They are delicious retreats, abodes of seasoned thought and peaceful meditation, these ancient homes of books. 'I no sooner come into the library,' wrote Heinz, that great literary counsellor of the Elzeviers, 'than I bolt the door, excluding Lust, Ambition, Avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is Idleness, the mother of Ignorance and Melancholy. In the very lap of Eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all great men and rich to whom this happiness is unknown.'
Happy indeed are those days when the book-lover has been accorded the freedom of some ancient library. A delicious feeling of tranquillity pervades him as he selects some nook and settles himself to read. Presently the mood takes him to explore, and he wanders about from case to case, now taking down some plump folio and glancing at the title-page and type, now counting the engravings of another and collating it in his mind, now comparing the condition of a third with the copy which he has at home, now searching through the text of some small duodecimo to see whether it contains the usual blanks or colophon. But presently he will chance upon some tome whose appeal is irresistible. So he retires with it to his nook, and is soon absorbed once more with that tranquillity which is better than great riches.
Dearly, however, though we may treasure the benefits and conveniences which these libraries of ancient foundation afford, for most of us there is another library that is nearer to our hearts; that cosy chamber with which we are accustomed to associate warmth, comfort, soft chairs and footrests, a wide writing-table that we may pile high with books, with scribbling-paper, foolscap and marking-slips in plenty. In short, a room so far removed from earthly cares and noise, that the dim occasional sounds of the outside world serve but to accentuate our absolute possession of ease. Here we may labour undisturbed though surrounded by a thousand friends. Or, if the mood take us, we may abandon ourselves to idle meditation
'Where glowing embers through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,'
and, lying back at our ease, may gaze contentedly upon the faithful companions of our crowded solitude, gathering inspiration from their silent sympathy.
Each to his taste. Whether we be student, book-hunter, librarian, or precentor,[14] no earthly abode can be compared with that garden of our choice wherein we labour so contentedly. It may be a small room in our own house, it may be an ancient university or college library, but it is all one: it is a library, that haven of refuge from our worldly cares, where troubles are forgotten and sorrows lightened by the gently persuasive experience of the wise men that have gone before us.
But, mark you, it must be literally removed from cares and noise, for it is impossible to study at all deeply while exposed to interruption. How terribly most of us have suffered from this form of mental torture, for it is little else! What trains of lucid thought, what word-pictures have been destroyed by thoughtless breakings of the chain of sequence! 'I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last,' wrote Miss Florence Nightingale. Hamerton, quoting her, is equally emphatic upon this point.
'If,' he writes, 'you are reading in the daytime in a house where there are women and children, or where people can fasten upon you for pottering details of business, you may be sure that you will not be able to get to the end of the passage without in some way or other being rudely awakened from your dream, and suddenly brought back into the common world. The loss intellectually is greater than any one who had not suffered from it could imagine. People think that an interruption is merely the unhooking of an electric chain, and that the current will flow, when the chain is hooked on again, just as it did before. To the intellectual and imaginative student an interruption is not that; it is the destruction of a picture.'
Who has not suffered from the idle chatter, or even worse—the lowered voice, that often assails the ear when working in our larger public libraries? Some innocent-looking individual will be reading quietly some paces away, so quietly and decorously in fact that one's heart goes out to him as a sympathetic fellow-bookman. Then enters some one whom he knows. In a flash he becomes a fiend incarnate. A word or two of greeting spoken in an ordinary voice one would pardon; but a long conversation is carried on in a monotonous forced undertone, terrible in its intensity. It is impossible to read so long as the conversation lasts, and murder surges in one's heart. O for the power to drop ten atlas folios in a pile upon their heads! People do not realise the carrying power of a strained and lowered voice. Generally the volume of sound is the same as when speaking aloud, for the tone is merely lowered and the same amount of breath is used. But often more force is required to vibrate the slackened vocal chords, and the maddening sound reaches to every corner of the building.
In the Reading Room of the British Museum one is constantly aware of this buzzing going on all over the room. Would that the rule enforced at one of our older monasteries were applied: 'In the Chafynghowys al brethren schal speke latyn or els keep silence.' This would indeed ensure quietness nowadays. The rule for nuns, however (who, presumably, were not so well acquainted with Latin) would be better still. They were not to speak at all.[15]