THE PRESIDENT: During the other sessions of the Conference we have been considering people—and books. At this concluding session the topics on the program have special reference to books—and people. The first paper invites our interest by its suggestion of the flavor which old books bring. Miss G. M. WALTON, of the Michigan State Normal College, will present this paper.
THE FRIENDLY BOOK
It was Mr. Lowell who reminded me the other day, by quoting Ecclesiasticus in one of his essays, that we owe the ideal of the man of leisure to a book of the Apocrypha wherein we read, "The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure."
Our profession standing as a guarantor of our wisdom and our learning, I am here today to bespeak a portion of our large opportunity of leisure for—The Friendly Book.
There is small fear that we librarians forget the books of power and the books of knowledge which DeQuincey (the ofttimes quoted) presses upon all men. And most of us undoubtedly possess that ardent zeal for knowledge which filled the soul of the literal-minded librarian who read quite seriously (and found therein a working category for her own improvement) Lamb's letter to an old gentleman whose early education had been neglected, where, among the qualifications of a preceptor, the following will serve to refresh your memories: "He must be a thorough master of vernacular orthography, with an insight into the accentualities and punctualities of modern Saxon. He must be competently instructed in the tetralogy, or first four rules. He must have a genius capable in some degree of soaring to the upper element, to deduce from thence the not much dissimilar computation of the cardinal points. He must instruct you in numeric and harmonious responses, and he must be capable of embracing all history, so as from the countless myriads of individual men, who have peopled this globe of earth—for it is a globe—by comparison of their respective births, lives, deaths, fortunes, conduct, prowess, etc., to pronounce, and teach you to pronounce, dogmatically and catechetically, who was the richest, who was the strongest, who was the wisest, who was the meekest man that ever lived; to the facilitation of which solution, you will readily conceive, a smattering of biography would in no inconsiderable degree conduce."
I sometimes question if professions are not tinged with the culture epoch epidemic. It is not so very long since we were half hesitatingly taking a place among the other learned professions, almost with the apologetic air of the young boy making his first appearance in long trousers, and wondering if his fellow-men appreciate his coming into their midst—but the youth soon assumes the aggressive attitude which compels attention—and one symptom of this attitude which I feel among ourselves is the large and learned talk about new books—the self-satisfied air and monumental confidence in our sometimes sophomoric knowledge and understanding of all things "in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth," until I wonder if the pleasant counsel about reading "books at least a year old, that we like, and that are great books" must be relegated with the rest of our Emersonian philosophy to the lumber room of our many youthful joys and dreamings.
I believe we all love best to mark the passing years by the friends they bring us, and it were a barren year that brings not one more friend, and so with our friendly books, which like all friendships fill our lives with genial warmth and gratitude. Neither is really a matter of choice, for a book like a person yields its intimate charm only to the sympathizing heart. We have no care to answer why, other than, "because"—"We love them because we must love them." A new book friend comes to us now and then, and we cling to the old ones. Sometimes we lose the personal touch, but we see their kindly faces and after a separation from them we arrange them on the shelves, and we rearrange them, and, as Mr. Arnold Bennett says, "The way we walk up and down in front of those volumes, whose faces we have half forgotten, is perfectly infantile."
I remember once in Rome a friend, selecting photographs, said, "I must take a good Cicero to my son Frank, who used to say he felt as well acquainted with Cicero as he did with Bishop Huntington," and dear old Dean Hook, when a lad at Oxford expresses this same intimate feeling in one of his lively inimitable letters, "I have got into a very dissolute set of men, but they are so pleasant that they make me very often idle. It consists of one Tuft, H. R. H., Henry Prince of Wales, and a gentleman Commoner named Sir John Falstaff, and several others. I breakfast with them, drink tea, and sometimes wine with them," and, again, on hearing the good news of the recovery of his grandfather, he writes, "The minute I opened the letter and saw the news, I pulled down my Shakespeare and had a very merry hour with Sir John Falstaff. I was determined to laugh heartily all that day. I asked Sir John to wine with me. I decanted a bottle of my beloved grandfather's best port and Sir John and I drank his health right merrily. Perhaps you will want to know how my old friend Sir John drank my grandfather's health. Why I took care to find out the place where he drank Justice Shallow's health. And so when I said, 'Here's to Sir Walter,' I looked on the book and the Knight said, 'Health and long life to him.'"
Among the oldest and dearest of my friendly books is the "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay," of which I became the happy owner, when it was fresh off the press, during a sojourn in the west, far away from my home library. The dates along the margins (one of Macaulay's habits which I adopted as I read) bring pleasant thoughts of a journey from Colorado to the western coast, and long before I knew Dean Hook (whom I first met here as the Vicar of Leeds) I was pulling Macaulay down from the shelf, not indeed to drink with Sir John, but to refer to some particular talk of men or of books—always to read on and on with equal delight whether he were breakfasting with a party of old Trinity College friends, reading in his study, or acting as a guide and escort on a half holiday of sight-seeing with his nieces and nephews, with whom he was always the prince of playfellows. It was on one of these excursions to the zoological gardens that Thackeray overheard someone say, "Never mind the hippopotamus! Never mind the hippopotamus! There's Mr. Macaulay!" When absent he exchanged long and frequent letters with the children, sealing those to his nephew at Harrow with an amorphous mass of red wax, which, in defiance of all postal regulations, usually covered a piece of gold.