To keep up with the flood of modern fiction is impossible. There is a great gain if we can find amusement in reading books which inform as well as entertain. Prefer fact to fiction. Few are indifferent to the pathos of Dickens and Thackeray but there is a chord touched in reading of the actual heroism of brave men and women which no imaginary character can affect so strongly. When we read poor DeLong’s record, in the midst of that terrible Arctic winter on the Jeannette, “for myself, I am doing all I can to make myself trusted and respected, and I think I succeed, I try to be gentle but firm in correcting anything I see wrong, and always calm and self-possessed.” we are moved by a real human sympathy. Yet it is one of the miracles of the masters of fiction that they make their characters so real to us. Lowell said he knew the sound of Squire Weston’s voice; and for many people Baker Street, London, is more definite as a landmark as the residence of the imaginary Sherlock Holmes than of the real Mrs. Siddons.
CHAPTER XI.
LIBRARIES AND THE CARE OF BOOKS.
We do not get the most out of a book unless we own it; we cannot take a personal interest in borrowed books, and, although it pleases Mr. Augustine Birrell to think of the thousands of thumbs that have turned over its pages with delight, it is difficult really to know a library book with its soiled pages, battered cover and the date when it must be returned impending like the Day of Judgment.
There is the same difference between a book that you own and a library book that there is between a home and a hotel; the one is stamped with the individuality of its owner, the other is common property. It is pleasant to have a feeling of proprietorship in the great men of the past and to speak of my Homer or my Shakespeare. How close it brings us to a man when we possess a book with his autograph or book-plate in it, or which, better still, he has read and marked. If for instance, we owned Lowell’s Don Quixote with the notes written on its margin in repeated readings from which he drew the material for his famous address, what an inspiration it would be.
The books that you skim you may borrow. If you buy them they will take up room on your shelves that may be more profitably employed; but the books that you wish to read again and again, to ponder over and to study you must own.
You may have a library full of books, but what you really are is determined by that part of them which you have read and laid to heart. Yet the unconscious tuition of books has a real value, we learn to love them by having them about us. Merely to surround ourselves with great books and with the portraits of those who have written them has a refining influence as constant as it is unnoticed. That the essay of Emerson or the poem of Longfellow is where you can lay your hand on it, that the kindly faces of the writers look down on you from the wall, associations such as these sweeten and elevate life.
Although there is a luxurious beauty about an elegant edition that is not to be lightly esteemed, there is a satisfaction in knowing that we can derive as much food for thought from a cheap Shakespeare as from a first folio. The truest book-lovers are those who love the thoughts that the books contain. Complete editions of standard authors are the best to own. The print should be large and the books easy to hold and to open. If edited at all, the work should be done by a competent scholar. It takes a great deal of editing to spoil a classic, but nowadays there is too much editing, too much thinking is done for us.
Dr. Johnson thought that books that you may carry to the fire and hold readily in your hand are the most useful.
The durability of the letter as well as the spirit of a book is nowadays too often disregarded. Publishers recognize how much a striking exterior has to do with the sale of a book and pay more attention to making it attractive than durable. In former times men had more respect for books. The vellum bound volumes of three hundred years ago will be in good condition long after the books of to-day have come to pieces and been thrown away.
If it be true that the degree of civilization of a people may be measured by its respect for its dead, it is no less true that the refinement of a household may be estimated by its care for its books. Some men of letters, however, have been remarkable for their ill-treatment of books. The poet Young turned down the leaf where there was a passage that interested him, so that many of his books would not shut. Voltaire noted his likes and dislikes in books with little regard to whether they belonged to him or not, while Coleridge said you might as well turn a bear into a tulip garden as let Wordsworth loose in your library; and in his Literary Reminiscences DeQuincey records a story which makes every book-lover shudder, that Wordsworth cut pages of Burke with a knife that had been used to butter toast.