The Romance of Book-Collecting

by J. Herbert Slater

HOW FASHION LIVES.

The dim haze which, in the imagination of the populace, once floated above the head of every hungry book-man, was never in those days identified with a mass of tangled, waving hair, which, aureola-like, 'girt his occiput about,' for he was no minor poet, with pale, eager face and love-locks everywhere, but a man, with a rugged front such as Ben Jonson wore, and a heart that beat within. The haze in which he moved was from the dust of old-world tomes; it settled on his coat, and, had he worn a bob-wig, it would have settled on that also, but, since wigs had escaped the fashion of fifty years before, it merely clung to his hair instead, and powdered it gray before its time. Half a century ago the England which for the most part was free from the shriek of the railway-whistle and the rumble of traffic harboured such men as these in their hundreds. They came from the last century, and the further their pilgrimage in this the more they haunted the rustic element in which they moved. They were, in their way, magicians, wearing the consecrated pentacles of Agrippa, 'that man of parts, who dived into the secrets of all arts, that second Solomon, the mighty Hee, that try'de them all, and found them Vanity.'

Naturally enough, when one of these old-time bookworms left his seclusion to mix with the whirl and throng of the London thoroughfares, he was swallowed up, as though he had never been, in a huge vortex of unappreciative apathy, for the man in the street never has time to dream, and such books as he affects are ledgers. But he might have strayed into some square which the tide, ebbing westward, had left desolate, and met his counterpart sitting, as he himself did when at home, in the midst of vellum-bound classics far into the night. Indeed, when he came to London, which was but seldom, it would be to visit another bookworm, just as the stage-doorkeeper of the present day spends his evening off at the entrance to another theatre, because he cannot get away, even in spirit, from his life's work and enterprise. Were we to look for these old book-men now, we should look in vain, for the century is fast drawing to its close, and a younger generation has occupied their seats.

The transition from the old to the new in the matter of books and all that pertains to them, has been very gradual. It commenced about fifty years ago, or a little earlier, and was due, perhaps, to the spirit of unrest fostered by an improved and quicker system of communication in a country of very small area, absolutely incapable of enlargement. We see a mighty change in everything external, and it is not surprising that our social habits should have experienced a revolution. Round goes the wheel, slowly and persistently, and we go with it, though daily custom and daily experience has a tendency to mask its motion. One day, sooner or later, we start up and look for the familiar landmarks. They are gone. New ones, not at all familiar, but still recognisable, have taken their place, and then we know that time has slipped away while we were dreaming, and that nothing can possibly be done but to take the future by the forelock, and to rush on for a brief space with the rest.

And so it is with books, and ever has been. Fifty years and more ago, time waited upon them and stood still; now they are carried along unceasingly, and have no rest. Every year the speed increases. Old companions of the shelf are whirled into space and parted for ever; the very men who buy them are changed in their aspirations, their tastes, and their desires, and in a very short time they will change again, and yet again. They are swayed and driven by Fashion, and this is how Fashion lives.

There was something about the dry-as-dust bookworm which, however consonant with antiquated modes of thought and action, was nevertheless felt to be utterly unsuitable to changed conditions. Men must and will read, and to accumulate is equally natural. A life of easy contentment engenders one mode of thought, a life of enterprise another; and the transition from the narrow limits of a prison-bound study to the open air is precisely what might have been expected to occur.

Men there were, as I have said, in plenty, who refused to quit the time-honoured traditions of their race; but on every side of them were being born lighter spirits, to whom colossal and intricate volumes were as heavy as lead. We see the changed nature of their tastes in the craving for art, and the outcome of it in scores and hundreds of miscellanies which began to be published about the year 1830, and held imperial sway on drawing-room tables for ten years or more.

Fisher's 'Scrap-Book,' and numerous other artistically got up volumes full of excerpts and elegant extracts, illustrated by some of the first engravers of the time, were extremely fashionable in those days, and for light and casual reading very probably supplied all that was necessary. The poets, from the Earl of Surrey onward, were served up in dainty plats, and the best prose authors were disembowelled with remarkable skill. The ingenious Martin Tupper, observing this transformation scene, brought joy into many households by laying down, in the form of explicit statements, matters of theological controversy which had in their day fed the Smithfield fires till they roared and blazed like those of Moloch.

These books were for the cultured, to whom the random books of Pierce Egan and William Combe were positively distasteful, and who, having neither the time nor the inclination to bury themselves deeply in classic lore, eagerly welcomed anything which appealed to their better selves and, at the same time, did not too severely tax their brains. The very style and nature of the books which were published at this period show as conclusively as anything can do the great change which was gradually creeping over the public mind.

Smollett and Swift were becoming coarse, and Hogarth, in his realm of art, was already much worse. Mrs. Radcliffe and the Rev. Mr. Maturin stalked like a couple of terrifying ghosts hung about with chains, wailing their lost home. They invariably spoke of haunted caverns, and the wind rumbling itself to sleep in the recesses of ruined chimneys. Their novels were the delight of these same dry-as-dusts, to whom the new age had said farewell, but who, in their impenetrable fastnesses, still revelled, though in numbers yearly decreasing, in 'The Raven,' with its soul-quaking refrain, in the 'Castle of Otranto,' and 'The Bravo of Venice.' Things of graver mood they could not find had they searched the entire catalogue of English literature, from the metrical poems of Cædmon, chanted to the winds of Whitby, down to the newest poem or novel.