“Cashel’s admiration for Lydia survived the ardour of his first love for her, and she employed all her forethought not to disappoint his reliance on her judgment. She led a busy life, and wrote some learned monographs, as well as a work in which she denounced education as practised in the universities and public schools. Her children inherited her acuteness and refinement, with their father’s robustness and aversion to study. They were precocious and impudent, had no respect for Cashel, and showed any they had for their mother principally by running to her when they were in difficulties.... The care of this troublesome family had one advantage for her. It left her little time to think about herself, or about the fact that, when the illusion of her love passed away, Cashel fell in her estimation. But the children were a success, and she soon came to regard him as one of them. When she had leisure to consider the matter at all, which seldom occurred, it seemed to her that, on the whole, she had chosen wisely.”
Here are conditions which, if presented at length and with sufficient skill, might hold us spellbound. Here is an opportunity to force conviction, were the novelist disposed to grapple with his real work. As it is, Mr. Shaw contents himself with adding one more to the marital failures of fiction. Dr. Johnson said that most marriages would turn out as well if the Lord Chancellor made them. The Lord Chancellor would assuredly make them better than that blundering expert, the novelist.
OUR BELIEF IN BOOKS
What pleasantness of teaching there is in books,—how easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books, without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them, they are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them, they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully.—Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, A. D. 1459.
Enough has been written in praise of books to fill a library. It is not always so eloquently worded as is the Bishop of Durham’s benediction; but the same general truths—or fallacies—are repeated with more or less pride and persuasiveness. At the same time, a lesser library might be compiled of the warnings uttered by the anxious ones who hold that the power of books is more potent than benign, and that if one half of the world’s readers are being led gloriously to high and noble truths, the other half is being vitiated by an influence which makes for paltriness and degradation. Under all circumstances, we are asked to believe that we are dominated by the printed page. It is this conviction which induces so much of austerity—not to say of censoriousness—in our counsellors, whose upbraidings are but the echoes of those sterner protests with which church and state were wont in earlier days to direct the reading courses of the public. That books have always been deemed formidable antagonists is proven by their frequent condemnation. The fires that were kindled for sorcerers and for heretics flamed just as fiercely for the stubborn volumes which passed the border-land of orthodoxy. Calvin burned all the pamphlets and manuscripts of Servetus at the same time that he burned their author; in consequence of which thoroughness, “Christianismi Restitutio” is said to be one of the rarest dissertations in the world.
For some books that perished at the stake the antiquarian can never mourn enough. An act passed in the short reign of King Edward VI commanded the wholesale destruction of all “antiphones, myssales, scrayles, processionales, manuelles, legendes, pyes, prymars in Lattyn or Inglishe, cowchers, journales, ordinales, or other books or writings whatsoever, heretofore used for the service of the churche, written or prynted in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue.” Owners of these precious volumes were commanded to give them up (heavy fines being exacted for disobedience), that they might be “openlye brent, or otherways defaced and destroied.” None were spared, save the “Prymars in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue set forthe by the late Kinge of famous memorie, Kinge Henrie the eight;” and even from such hallowed pages all “invocations or prayers to saintes” were to be “blotted or clerelye put out.” Orthodoxy is a costly indulgence. What treasures were lost to the world, what—
Small rare volumes, dark with tarnished gold,
shrivelled into ashes, that the Book of Common Prayer might rule in undisputed authority and right!
Queen Elizabeth was strenuously opposed to “schismatical” works, as well as to those of a political or diplomatic character. With broad-minded impartiality she burned all books and pamphlets which presumed to deal—no matter in what spirit—with subjects she did not wish discussed. Like the old Tory lady who objected to her Tory butler’s sentiments, seeing no reason why butlers should have sentiments at all, Elizabeth punished the too effusive piety and patriotism of her subjects as severely as she punished their discontent. The hall kitchen of the Stationers’ Company witnessed many a bonfire of books during her reign; and many an incautious author discovered with poor Peter Wentworth that “the anger of a Prince is as the roaring of a Lyon, and even as the messenger of Death.” James I favoured St. Paul’s churchyard as a spot singularly suitable for the cremation of books; and Oxford and Cambridge had their own exclusive auto-da-fés for two centuries and more. Edinburgh, with fine national feeling, burned Drake’s “Historia Anglo-Scotica,” because its English tone offended Scottish pride; and England burned the Rev. Arthur Bury’s “Naked Gospel” in 1690, because she conceived that a rector of Exeter should veil his truths more decently from the eyes of the feeble and profane. The last book to achieve such unmerited distinction in Great Britain was a copy of Mr. Froude’s “Nemesis of Faith,” which, being discovered in the possession of an Oxford student, was publicly burned by the Rev. William Sewell, Dean of Exeter, in the college hall, on the twenty-seventh of February, 1849. “Oxford,” says Mr. James Anson Farrer, “has always tempered her love for learning with a dislike for inquiry.” The incident, being at best unusual, gave such a healthy impetus to the sale of Mr. Froude’s work—which had won no wide hearing—that it went into a second edition, and became an object of keen, though temporary, solicitude. Well might the Marquis de Langle say that burning was as a blue ribbon to any book, inspiring interest, and insuring sales. There are those who affirm that the “Index Expurgatorius,” by which the Roman Catholic church still seeks to restrain the reading of her children, is a similar spur to curiosity. This I do not believe, having never in my life met a Roman Catholic who knew what works were or were not upon the “Index,” or who had been incautious enough to inquire.
The decline of church discipline and the enfeeblement of law permit books now to die a natural death; but the conviction of their powerful and perilous authority still lingers in the teacher’s heart. If he knows, as is often the case, much of letters and little of life, he magnifies this authority until it seems the dominant influence of the world. A writer in one of the British quarterlies assures us with almost incredible seriousness that we are at the mercy of the authors whom we read.