Books and Bookmen

by Ian Maclaren

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.