conceived design.”[[17]]
[17]. Connaissances Nécessaires à un Bibliophile, par Edouard Rouveyre, Troisième Edition. Paris, Ed. Rouveyre et G. Blond, 1883, 2 vols.
“The binding of a book,” the Right Honorable W. E. Gladstone succinctly observes, “is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type, and ink are the body in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and habiliment, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense.” Nor should the book-lover neglect to carry out the rules relative to binding laid down by Octave Uzanne in his Caprices d’un Bibliophile: “A book should be bound according to its spirit, according to the epoch in which it was published, according to the value you attach to it and the use you expect to make of it; it should announce itself by its exterior, by the gay, striking, lively, dull, somber, or variegated tone of its accoutrement.”
With regard to the book-cases themselves, their height should depend upon that of the ceilings, and on the number of one’s volumes. For classification and reference, it is more convenient to have numerous small cases of similar or nearly similar size and the same general style of construction than a few large cases in which everything is engulfed. With small or medium-sized receptacles, each one may contain volumes relating to certain departments or different languages, as the case may be; by this means a volume and its kindred may be readily found. Thus one, or a portion of one, may be devoted to bibliography, another to the philosophers, another to poetical works, another to foreign literature, another to reference works, another to books relating to nature, art, etc.
The style and color of the bindings, also, may subserve a similar purpose; as, for instance, the poets in yellow or orange, books on nature in olive, the philosophers in blue, the French classics in red, etc. Unless methodically arranged, even with a very small library, a volume is often difficult to turn to when desired for immediate consultation, requiring tedious search, especially if the volumes are arranged upon the shelves with respect to size and outward symmetry. This may be avoided by the use of small book-cases and a defined style of binding. I refer to the general style of binding; variety in bindings is always pleasing, and very many books one procures already bound and wishes to retain in the original covers. Books, moreover, which are in constant or frequent use should not be placed in too tender colors. Volumes become virtually lost and inaccessible in the vast walnut sarcophagi in which they are frequently entombed, and lose the attractive look they possess when more compactly enshrined. Above all things, the book-case should be artistic, artistically plain, except for the richness of the carving. Black walnut I should banish, unless employed exclusively for somber old folios, to accentuate their antiquity. Neither the library nor the study should appear morose or exhale an atmosphere of gloom.
In a room ten and a half to eleven feet high, five feet is a desirable height for the book-cases. Besides the drawers at the base, this will afford space for four rows of books, to include octavos, duodecimos, and smaller volumes. In some of the cases three shelves may be placed—the shelves, of course, should be shifting—to include folios, large quartos, and octavos. Where the ceilings are twelve feet high, six feet is a better proportion, this height affording five or four shelves, according to the size of the volumes. By leaving the top of the book-case twelve to thirteen inches wide, ample space will be allowed for additional small books, porcelains, and bric-à-brac. It must be borne in mind that tall book-cases, in addition to the inaccessibility of the volumes on the upper shelves, leave little if any space for pictures on the walls above them; and that, though books assuredly furnish and lend an air of refinement to an apartment, they still require the relief and complement of other decorative objects.
The cultured business man who may have the taste but lacks the time for extensive reading, the average man or woman who reads for recreation, may derive more benefit from a small library comprised of the best books carefully chosen than from the average large library. “Quid prosunt innumerabiles libri quorum dominus vix totâ vitâ suâ indices perlegit?” (“Of what use is an innumerable quantity of volumes whose owner may scarcely read the titles during his lifetime?”) Seneca justly reasoned. It is not so much the dinner of innumerable courses as a few dishes well prepared. Except to those who read quickly and assimilate readily, the large library is apt to consist for the most part of “uncut edges” in the layman’s sense of the term.
A good library is rarely suddenly formed. Moreover, if it could be, it were not half as satisfactory as a library added to by degrees, the growth and gradual increase of years. Again, some of the works that were considered a rare treat half a century since are no longer a treat to-day. They have become old-fashioned in the same sense as a garment. The critical eighteenth-century essay in its entirety, the old style metaphysical airing of some pet hobby, or didactic wool-drawing now seem rather ponderous productions. At present one does not even care to read all of the joint productions of Addison and Steele (particularly the latter’s essays), an averment that would have placed one under a ban twenty years ago. Yet even in Johnson’s day the Rambler was more extolled than perused, the publisher complaining that the encouragement as to sale was not in proportion to the raptures expressed by those who read it.
With the increasing pyramids of books, selection must become proportionately more and more restricted. Equally is this the case with poetry. Many of the ancient bards still figure in the editions of the English poets—only to sun their gilded backs on the library shelves and seldom have their pages turned. It were absurd to assert that the Spectator and numerous other productions of a former day will ever become closed volumes. Curiosity, and their fame also, would always cause them to be read by futurity did not their merit preclude the possibility of their ever sinking into oblivion. It is very probable, however, that at no distant day many of the immortals will exist in abridged editions. Some authors, like Montaigne, on the other hand, can never be cut down; their redundancies and embroideries are their charm.
To our forefathers time was more lenient than it is to us. Somehow the days and the nights were longer, and the old-time reader appeared to find more leisure and a brighter oil with which to pursue his literary browsings and point his antitheses. “There is a certain want of ease about the old writers,” Alexander Smith remarks (and I recall no one who has expressed it so musically before), “which has an irresistible charm. The language flows like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet recoil—the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to the surface and breaking the whole into babbling music.”
“When I looked into one of these old volumes,” Thoreau characteristically says, “it affected me like looking into an inaccessible swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bull-frogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”
In this age of hurry and concentration who has the time to wade through the hundred volumes of Voltaire? It is even a task to go through his anthology, Élite de Poésies Fugitives, in the pretty little two-volume Cazin edition, there are so many more shells than pearls. But one’s time is well repaid after all, if only for the sake of finding and holding one such exquisite bit of airy verse as M. Bernard’s Le Hameau. Is it original, or a translation? The German poet Gottfried Bürger’s Das Doerfchen and this are one and the same, except that the latter is somewhat condensed, though equally beautiful. Following M. Bernard’s idyl is a panegyric in verse by Voltaire addressed to M. Berger, “who sent him the preceding stanzas,” Voltaire’s tribute beginning:
De ton Bernard
J’aime l’esprit.
C’est la peinture
De la nature.
Bernard, Berger, and Bürger; or Bürger, Berger, and Bernard would at first sight seem to be in a tangle. But in rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s,
I praise my dear
Sweet village here,
undoubtedly should be returned to the German poet.
In the case of nearly every prolific author some few volumes represent his finest thought. I grant every one has or should have a favorite author, one who stands to him on a higher pedestal than all others,—an author whom he reveres and loves, and who must be read in every line that was the emanation of his brain. But for one to read every page of Thackeray, Bulwer, Goethe, Dumas, and the host of celebrated romancists, poets, essayists, and philosophers, delightful and instructive though they be, is a simple impossibility.
To return to the change in literary taste, and to instance a marked example, consider Wilson, or Christopher North. “Fusty Christopher,” Tennyson termed this pompous arbiter elegantiarum. The tables have been turned since the editor of Blackwood reviled the poet-laureate, and the animus of the criticism on Tennyson might now be applied to its stultified author. What magazine of the present could be induced to publish North’s rhapsodies? An installment would seriously damage The Atlantic, Scribner’s, or even Maga itself. How tiresome his ceaseless alliteration, his deluge of adjectives, his stream of similes, his invective, his bathos!
Many portions of the Noctes, it is true, are marvels of imagination and erudition, and some of his angling conceits are worthy of Norman MacLeod. Others, especially his selections as collected and published by himself under the title of The Recreations, are crusted over with algæ of self-conceit. It is the peacock who consciously struts. Pepys’s reiterated “I” and quaint egotism are never tiresome; Wilson’s pompous first person plural becomes a weariness. They used to give us Baxter’s Saints’ Rest to parse, in the olden school days, and I could not help but think that if the saints had such a horrible time, how fortunate it was we lived in a more advanced period. No doubt the schoolmaster might have given us worse books to parse; and, unquestionably, we should be duly grateful that The Recreations were not included. From the a priori to the a posteriori would have been so much harder sailing! Has not even the long-spun panorama of The Seasons lost something of its charm? Or, rather, should it not be read in an old edition?
Good editions of good books, though they may often be expensive, can not be too highly commended. One can turn to a page in inviting letterpress so much easier than to a page of an unattractive volume. The fine shades of meaning stand out more clearly, and the thought is revealed more intelligibly when clothed in fitting typographical garb. Often it becomes a positive labor to follow many a pleasing author in the small or worn types and poor paper with which the publisher mercilessly thrusts him into the world. The reader has virtually to work his passage through the pages and take frequent rests by the way.
Poor illustrating is even worse. Who may appreciate the beauties of The Talking Oak in the edition where Olivia is portrayed in the act of kissing a giant bole whose girth scarcely equals her own? One must ever afterward associate an oak with a fat Olivia. Apparently the artist never read Sir Thomas Wyatt:
A face that should content me wondrous well
Should not be fair, but lovely to behold,
or William Browne:
What best I lov’de was beauty of the mind,
And that lodgd in a Temple truely faire.
How dreadful, too, are many of the works illustrated by Cruikshank and Crowquill, which some profess to set such store by because they are held at such a premium by the book dealers!
Nearly as reprehensible as poor illustrating is pilloring the unfortunate author in the stocks of some atrocious color that must develop a cataract if gazed at long and fixedly. “I have been well-nigh ruined by the binder!” exclaimed one of the bright writers and literarians of the day; and before attempting to read one of his most entertaining volumes I stripped it of its frightful garb and clothed it in becoming attire. Otherwise one might not follow the ideas, the glaring blue and hideous figure of the original cover asserted themselves so strongly.
One should always endeavor to procure a good edition to start with; it is inconvenient to change editions. You come to associate certain favorite passages of a well-conned author with their place upon certain pages, so that you may instantly turn to them. The passages look strange to you in strange types, and you almost require to be introduced anew. With a change of page the mere thought itself remains the same, only it seems to have altered its expression. Let those who will, prate about a thought being a thought wherever it may exist. Some thoughts there are so airy and delicate they require to be read by one’s self—they lose a portion of their fragrance if repeated or obtained second hand. They should be savored by the eye and heard only by the inner ear. “The dark line” of the sun-dial “stealing imperceptibly on—for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by”—is more sharply defined upon the page of The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, the page where I first saw it, than it can ever appear to me upon any other page. Again, many flowers one enjoys most upon the uncut stalk. They may not be plucked and retain the full aroma they distill amid their natural surroundings. So that a quoted sentence from want of connection often loses much of the charm it presents upon the author’s page. And yet, on the other hand, quotation, when judiciously employed, not unfrequently places the author quoted in his most favorable light, while forming equally a pleasing complement to the page of the writer himself. Montaigne’s fleurons of citation, woven from his scholastic and inexhaustible loom, what were the Essays without them?—limpid brooks and springs ever pouring their sparkling waters into the meandering, smooth-flowing river of the text. Merely by the change of type, quotation relieves the monotony of the page, while, with great writers, apt citation lends added emphasis and beauty to the thought, just as the art of damascening enriches a fine blade.
Good editions are everything in reading. Even the fragrant mint of Lamb possesses a heightened pungency to me when gathered along the cool, broad margins of a London imprint. Not only the mind through the personality or charm of the thought expressed, and the ear through the harmony and lucidness of the style with which it is uttered; but equally the eye, in the outward garb with which the thought is clothed, should be gratified in reading a beautiful book. The printer it is who contributes the finishing touches and heightens the reflective surface. Elia’s buoyant, playful graces have, perhaps, received their most exquisite and appropriate setting in the two little volumes of the Temple Library, printed by the Chiswick press, the smaller being preferable to the large-paper edition.
It is pleasant to have some authors both in an early and a late edition. If I desire the notes, the full-page illustrations, and an amplified text, I choose the edition of The Complete Angler illustrated by Stothard and Inskipp and annotated by Sir Harris Nicholas. If I wish to get still nearer Walton—to hear more plainly his birds contending with the echo, to pluck his culverkees and ladysmocks, to smell his primroses, and admire the very “shape and enameled color of the trout it joyed him so to look upon,” I read him in the old spelling and old font of the fac-simile reprint of the first edition. Moreover, for the sake of making comparisons, it is often desirable to have an early as well as a late edition of a favorite author. So subtle, indeed, are the niceties of reading they may scarcely be defined. How delightful the mere cutting of the edges of the book one longs to read, and the occasional dip into the pages as you turn the leaves!
Of a few favorite authors it is desirable to possess two copies, one in an inexpensive form to take when traveling. A trunk-maker is yet to appear who will contrive an apartment that will enable one to pack books so they may receive no possible injury—the one thing Addison’s Trunk-maker of the Upper Gallery neglected. Besides, apart from the friction in its receptacle, a valuable book is liable to other injuries, or loss while traveling. The traveling volume should be small, securely bound, light in the hand, and not too bulky for the pocket.
But an old book of all books for true delight! The pleasure of reading Chaucer or Spenser is doubled by the types and the associations of the past. The foxed and faded pages are like the rust on antique bronzes, the lichens on an old wall.
In the preface to Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books reference is made to this fascination which is conferred by an ancient font upon an ancient page. “There is,” remarks the author, “a delicate flavor of antiquity and a certain quaint charm in the old print of the books from which many of the dedications have been drawn that seems to depart when the same sentences are printed in modern type, and we are apt sometimes to wonder what it was that we originally admired. The bouquet has fled while we were in the act of removing the cork from the bottle.” Present, too, with the charm of the olden page itself is the thought of who may have first turned the pages when the book you are reading was in its fresh and spotless leaf, and whose hand it was that traced the annotations which embroider its margins.
To revert in parentheses to the sun-dial, Mrs. Gatty’s monograph, recently republished and extended,[[18]] contains thousands of mottoes and references to the clock of nature taken from numerous languages, but none equal to Lamb’s apostrophe. So far as references to the passage of time are concerned, there can be none more expressive than Ronsard’s lines:
[18]. The Book of Sun-Dials. Collected by Mrs. Alfred Gatty. New and enlarged edition. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889. Pp. viii, 502.
Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame!
Las! le temps non: mais nous nous en allons.[[19]]
[19].
Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, Time stays, we go!
(Austin Dobson’s translation.)
Singularly, the beautiful sonnet in which these lines occur was one which had been cast aside by Ronsard from the later editions of his works, and was only reprinted in Buon’s edition of 1609. Still more singular it seems that the “Prince of Poets” should have remained comparatively unappreciated for two centuries until reintroduced by St. Beuve. Am I mistaken in thinking there is a pronounced resemblance between this sonnet and Shakespeare’s “When I do count the clock that tells the time”?
Chaucer’s—
For tho’ we sleep, or wake, or rome, or ride,
Ay fleeth the time, it will no man abide,
and Spenser’s—
Make hast, therefore, sweet Love, whilst it is prime,
For none can call again the passèd time,
are as fine as any of the allusions by the classic poets who have festooned and intertwined the passing hour with rosebuds and asphodels.
I find the Book of Sun-Dials a delightful volume to take up when in a meditative mood. It needs, withal, a still room and a still hour to be read in, an environing quietness like the whisper of the gnomon itself. Then rambling through the pages, the present becomes absorbed by the past as you muse over the icons of the dials and moralize upon the quaint inscriptions. Transcribed in large Italic type, the mottoes stand out with the vividness of an epitaph graven upon a tomb, voices from posterity preaching from the perennial text:
As Time And Houres Passeth Awaye
So Doeth The Life Of Man Decaye.
Often as you contemplate the time-posts and their intaglios do they absorb the attention afresh, casting new shades of meaning from the sentient styles. They transport you into gardens where old-fashioned flowers and historic yew-trees grow, they conduct you through old churchyards among neglected graves, they deliver their homilies from weather-beaten walls, and their pathos appeals from many an ancient sanctuary and moss-grown lintel. How noiselessly, how serenely they mark the flight of time! It is Time itself inaudibly counting the hours; the day suavely balancing its silent periods. They mirror primitive time, removed from the present turmoil, when the sun was the pendulum and the shadow the index-hand. Associated with Nature by ties the most endearing, by the golden sunshine, the murmuring breeze, and the songs of birds, the dial becomes, as it were, a reflective facet of external Nature in her gracious moods, its very shadow representing sunlight, the sunlight absent where the shadow is not. The sun-dial has molded itself to grace, and with rare exceptions its mottoes are happily chosen, attesting hours of meditation in forming an epigram or shaping a poetic fancy to blend with the shifting shadow. Certainly many of the sentiments collated in the monograph referred to are of more than passing interest. Their pathos and their quaintness set one dreaming.
Among the many inscriptions which arrested me while first turning the leaves, a few may be appended without, I trust, fatiguing the reader. Let her or him moralize a moment, and consider life from the standpoint of the dial, now grave, now gay; now lively, now severe. Though Time hurries mankind it has apparently not hurried the dials in choosing their inscriptions. It is rather a case of festina lente than hora fugit. Some are as terse as an epigram of Martial or a proverb from Job; others sweet as a hymn of Watts or a stanza from The Temple. Thus, light and shadow are felicitously blended in the tale a dial tells on a house at Wadsley, near Sheffield, the moralist preaching from a niche in the wall:
Of Shade And Sunshine For Each Hour
See Here A Measure Made:
Then Wonder Not If Life Consist
Of Sunshine And Of Shade.
I Mark The Moments Trod For
Good Or Ill
has been the burden of the vertical dial at the priory, Warwick, since 1556.
Lifes But A Shadow
Mans But Dust
This Dyall Sayes
Dy All We Must
says the dial on the Church of All Saints, Winkleigh, Devon.
I Am A Shadow, So Art Thou
I Mark Time, Dost Thou?
is inscribed on an old horologium in the Grey Friars’ churchyard, Sterling.
Sweetly fragrant are the lines incised on the four sides of a stone dial in a flower-garden at South Windleham:
I Stand Amid Ye Summere Flowers
To Tell Ye Passage Of Ye Houres.
When Winter Steals Ye Flowers Awaye
I Tell Ye Passinge Of Their Daye.
O Man Whose Flesh Is But As Grasse
Like Summere Floweres Thy Life Shall Passe.
Whiles Tyme Is Thine Laye Up In Store
And Thou Shalt Live For Ever More.
Pretty, also, are the lines by James Montgomery beneath a vertical dial in Burneston, Yorkshire:
Time From The Church Tower Cries To You And Me,
Upon This Moment Hangs Eternity:
The Dial’s Index And The Belfry’s Chime
To Eye And Ear Confirm This Truth Of Time.
Prepare To Meet It; Death Will Not Delay;
Take Then Thy Saviour’s Warning—Watch And Pray!
One of the mottoes has an echo of Sidney:
Time As He Passes Us Has A Dove’s Wing
Unsoiled And Swift, And Of A Silken Sound.
“The Night Cometh” is neatly amplified upon a plate that supports a cross sun-dial on a stone pedestal upon the terrace of the hospital of St. Cross, Rugby:
The Passing Shadows Which The Sunbeams Throw
Athwart This Cross, Time’s Hastening Foot-Steps Show;
Warned By Their Teaching Work Ere Day Be O’er,
Soon Comes The Night When Man Can Work No More.
One motto reads Unam Time (Fear one hour); another, Unam Timeo (One hour I fear). Two others read, Heu Quærimus Umbram, Heu Patimus Umbram (Alas! we pursue a shadow), (Alas! we endure the shadow). Eheu Fugaces is marked upon a Yorkshire plate, and Labuntur Anni on Burnham Church, Somerset. The shortest mottoes are Redeme, J’avance, Remember, Irrevocabile. A beautiful stone sun-dial still casts its shadow in the old garden of Gilbert White, and is figured in Macmillan’s edition of the Natural History of Selborne. This is not mentioned in Mrs. Gatty’s comprehensive work, and I can not determine from the illustration whether it bears a motto. Each To His Task, taken from White’s Invitation would be an appropriate inscription.
One of the quaintest inscriptions mentioned in the Book of Sun-Dials is that which looks from the wall of a church at Argentière, near Vallouse. It was scarcely composed in an hour, and loses much in the translation:
Cette Montre Par Son Ombre Montre
Que Comme L’Ombre Passent Nos Jours.
(This marker marks by its shadow that our days pass away like a shadow).
There is much of moral coloring in these two lines:
Haste Traveller, The Sun Is Sinking Low
He Shall Return Again, But Never Thou.
And is this not altogether lovely?
Give God Thy Heart, Thy Hopes, Thy Gifts, Thy Gold,
The Day Wears On, The Times Are Waxing Old.
And so one might go on quoting the old moral, shadowed by different texts. Perhaps Sterne expresses it as pithily as any epigrammatist, “life” being but another term for time: “What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side? from sorrow to sorrow? to button up one cause of vexation, and unbutton another?” But Sterne deals with the shadow only, while the gnomon of the dial presents its side of sunshine equally with its side of shade, however somber the tone of the inscription. Doubtless Nature preaches more truly than man. Life is not all composed of shadow, nor all of sunshine; and if we but cultivate the spirit of contentment, possibly we have solved its sternest problem.
But may contentment, after all, be had for the striving? “Whatever it be that falleth into our knowledge and jouissance,” reasons Montaigne in the fifty-third chapter of the First Book, “we finde it doth not satisfie us, and we still follow and gape after future, uncertaine, and unknowne things, because the present and knowne please us not, and doe not satisfie us. Not (as I thinke) because they have not sufficiently wherewith to satiate and please us, but the reason is, that we apprehend and seize on them with an unruly, disordered, and a diseased taste and hold-fast.” And, again, in the twelfth chapter of the Second Book: “All of the Philosophers of all the sects that ever were doe generally agree on this point, that the chiefest felicitie, or summum bonum, consisteth in the peace and tranquillitie of the soul and bodie:—but where shall we find it?”
Somewhere, slumbering upon the shelves, there exists a golden book of a former century, written by a learned French philosopher-pantologist, entitled L’Art de se rendre heureux par les Songes (The Art of rendering one’s self happy by Dreams). A unique volume and the labor of a lifetime, its present owner and the fortunate possessor of the secret has never been discovered; and, alas! a reprint does not exist. Contentment—is this but another name for Illusion?—is a bird of passage who, soaring high in the empyrean, must be secured on the wing. Numberless those who would ensnare him, and innumerable the lures set to turn his evasive pinion. But he flies not in flocks; and, dimly outlined against the distant sky, he is ever flitting onward, far out of range. Some one, farther on, who seeks him not, perchance looks serenely upward, and unconsciously charms him down....
My fair and gracious reader, is it you?
XIII.
AUTHORS AND READERS.
There must be both a judgment and a fervor; a discrimination and a boyish eagerness; and (with all due humility) something of a point of contact between authors worth reading and the reader.—Leigh Hunt, My Books.
A truly good book is something as natural and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.—Thoreau.
A CERTAIN selfish satisfaction I enjoy in reading a fine limited edition of a classic, or a choice work that is difficult to procure. It is like possessing a gem of an uncommon color, a piece of old Chinese glaze, or any rare art object. If the work itself possess intrinsic value I am sure of my investment, while I rejoice in its attractive guise. Reading thus becomes more than a pleasure; it is an exquisite luxury. I marvel who secures all the “number 1’s” of the large-paper editions. Some bibliotaphe must have a monumental collection, for nobody ever sees one.
“The passion for first editions, the purest of all passions,” some one remarks. I confess I do not share this passion in its intensity, in all cases, unless the first edition be superior in letterpress or form, or a later edition has been altered, condensed, or enlarged to its disadvantage. The classics in first editions, and the “old melodious lays” in first folios by all means, if you can afford and procure them; Gibbon, Macaulay, Scott, Dickens, and the rest of the historians and novelists in the easiest, most attractive page to read and hold in the hand, whatever the edition. This with reference to literature proper, and not to scientific works, of which latter the latest edition is naturally to be preferred.
I sometimes find myself picturing the author behind the page. Lang and Dobson, are they as merry as the songs they sing? Phil Robinson, is he half so pleasant a companion in the flesh as on the printed page? Bullen, who edits the old poets with such consummate taste, is he as jolly as the Elizabethan lyrics ever swarming on the tip of his tongue? Higginson, so tender and musical in his polished prose, I wonder does he lose his temper when the sauce piquante proves a failure? The brilliant, entertaining philosopher of A Club of One, is he philosophical enough to eschew colchicum for his gout; and, I marvel, is he enrolled among the Brotherhood of the Merry Eye?
Perhaps the author is most charming, for the most part, between the covers. On paper he is always on his good behavior, his personal facets shaped so as to catch the most favorable light. Knowing him and meeting him in every-day life you might find him cold, arrogant, opinionated—an altogether disagreeable companion. Forgetful of the flight of time, he might be prone to argument or backbiting. He might be deaf or color-blind, and always late at his engagements. He might be constantly straddling a hobby-horse. He might be an incorrigible whistler, or possess an ungovernable temper. All his petty weaknesses and foibles he conceals, or tries to conceal, on the printed page.
Thus, Joseph Boulmier:
Oui, les hommes sont laids, mais leurs œuvres sont belles;
Les hommes sont méchants, mais leurs livres sont bons.
Men are unlovely, but their works are fair—
Ay, men are evil, but their books are good.
If, as has been asserted, he is the best author who gives the reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time, surely the olive crown should be awarded the composers of the compilations, the digests, and the anthologies, often the fruit of decades spent in poring over manuscripts and print. Little do we consider the pains they have cost. What an amount of rummaging through faded manuscripts, what ransacking of musty folios and plodding through by-ways of the past has it not required to produce Bullen’s smiling volumes from the song-books, masques, and pageants of the Elizabethan Age, and his other rarer anthologies, Speculum Amantis and Musa Proterva. The works themselves of very many of the authors quoted would be a veritable labor to wade through, with few fragrant flowers of poesy to perfume the way. All this the compiler spares us, and with catholic taste gathers a blossom here and a blossom there from the vast fields of little-known song. Equally does Mr. Bullen deserve the thanks of every lover of lyric poetry for his collection of Campion’s works, and the Chiswick press the tribute of all admirers of beautiful printing for the frame in which Campion’s “golden cadence” has been set.
By reading Hazlitt’s Gleanings in Old Garden Literature I am saved the fatigue of perusing countless uninteresting tomes on the subject. He has extracted the honey for me from innumerable flowers. Yet my Parkinson, my Gerarde, my Evelyn, my Bacon I must read between the lines myself; it is to the dull books he has been the bee for me. To gather the sweets is often a difficult and always a laborious task. Not these plodding compilers, the class who are referred to in the wise old precept, the source of which I have never been able to trace: “Those who do not practice what they preach resemble those sign-posts in the country which point out the weary way to the traveler without taking the trouble of traversing it themselves.”
Without doubt, among the most beloved of books are those written for pure love of the beautiful, distinct from literary ambition or posthumous fame, especially when to this is added a sympathetic, lucid, and unconscious style, such as we love to linger over in The Complete Angler or White’s Selborne. Walton himself has epitomized this charm in a line introductory to his angling idyl: “I wish the reader also to take notice that in the writing of it I have made myself a recreation of a recreation.”
Johnson has said books that you may carry to the fire and hold readily in your hand are the most useful, after all. Before Johnson, and long before printing was dreamed of, an old Greek proverb held that a great book was a great evil, and Martial wrote:
Buy books that but one hand engage,
In parchment bound, with tiny page.
Assuredly, the little book is a delight. It is a joy in the hand when well bound, and may serve to take the place of fire-arms in a public conveyance where one otherwise might find himself at the mercy of an uncongenial or too loquacious passenger. But the life of the library were dull were it confined to the 18 and 24 mos. Let each book and each subject have its appropriate setting, and let there be variety of sizes. The majesty of the shelves were fled without the thick quarto and tall old folio.
Apart from De Bury, Dibdin, Disraeli, Burton, Didot, Janin, the bibliophile Jacob, and other universally known bibliographical writers, there are innumerable pleasant books on books. Of such, in addition to those previously alluded to, may be specified Lang’s Books and Bookmen and The Library; The Pleasures of a Bookworm and The Diversions of a Bookworm, by J. Rogers Rees, delightfully written volumes attractively printed by Elliott Stock; Alexander Ireland’s Book-Lover’s Enchiridion; Saunder’s The Story of Some Famous Books; Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books, and How to form a Library, the latter three volumes likewise daintily printed by Elliott Stock in the series of The Book-Lovers’ Library.
In A Club Corner, by A. P. Russell, a volume previously mentioned, is largely devoted to books and authors. A store-house of literary and bibliographical information exists between the covers of Library Notes, and Characteristics, by the same author. Books and how to use Them is the title of an instructive and entertaining small duodecimo by J. C. Van Dyke, librarian of the Sage Library, New Brunswick, N. J., a writer deep versed in books, but not shallow in himself. Brander Mathews’s Ballads of Books, or Lang’s recast of this volume, is a most excellently chosen collection of poems relating to books. Every one will read with pleasure Percy Fitzgerald’s The Book Fancier, or the Romance of Book-Collecting, a work replete with curious information. The French scholar has a host of kindred works to choose from, all written de cœur; for in France the passion for books, book-collecting, fine letterpress, and fine bindings exists to a greater degree than anywhere else. It was a Frenchman, the famed bouquineur Nodier, who worried through life without a copy of Virgil “because he could not succeed in finding the ideal Virgil of his dreams.”
What instructive, sparkling volumes are these: L’Enfer du Bibliophile, Mes Livres, Connaissances Nécessaires à un Bibliophile, Derome’s Le Luxe des Livres and the two beautifully-printed and entertaining volumes, Causeries d’un Ami des Livres, Le Petit’s L’Art d’Aimer les Livres, Peignot’s Manuel du Bibliophile, Octave Uzanne’s Caprices d’un Bibliophile, Mouravit’s Petite Bibliothèque d’Amateur, Jacob’s Les Amateurs de Vieux Livres, and how many more!
I know of no more fascinating volume of its class, however, than De Resbecq’s Voyages Littéraires sur les Quais de Paris, Paris, A. Durand, 1857. The contents are in the form of letters from an indefatigable hunter of the book-stalls along the Seine to a fellow-bibliophile in the provinces. Daily, through summer’s sun and winter’s cold, he continues the chase, scenting the spoils of the stalls like a harrier beating the ground for game, chatting with the book dealers, and philosophizing as he scans the volumes. Among the many prizes which persistent foragings secured was a copy of that rarest of the Elzevirs, the Pastissier François. The volume had been denuded of its covers, but had the engraved title-page, the celebrated scène de cuisine with the range, the tables, the cooks, and the fowls entirely intact. “The box in which this jewel reposed, its interior in perfect preservation, contained no price-mark.
“‘How much?’ said I to the merchant.
“‘Well, for you, six sous; is it too dear?’”
I recall few more delightful books for the bibliophile than Jules Richard’s beautifully-printed small volume L’Art de Former une Bibliothèque, published by Edouard Rouveyre, Paris, 1883. His advice to the collector, which terminates the preface, is well worth transcribing:
“Always distrust your enthusiasm.
“Distrust the enormous prices at which certain original editions of secondary authors are quoted. For acknowledged genius one can afford to pay generously, but for the others, how many disappointments the future has in store!
“Never pay a high price for a book you do not know.
“Verify the titles, the pagination, the tables, and count the plates, if it is an illustrated book.
“The same observation holds good for editions on extraordinary paper of books absolutely ordinary. Whatman and vellum require to be well placed in order to sustain their value.
“One knows when he begins to collect, one never knows when he will cease; therein consists the pleasure.”
A work of much interest is that of Philomeste Junior (Gustave Brunet), published in four small brochure volumes severally entitled La Bibliomanie en 1878, 1880, 1881, 1883, ou Bibliographie Rétrospective des Adjudications les Plus Remarquables faites cette Année, et de la Valeur primitive de ces Ouvrages. It is in France that bibliomania seems to have reached its apotheosis. La Bibliomanie furnishes some interesting facts with regard to the steady advance in the prices of certain classes of French books. “Fashion dictates her laws for the choice of books as for the toilet of fashionable ladies; they are without appeal.” To be the happy possessor of a cabinet in which are enshrined a dozen tomes of unexceptional condition, illustrated by celebrated eighteenth-century artists like Eisen, Gravelot, Moreau, Marillier, and bound by Du Seuil, Padeloup, Derome, or Trautz, calls for an elastic portemonnaie.
To cite a few examples of the advance in French books, paralleled also in English books, a copy of Manon Lescaut (1753) sold in 1839 for 109 frs., in 1870 for 355 frs., in 1875 for 1,335 frs. The edition of Montaigne’s Essays: Bourdens, S. Millanges, 1580, two parts in one octavo vol., sold for 24 frs., in 1784. The same copy recently sold for 2,060 frs. Another edition of the Essays, 1725, 3 vols. 4to, with the arms of the Maréchal de Luxembourg, brought 2,900 frs. for the “arms.” Still another edition, Paris, 1669, 3 vols., 12mo, a poor edition, brought 1,960 frs. at the Cormon sale, Paris, 1883. It had the stamp of the golden fleece, the insignia of Longpierre, a mediocre poet, and the purchaser paid for the fleece. The edition of 1595, Paris, chez A. l’Angelier, 1 vol., infol. veau, brought 1,100 frs., in 1881. A “clean and sound copy” of this edition in the original calf was quoted in a recent London catalogue at £12 12s., another London dealer pricing a copy of the same edition soon afterward at £60.
The edition of 1588, Paris, Abel l’Angelier, in 4, mar., Du Seuil, was recently quoted by Morgand who is termed la bourse des livres, at 4,000 frs. This was the last edition published during the author’s lifetime, and the first to contain the third book. It was marked on the frontispiece “fifth edition,” though only three are known to have preceded it. The library of Bordeaux possesses an example of this edition filled with annotations and corrections by the hand of Montaigne. Up to the present time, no editor of the Essais has availed himself of these resources, of inestimable value from the point of view of the study of the text of Montaigne. It would be of more than passing interest to know whether in these corrections the author mitigated his observation with regard to authors correcting their work.
A copy of the Pastissier François, bound by Trautz, was purchased not long since by a French amateur for 4,100 frs. In 1883 a copy sold for 3,100 frs., at the sale of M. Delestre-Cormon, Paris. “This broché copy, uncut (extremely rare in this condition), cost its owner 10,000 frs.; it has suffered a justifiable reduction. Despite the entire absence of interest it presents, this volume being the least known of the Elzevir collection, it has often obtained enormous prices, but they are not sustained; it has been recognized that its rarity has been exaggerated.”
Among the numerous causes, especially in France, which operate in the value of a volume are previous distinguished ownership, and the garb of an illustrious binder. In books the habit frequently makes the “monk.” It is sufficient for a mediocre work to be emblazoned with the crest of Pompadour or to have been fingered by Du Barry to make it worth its weight in gold. All their légèretés are freely forgiven by the bibliophile in view of the lovely bindings with which they clothed their books. Of recent years, as is well known, the Greek and Latin classics have found far less favor than they did a few years since. In France, and equally in England, the craze is for first editions of standard works, for rare works, for works formerly belonging to some distinguished personage, for rare or beautiful bindings, and for special beauty of letterpress or illustration.
A late illustrated catalogue, issued by Bouton, the New York bookseller, furnishes some interesting facts with regard to the increase in the price of books in this country. If we consider the rapidly advancing taste for literature in America, it is safe to predict that it will not be long before rare and valuable books will be as generally sought for here as they are in France and England, and become as well distributed as are the choice treasures of the world of art which find the highest competition in the metropolis of the New World.
Reviewing the book trade of the past thirty years, a retrospect shows that year by year the competition for rare and standard books has become more keen and the older ones necessarily more and more difficult to procure. “In the English book-centers,” says the reviewer, “besides a large home demand, the purchases for the United States and the English colonies keep up a steady stream outward, and first editions must sooner or later become unattainable, as they will ultimately find a place in public institutions.” Comparing the prices quoted in early catalogues with those of to-day, for instance, a copy of the Abbotsford edition of Scott’s works, 17 vols., handsomely whole-bound, priced twenty-five years since at $125, is now priced at $225. The Pickering Chaucer, then priced at $10, is now held at $30. Major Walpole’s Anecdotes, priced $22.50, is in the present catalogue at $75. Rowlandson’s Dance of Death at $6.50 and the Dance of Life at $1.75 have advanced to $75, for the three volumes. In catalogue No. 2 a fine copy of Purchas’s Pilgrims is quoted at $175. A similar copy would now command $500. In Catalogue No. 3 a fine copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle is priced at $35; in the present catalogue a copy is priced $150. Based upon an experience of over thirty years, the reviewer asserts that, however fashion may change and this or that class of books come into or pass out of vogue, good sterling books of real merit will always be in demand, while the first editions of the works of great writers will continue to rise steadily in value, and will be prized as long as the English language is spoken.
La chasse aux bouquins is not without its disappointments and surprises. Time and again one misses the mark, finally to secure a rare prize. A captivating title is not always a safe target. Appearances are deceitful in book-titles, and the old book catalogues have very winning ways. The two bound volumes of Les Trois Mousquetaires, which I picked up in a book-stall along the quay at Paris years ago, contained a pencil drawing of Porthos inserted between the fly-leaf and title-page of Volume I, worth a hundred times their cost. Fortunately, they had escaped De Resbecq. Whether Edouard Olin, the artist whose name figures below, ever exhibited a picture in the Salon subsequently, I do not know. But his Porthos is a marvel of conception and execution that would have delighted Dumas and that would honor Détaille.
A German catalogue was the means of procuring me, at half the original cost of the volume, a clean and perfect copy of Joseph Boulmier’s Rimes Loyales. Paris: Poulet-Malassis et De Brosse, 1857. The copy contains on the false title the author’s ex dono to Mademoiselle Andréa Bourgeois, and on the reverse of the title-page, in the same singularly neat handwriting, signed “J. B.,” is a poem of six stanzas, scarcely exceeded in beauty and finish by any from the pen of the author of Rimes Loyales or Les Villanelles. The lines are entitled Du Haut de Montmartre, the first and sixth stanzas being identical, and reading as follows:
L’aigle n’habite pas au fond de la vallée
Il choisit pour son aire une cime isolée,
Et c’est de là qu’il part, libre et capricieux.
Le poète est semblable à l’aigle magnanime:
Il aime les hauteurs où l’air vif le ranime,
Où, plus loin de la terre, il est plus près des cieux.
A friend and Tom Folio, who devours the old book catalogues, saw this advertisement a short time since in an English pamphlet: “Machiavelli (Nicolo). Opere, 11 vols., 4to, whole-bound russia extra, gilt edges, with portrait, printed throughout on blue paper (only eight copies so made), a most superb set. Milan, 1810.... £4.” He cabled for it and secured it. It proved a blue diamond. Within a week after receiving it he was offered two hundred dollars for the work. Within a fortnight he disposed of it for three hundred dollars, a sufficient advance to make a large addition to his library.
Many tempting and deceptive titles occur under the heading of “Curious” and “Facetiæ,” but experience will cause one to fight shy of catching titles and annotations unless one knows the work to be meritorious. Frequently the gold is in the tooling, and the pure ore concealed beneath an unattractive cover. Perhaps the windfalls are more than offset by the disappointments. Inviting volume after inviting volume will present itself when one is not in the humor, thrusting itself before you in the book-stalls and auction sales, mutely appealing to you to become its possessor, only to elude you when you earnestly desire it.
But auction sales are dangerous, and are apt to lead to lapses and excesses that one would not commit in calmer moments. There it is difficult to decide dispassionately, while the lots invariably bring far higher prices than if obtained in the ordinary way. Even those of stern judgment are led into purchases they afterward regret, carried away by the excitement of the moment. The seductive voice of the auctioneer, the passion for possession, the rivalry of the bidders, and the excitement of the hour, all exert their influence and combine to weaken even the most stoical and wary. The fly is placed temptingly upon the current, and instantly it is seized.
Again, you dive into the foreign book pamphlets, where a coveted treasure is catalogued, almost inevitably upon application to find it “sold,” the prize is so far out of reach. But how elated you are when you do secure a long-sought prize, and after repeated attempts a tall old copy in perfect condition and in lovely first letterpress rewards your endeavors!
Sainte-Beuve speaks of “the smiling and sensible grace of Charles Lamb.” I am inclined to think the latter’s characteristic good humor was in part due to the facility with which he procured the rare old editions he loved. They were easier to lift from the shelves in Lamb’s days than now, and the old book-dealer possessed far less “Imperfect Sympathies” than the hardened modern Autolycus.
My interpretation of Montaigne by Florio, “thick folio, large copy, old calf, neat, scarce, 1632,” and its predecessor of 1613 that lend such dignity to their companions in old calf, were not obtained without persistent efforts. Sometimes I think many of my old books are not unlike Sir Roger de Coverley’s fox, whose brush cost him fifteen hours’ riding, carried him through half a dozen counties, killed him a brace of geldings, and lost above half his dogs. But one’s rare editions need no brass nails to record their bewitching title-pages or mark their place amid the vistas of the shelves.
Preferable to the editions of 1613 and 1603 is the later edition, the former lacking the index, though containing the fine portrait of the translator by Hole. Florio’s strong and masterly English has well reflected the original. I regard his translation as far superior to the more generally accepted version by Cotton. Cotton is frequently more literal; but Florio, despite not unfrequent interpolations and slight departures, comes nearer to the coloring and picturesqueness of the text. Take the spirited passage of the hare and the harrier, for instance:
Ce liéure qu’ vn leurier imagine en songe: apres lequel nous le voyons haleter en dormant, allonger la queuë, secoüer les jarrets, & representer parfaitement les mouuemens de sa course: c’est vn liéure sans poil & sans os.—Book II, chap. xii.
The Hare that a Grey-Hound imagines in his sleep, after which we see him pant so whilst he sleeps, stretch out his Tail, shake his Legs, and perfectly represent all the motions of a Course, is a Hare without Furr and without Bones.—Cotton’s translation.
That Hare, which a grey-hound imagineth in his dreame, after whom as he sleepeth we see him bay, quest, yelp, and snort, stretch out his taile, shake his legs, and perfectly represent the motions of his course; the same is a Hare without bones, without haire.—Florio’s translation.
Equally well rendered, and an excellent specimen of the translator’s style, is the passage of Volumnius referring to the election of certain Roman citizens as consuls: “They are men borne unto warre, of high spirits, of great performance, and able to effect anything; but rude, simple, and unarted in the combat of talking; minds truly consulare. They only are good Pretors, to do justice in the Citie that are subtile, cautelous, well-spoken, wily, and lip-wise.” Florid and redundant, Florio nevertheless employed his words as Walton did his frog; and in numerous passages he out-Montaignes Montaigne, his vocabulary, as Montaigne says of the Italian cook’s, being “stuffed with rich, magnificent words and well-couched phrases; yea, such as learned men use and employ in speaking of the Government of an Empire.”
Speaking of Florio’s rendition, the sonnet Concerning the Honour of Bookes—
Since honour from the honorer proceeds,
etc.—is well known. Not so familiar, however, the preceding lines, likewise prefixed to the editions of 1613 and 1632, and relating equally to books. The sonnet, which has no name attached and which was naturally attributed to the translator, is now generally thought by critics to be by his friend Daniel, “of whom it is abundantly worthy, and, indeed, most characteristic in sentiment and diction,” observes David Main. The somewhat extended eulogium of author and translator is worth transcribing for those who may not be familiar with it. It corroborates, withal, a view regarding the increasing multitude of books, a multitude increased a thousand-fold since Daniel’s time, that I have previously touched upon. Relating as it does to the French philosopher, it may well be diffusive.
But no extended transcription of an old author can stand out upon a modern page with the vividness it does in a well-preserved old edition. Apart from the charm of antiquity, the old edition has an added virtue which the new edition lacks—the odor that clings to a venerable tome, a fragrance as of the everlasting or immortelle of the autumn fields, lingering amid its ancient leaves. Nor is this altogether fancy; the faded pages recall the ashen hue of the flower, and like it they survive to preach the sermon of immortality.
Daniel’s lines are thus inscribed: “To my deare brother and friend M. John Florio, one of the Gentlemen of her Majesties most Royall Privie Chamber”:
Books, like superfluous humors bred with ease,
So stuffe the world, as it becomes opprest
With taking more than it can well digest;
And now are turnd to be a great disease.
For by this overcharging we confound
The appetite of skill they had before:
There be’ng no end of words, nor any bound
Set to conceit the Ocean without shore.
As if man laboured with himselfe to be
As infinite in writing, as intents;
And draw his manifold uncertaintie
In any shape that passion represents:
That these innumerable images
And figures of opinion and discourse
Draw’n out in leaves, may be the witnesses
Of our defects much rather than our force.
———————
But yet although wee labour with this store
And with the presse of writings seeme opprest,
And have too many bookes, yet want wee more,
Feeling great dearth and scarcenesse of the best;
Which cast in choicer shapes have been produc’d,
To give the best proportions to the minde
Of our confusion, and have introduc’d
The likeliest images frailtie can finde,
And wherein most the skill-desiring soule
Takes her delight, the best of all delight,
And where her motions evenest come to rowle
About this doubtful center of the right.
———————
Wrap Excellencie up never so much
In Hierogliphicques, Ciphers, Caracters,
And let her speake never so strange a speech,
Her Genius yet findes apt discipherers:
And never was she borne to dye obscure,
But guided by the Starres of her owne grace,
Makes her owne fortune, and is ever sure
In mans best hold to hold the strongest place.
And let the Critick say the worst he can,
He cannot say but that Montaigne yet
Yeelds most rich peeces and extracts of man;
Though in a troubled frame confus’dly set,
Which yet h’is blest that he hath ever seene,
And therefore as a guest in gratefulnesse,
For the great good the house yeelds him within
Might spare to tax th’ unapt convoyances.
But this breath hurts not, for both work and frame,
Whilst England English speakes, is of that store
And that choice stuffe as that without the same
The richest librarie can be but poore
And they unblest who letters doe professe
And have him not: whose owne fate beats their want
With more sound blowes than Alcibiades
Did his Pedante that did Homer want.
My 1603 folio Florio bound by Roger Payne, my Foppens’s Elzevir with autograph and annotations of Molière, my 1580 Bourdens edition placed in its robe of honor by Derome—all these my ship contained among her precious stores.
XIV.
THE PAGEANT OF THE IMMORTALS.
Hi sunt Magistri qui nos instruunt, sine virgis et ferulis, sine cholorâ, sine pecuniâ. Si accedis, non dormiunt; si inquiris, non se abscondunt; non obmurmurant, si oberres; cachinos nesciunt, si ignores.—Richard de Bury.
Pour peu qu’il soit tenu loin du chaud et du frais,
Qu’on y porte une main blanche et respectueuse,
Que le lecteur soit calme et la lectrice heureuse ...
Un livre est un ami qui ne change jamais.
Jules Janin.
I HAVE two chairs for my reading—a stiff one for books I have to read; a luxurious one for books I like to read. My luxurious chair is of dark-green leather, a seat to sink into, modeled after the easy arm-chair of the Eversley Rectory, known from its seductive properties as “Sleepy Hollow.” When I find a volume more than usually delightsome, I call in an extra chair for a foot-rest, so the body may possess the same ease as the mind. And yet the delight a volume affords depends largely upon the mood in which the leaves are turned, and the printer who has turned the leaves.
A fondness for reading the old book catalogues is apt to prove not only an expensive luxury, but consumes a great deal of time. For no catalogue may be hastily skimmed through. The least attractive list, composed largely, it may be, of works on theology, mineralogy, theosophy, or jurisprudence, may contain the precise book you are searching for. The most attractive lists must naturally be perused carefully. In fact, reading catalogues is like reading books—even with attentive reading one is liable to skip a title, or, at least, overlook its real significance, just as one may not always grasp the true meanings of an author upon first perusal. Then, one subject or one title leads to another, and the catalogue must be reread. Even when you have made out your list, it occurs to you that half or three quarters of the lot you have selected will undoubtedly be “sold”; and having left out a number you really desire, you go over the catalogue still more carefully a third time for “substitutes.” Not only this, but the catalogue differs from a book in that it can not wait or be put off. It must be studied immediately it is received; or some one else gets the advantage, as some one else living nearer by generally does.
If the business you have on hand prevents your devoting the necessary time to the catalogue or catalogues, you are haunted with the feeling that it contains a prize, and that you may not catch the first mail. Indeed, should any of the lists contain, at anything like a reasonable figure, that scarce old Herbal, an ancient angling tome, or a certain edition of Les Caractères, which you have long been searching for, you ought to telegraph for it without a moment’s delay. You know Smith will read his list the minute he receives it. He is already far richer in La Bruyères than you are, and never ceases collecting them. And although he already has the edition you desire, it is ten to one if he sees it offered at a bargain in fine antique binding he will duplicate it. There is no such contingency as his skipping it. He never skips—he secures and exults. His library shelves groan with La Bruyères. Were he rich he might be forgiven; but all his prizes have been hooked by careful angling, and are a triumph to his skill and monumental industry.
Charles Asselineau, in the unique little volume L’Enfer du Bibliophile, draws a sharp line between the true book-hunter, who makes use of his own knowledge, patience, and industry, and the hunter by proxy, who bags his spoils through cunning other than his own-“the rich and lazy amateur who only hunts by procuration and trusts to the care of an accomplished professional to whom he gives carte blanche, and who despises him—ay, who despises him, as the game-keeper and poacher always despise the indolent and unskillful master who triumphs through their skill.” The opening sentence of the volume is worthy of Sterne: “Oui ... l’enfer! is it not there that one must arrive sooner or later, in this life or in the other; oh all of you who have placed your joys in voluptuousness unknown to the vulgar?”
On the other hand, you have the alternative of neglecting your business and attending to the catalogues. In any case, the book catalogue is an attraction and a bane. If you are niggardly and only order a volume or two, you are generally disappointed; if you are in a liberal mood, and order a number, thinking you will only obtain a few, you are likely to get a lot of books that will deprive you of getting others you really require. Then the works one continually sees that one can not afford, the columns of temptations all crying, “Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing”—the Paris catalogues in particular, so rich in their embarras de richesses. There is a stanza of Clough’s that may be cited as pertinent to book-hunting:
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one’s self,
How pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking,
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!
How pleasant it is to have money!
Possibly the old book catalogues are sent as a lesson in self-control, and to teach one to endure disappointment as patiently as human nature will allow.
Not the least interesting volume of my library is my herbarium. Still every pressed flower retains much of its original color, reviving the scene of many a pleasant ramble. Commencing with the first cluster of spring beauty and white shad-blow spray, and ending with the last purple aster and blue gentian of autumn, it is thus a sentient floral calendar—a fragrant anthology of the seasons. It is one of my pleasantest volumes for winter reading, every flower of which is a chapter written by Nature herself. This involucre of white dogwood, for instance, becomes a vernal landscape riotous with bloom, while these feathery mespilus blossoms bring up the April hillsides sprinkled with hepaticas and violets. This bunch of trilliums recalls a distant beechwood in early May carpeted with the snowy triangular flowers and misty with the beech’s unfurling leaves.
And this pink lady’s-slipper!
Once more I trace the sinuous curves of the Wiscoy and am lulled by the drowsy murmur of the stream. How cool the water swirls beneath the overarching hemlocks, and how it is churned into foam in the deep, dark pool at the tail of the rapid, where I know the big trout I hooked and lost the previous year is waiting for another taste of my “cochybondu”! It is just at the base of the steep shaded hillside where the sun never penetrates. If my trout chooses to display his rubies and chrysoberyls he must thread his way up the current or float down to the meadow far below. When I have hooked and basketed him, another big fellow will occupy his place in the same deep, dark pool.
It is the choice spot of the stream within a reach of half a mile, and invariably holds the strongest fish and most accomplished taker of ephemeræ. His pannier must needs be large, so many flies and midges and worms and bugs and beetles drift past his lair, and are sucked in by the eddy into his awaiting maw. The sudden dive of a water-rat proclaims a rival angler, who may also have his eye on my trout, and bring him to bag, perchance, if I miss him to-day.
An aroma of mint, mingled with the fragrance of wild flowers and ferns, follows me along the banks; and there, in the swamp where the partridge drums, my pink lady’s-slipper gleams. The twisting roots of the hemlock plunge deep into the pool; and with a slap of his red tail the big trout rises just beyond them in the foam-flecks of the eddy, precisely where he rose the previous year. How the water growls round the bank it has mined, and chafes and scolds at the obtruding prongs! And how picturesquely, too, the old hemlock leans over the stream, shading the trout for the last time! Another athlete and trained fly-catcher must lead the somersault acts hereafter; for a day at least the small fry may rest secure. But, alas! with a sudden rush, my trout has wound the leader fast around the hemlock’s roots, as he has wound so many leaders before; and, with a farewell flash of his encarmined sides, I seem to hear his parting message: “Multæ lapsæ inter truttam et bascaudem sunt!” The pressed flower remains to remind me of the struggle and my June holiday.
Looking now at the pink lady’s-slipper from the Wiscoy woods, I am glad, after all, I did not take my trout, however great a triumph his capture might have afforded me at the time. For, if the water-rat has not caught him meanwhile—and the maxim the trout flung at me virtually precludes this possibility—he is undoubtedly still swimming in his favorite pool. Granting I had caught him and that a fish of equal size had taken his place, it would yet be another trout, not my trout which I hooked and lost. The stream flows more musically and more limpid to me knowing he is still stemming the current, and that he regained his freedom.
This spike of cardinal flowers carries me a hundred miles away; and once more am I drifting down the Oswego River on a hazy autumnal afternoon, indifferent whether the great green bass rise or not, so golden is the September day. It is enough to be idling beneath the roar of the rapid, to mark the different hues of the water, the play of the slanting sunbeams, the undulations of the wooded shores. Surely the landscape needs no more. Ah, yes! just that bit of color skirting a still bayou, the flame of cardinal flowers and their reflected images below. What an illustrated volume! the imperial folio of the seasons! And what a succession of illuminated pages it discloses from the rubric and the preface until the last leaf is turned! every subject indexed and paged by the grand author, Nature; its types as fresh as if they had only run through one, instead of thousands of editions.
In dreams do I behold in all the great libraries the procession of the books that nightly emerge from the seclusion of their shelves—countless flowers from the Muse’s hill and garlands from the meadows of the classics. At a signal from the most antiquated tome, I see a sudden movement among their ranks, and hear a rustling of innumerable leaves, as the souls of the immortals are quickened into life, and the spirits of old authors assemble for converse. Platoons of majestic folios, some in calf, some in sheep, and some in stamped pigskin appear, columns of venerable and vellumed quartos, tiers of tall octavos, troops of lovely Elzevirs, Aldines, and sedate black-letter editions file by with measured tread. Volumes black with age move with step as elastic as those clothed in more modern garb. Indeed, old and young seem to be indiscriminately mingled, without regard to costume or richness of attire. Only, I observe that the procession is composed solely of the dead.
I notice, moreover, that it is only the books of real merit or great renown that are called to take part in the pageant; and that the participants vary with each succeeding night, appearing entirely without regard to chronological order, though all the beautiful world of belles-lettres, philosophy, and science that has charmed and instructed mankind throughout the ages, forms the processional. Thus a copy of Plato and a first folio of Shakespeare pass by, side by side, followed by The Canterbury Tales and the Faerie Queen, hand in hand. Or is it Goethe’s Faust and Plutarch’s Lives? It is sometimes difficult to catch the titles, so numerous are the volumes that take part. As the eye becomes accustomed to the dimness, the titles are more easily traced, and I distinctly recognize Horace and Virgil, Milton and Keats, Herrick and Hood, Montaigne and Pascal, Lamb, Thackeray, Cervantes, Molière, Theocritus, Dante, Schiller, Balzac, Dumas the Elder, Pope, Burns, Goldsmith, Addison, Hawthorne, Bulwer, Dickens, Irving—until the eye is dazed at the multitudinous names. Night after night the procession forms and the participants vary—there are so many volumes to take part, so many that may not be overlooked. Richard Jefferies, his beautiful thoughts scarcely dry on the page, I note has just been called forth from the shelves, and Thoreau has already marched with Walton and Gilbert White.
Although not assisting in the pageant itself, there are, I perceive, numerous volumes that, nevertheless, appear to be in communication with such of their companions as have responded to the signal. Beckoning glances from those below are answered every now and then by faint responses from the volumes above, their leaves as yet unfoxed by Time. Of these latter there are many, and I soon perceive that they bear the names of living authors of note who must wait until their earthly life is spent ere they too may answer the roll-call and take rank with the immortals. How, apparently without volition of their own, as if touched by an unseen hand, the leaves of In Memoriam rustle and the pages of The Autocrat flutter!
The only participants I see that seem to be out of place assemble once a year in solemn conclave, conversing, it is true, but wearing a dejected look. Countless volumes, these, principally first and rare editions, many bound in lovely leathers, exquisitely gilded, lettered, and tooled, bearing innumerable stamps and monograms, coats-of-arms, and ancient book-plates. Many of them I recognize as having seen before in high spirits, discoursing with their companions during the hour of the nightly pageants. This yearly and unusually large gathering, characterized by its extreme gravity, puzzled me at first, until I discovered it was composed of the ghosts of borrowed books, unhappy in their covers, lamenting the loss of their former possessors who had once cherished them so fondly. I see, too, Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone, Brantôme’s Dames Galantes, Balzac’s Physiologie du Mariage, La Fontaine’s Contes with the Eisen, De Hooge, and Fragonard plates, and in yonder soiled, foul-smelling tome I perceive the smutty old satirist and Doctor-Franciscan Rabelais. Why he should be called out at all, seems a mystery, his pitch is so defiling, and his boluses are so nauseating.
Some participants there are which at first baffled my comprehension. These, though perfectly composed themselves and mingling freely with their fellows, nevertheless appear to excite an inordinate curiosity among their companions which is never gratified. The titles they bear are plainly discernible; but only when the march becomes sufficiently animated to cause a violent fluttering of the leaves can I catch a glimpse of the author’s name on the title-page. Then I discover these numerous tomes invariably reveal the name of a most voluminous and versatile author, whose personality it is impossible to fathom, an author writing with equal facility in all languages and on all topics, in poetry and in prose, persistently preserving his incognito under the name of “Anon.”
I see, also, participating in the pageant semi-annually, and on these occasions directing, as it were, the imposing march of the volumes, numerous men of middle and advanced age that seem to exhale an odor of musty tomes. Occasionally these pause in their march before some one of the shelves to take down a volume which I have not before seen in the procession, handling it with reverential care, as if conscious of the gems it enshrined. Sometimes it is a volume by a living author of note; again it is an encyclopædia or concordance, or a special number of some dusty periodical that has long lain unopened. On inquiry of my informant, I learned that this human element consists of the painstaking custodians who had the volumes in keeping, the scholarly and unappreciated librarians who devoted so much labor to the cataloguing and classification of their charges.
Abruptly close the clasps of the most venerable tome. Again I hear the rustling of pages and folding of covers, as each volume returns to its accustomed place and once more sinks into hallowed slumber. The librarian of one of the great libraries where the nightly pageant forms scouted the idea of his charges leaving their retreats. “Would I not hear them?—besides the dust remains undisturbed!” he replied. But a dead author makes no noise and leaves no tell-tale traces when he quits his tenement of print. Books, so eminently human, in the natural course of things must have their ghosts. Of course, the librarian’s candle would dissipate them, as mists are dispersed by the sun.
