Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

by Richard Le Gallienne

My library would, first of all, be vast and multitudinous, a mysterious collection of books without beginning and without end, a romantic infinitude of learning and fragrance of old leather. It should go uncatalogued as the wilderness. No human index in the form of a librarian should tame it into prim classification. It should grow wild as the virgin forest, and unlooked-for adventures of the soul should lie in ambush in every alcove and lonely backwater of its haunted shelves. No less than a thousand rooms, big and little, winding in and out, wandering here and there, would be needed to contain it. There are many book-lovers who will hardly understand this Gargantuan passion for a huge library. A small and sensitively chosen collection of books is their ideal. For me, however, a few books are no more a library than a few trees are a forest, or a few gallons of water an ocean. A library is the firmament of the soul, and each particular star gains in significance from being a shining unit in all that celestial mystery.

While I should aim to have a library coextensive with the mental history of humanity, from the clay books of Babylon to the latest French novel, the learned rooms I should oftenest loiter in would be those rainbowed with the gold and purple of monkish manuscripts, the rooms mysterious with grimoires and herbals and ancient treatises on the occult sciences, the rooms of black-letter and the types of Aldus and those other first printers through whose magic Virgil and Catullus and Horace rose again from the grave. And I would have my library built with innumerable secret chambers and sliding panels and hidden passages—so that, whenever it was my desire, I could shut myself up with a favourite author for a week at a time, and domestic search for me be quite in vain.

My chapel will need few words. It would be merely a crucifix, silence, and sunlight.

I said that there would be no librarian in my library, similarly there would be no gardener in my garden, no priest in my chapel. The places of the soul need no custodians. The worshippers are the priests.

Of course, I should expect to indulge many an idle fancy and picturesque whim in my castle-in-Spain but they would take too long to tell of. Here I have but set down what I conceive to be the reasonable necessities of a dream. I have said nothing, for example, of my treasure-caves beneath the castle, vaults lit by enormous carbuncles, and filled with countless coffers of bronze, overflowing with ancient coins and precious stones. Nor have I spoken of my paradise of butterflies, a great enclosed garden where I would rear all the flower-winged things that, like illuminated letters or the painted souls of Japanese girls, flit and flicker through the sunlit world. Nor have I told of my palace of serpents, where python and cobra and all the ringed, gliding, spangled creatures that hiss and sting should coil about tropical trees, and sleep their mysterious sleep, or fall down like lightning on their paralysed prey. Then, too, I might tell of my great aquarium where, at ease in my luxurious diving-bell, I would lie all day watching iridescent fishes all flounced and frilled with rainbows, and slow-moving elemental shapes that brood eternally at the bottom of the sea.

A hundred other such fancies I shall hope to indulge in my castle-in-Spain, and one more I must not forget, for no castle would be complete without it—the oubliette. Into that I would fling all my sorrows and cares, and all—unwelcome visitors.