APPENDIX
APPENDIX
WE see sometimes appearing certain light little works connected either with literary history or ancient poetry, or manners and customs, which would be nothing but pretty and curious pamphlets, if the Appendix which follows them were not swelled out of all proportion with proofs and illustrations, annotated notes, documents with sidenotes, bibliographic bibliography, considerations and commentaries of all sorts, which put the reader to the torture. By this proceeding of an exaggerated literary conscience, an opuscule of thirty pages arrives sometimes at three hundred: it is in some sense a case of erudite exaltation, sometimes also a vain-glory of the investigator, who has a mind to climb up the pyramid of books he has examined, proudly there to set up his silhouette, as we plant a flag on a building as soon as it is complete.
As an epilogue to another volume of this series, The Fan, we published a sketch of documentary bibliography to indicate the principal works which we had searched for the little materials necessary for that monograph. You will find there six or eight pages of titles placed without order, and ending with this phrase of a man out of breath, and expressing extreme fatigue—et cœtera.
And in this et cœtera we have set now a hundred library shelves in the shadow—sparing thus our most fastidious readers an extremely bitter pill, and sparing ourselves also the fatigues of an interminable catalogue of no great profit to any one, considering the nature of the work in question, and the fashion in which we have treated it.
At the conclusion of the three unpretending pieces of chit-chat which we have just engaged in about The Sunshade, the Glove, and the Muff, people may expect to see figuring here the lineaments or first matters of the canvas on which we embroidered our bold arabesques. People will be deceived. It will please us for this time to hide the innumerable instruments of our thefts; they are still there by our sides, making walls and barricades upon our tables and the seats round about us. But if, on the termination of a task, we love usually to put back regularly in order a library turned upside down by the fever of researches, happy in being nourished by the intellectual juice of old books, sometimes also we are prostrated by that intense discouragement which “dumfounds a man,” according to an every-day expression. In fact, the result has not answered so great a working up of material, a picture has been dreamed of too big for the frame, the artist has been obliged to reduce himself, to resign himself, and to put in nothing of his own essence; in short, the Mosaic littérateur looks at the Little Thing he has just finished beside the Great Matter which he had conceived.
In like conditions, the meâ culpâ is the sole preventive parade that can be made in his retreat to questions which become twisted into a note of interrogation on the smiling lips of the reader.