Neither of us, therefore, could afford to laugh at the other; nor did either of us laugh at himself; we just went blankly away, and parted. I daresay my friend found presently, as I did, balm in the knowledge that the Tivoli’s frontage wouldn’t, because it couldn’t, be so bad as that which we had just, for the first time, seen.
For me there was another, a yet stronger, balm. And I went as though I trod on air, my heart singing within me. For I had not, after all, to resume my task of writing that letter to The Times.
BOOKS WITHIN BOOKS 1914.
They must, I suppose, be classed among biblia abiblia [Greek]. Ignored in the catalogue of any library, not one of them lurking in any uttermost cavern under the reading-room of the British Museum, none of them ever printed even for private circulation, these books written by this and that character in fiction are books only by courtesy and good will.
But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that aren’t. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words well and appropriately printed and bound? If you can say Yes to these questions, then only, I submit, is the title of ‘book’ deserved. If Lamb were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than he did. Published volumes were few in his day (though not, of course, few enough). Even he, in all the plenitude of his indulgence, would now have to demur that at least 90 per cent. of the volumes that the publishers thrust on us, so hectically, every spring and autumn, are abiblia [Greek].
What would he have to say of the novels, for example? These commodities are all very well in their way, no doubt. But let us have no illusions as to what their way is. The poulterer who sells strings of sausages does not pretend that every individual sausage is in itself remarkable. He does not assure us that ‘this is a sausage that gives furiously to think,’ or ‘this is a singularly beautiful and human sausage,’ or ‘this is undoubtedly the sausage of the year.’ Why are such distinctions drawn by the publisher? When he publishes, as he sometimes does, a novel that is a book (or at any rate would be a book if it were decently printed and bound) then by all means let him proclaim its difference—even at the risk of scaring away the majority of readers.
I admit that I myself might be found in that majority. I am shy of masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers expected me to find. As a matter of fact, those disappointments are dim in my memory: it is long since I ceased to take publishers’ opinions as my guide. I trust now, for what I ought to read, to the advice of a few highly literary friends. But so soon as I am told that I ‘must’ read this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I become strangely loth to do anything of the sort. And what I like about books within books is that they never can prick my conscience. It is extraordinarily comfortable that they don’t exist.
And yet—for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can’t stir sweet longings—how eagerly would I devour these books within books! What fun, what a queer emotion, to fish out from a fourpenny-box, in a windy by-street, WALTER LORRAINE, by ARTHUR PENDENNIS, or PASSION FLOWERS, by ROSA BUNION! I suppose poor Rosa’s muse, so fair and so fervid in Rosa’s day, would seem a trifle fatigued now; but what allowances one would make! Lord Steyne said of WALTER LORRAINE that it was ‘very clever and wicked.’ I fancy we should apply neither epithet now. Indeed, I have always suspected that Pen’s maiden effort may have been on a plane with ‘The Great Hoggarty Diamond.’ Yet I vow would I not skip a line of it.
WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped that perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that the novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion and found by discerning critics to be not at all bad.