Books and Bookmen — Story, Setting & Ideas

Transcribed from the 1912 James Nisbet & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

[Picture: Ian Maclaren]

London JAMES NISBET & CO. LIMITED 22 BERNERS STREET, W. 1912

THEY cannot be separated any more than sheep and a shepherd, but I am minded to speak of the bookman rather than of his books, and so it will be best at the outset to define the tribe.

It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many books, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which a gentleman’s library is not complete. And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books, since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them. It is the foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpenny edition. The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos. As he was to preside at a lecture I was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the rôle that night of a man who had been successful in business, but yet allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he desired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain imposing air that we should visit what he called “my library.” Across the magnificence of the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner. “There,” he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, “what do you think of that?” And _that_ was without question a very large and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors. Before I saw the doors I had no doubt about my host, but they were a seal upon my faith, for although a bookman is obliged to have one bit of glass in his garden for certain rare plants from Russia and Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white vellum lily upon which the air must not be allowed to blow, especially when charged with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates this conservatory, just as much as he loves its contents. His contentment is to have the flowers laid out in open beds, where he can pluck a blossom at will. As often as one sees the books behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked, then he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with them in the evening hours when the work of the day is done, but their jailer, who has bought them in the market-place for gold, and holds them in this foreign place by force. It has seemed to me as if certain old friends looked out from their prison with appealing glance, and one has been tempted to break the glass and let, for instance, Elia go free. It would be like the emancipation of a slave. Elia was not, good luck for him, within this particular prison, and I was brought back from every temptation to break the laws of property by my chairman, who was still pursuing his catechism. “What,” was question two, “do you think I paid for _that_?” It was a hopeless catechism, for I had never possessed anything like _that_, and none of my friends had in their homes anything like _that_, and in my wildest moments I had never asked the price of such a thing as _that_. As it loomed up before me in its speckless respectability and insolence of solid wealth my English sense of reverence for money awoke, and I confessed that this matter was too high for me; but even then, casting a glance of deprecation in its direction, I noticed _that_ was almost filled by a single work, and I wondered what it could be. “Cost £80 if it cost a penny, and I bought it second-hand in perfect condition for £17, 5s., with the books thrown in—_All the Year Round_ from the beginning in half calf;” and then we returned in procession to the drawing-room, where my patron apologised for our absence, and explained that when two bookmen got together over books it was difficult to tear them away. He was an admirable chairman, for he occupied no time with a review of literature in his address, and he slept without being noticed through mine (which is all I ask of a chairman), and so it may seem ungrateful, but in spite of “_that_” and any books, even Spenser and Chaucer, which _that_ might have contained, this Mæcenas of an evening was not a bookman.

It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a pleasant anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having made his pile and bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to an old friend to send him out some chests of books, as many as he thought fit, and the best that he could find. His friend was so touched by this sign of grace that he spent a month of love over the commission, and was vastly pleased when he sent off, in the best editions and in pleasant binding, the very essence of English literature. It was a disappointment that the only acknowledgment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say that the consignment had arrived in good condition. A year afterwards, so runs the story, he received a letter which was brief and to the point. “Have been working over the books, and if anything new has been written by William Shakespeare or John Milton, please send it out.” I believe this is mentioned as an instance of barbarism. It cannot be denied that it showed a certain ignorance of the history of literature, which might be excused in a bushman, but it is also proved, which is much more important, that he had the smack of letters in him, for being turned loose without the guide of any training in this wide field, he fixed as by instinct on the two classics of the English tongue. With the help of all our education, and all our reviews, could you and I have done better, and are we not every day, in our approval of unworthy books, doing very much worse? Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time, some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity of some fantastic critic.

There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the commonwealth of bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the sign of the free-born is, that without critics to aid him, or the training of a University, he knows the difference between books which are so much printed stuff and a good book which is “the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit.” The bookman will of course upon occasion trifle with various kinds of reading, and there is one member of the brotherhood who has a devouring thirst for detective stories, and has always been very grateful to the creator of _Sherlock Holmes_. It is the merest pedantry for a man to defend himself with a shamed face for his light reading: it is enough that he should be able to distinguish between the books which come and go and those which remain. So far as I remember, _The Mystery of a Hansom Cab_ and _John Inglesant_ came out somewhat about the same time, and there were those of us who read them both; but while we thought the _Hansom Cab_ a very ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves. Certainly it is not lying between _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_. But some of us venture to think that in that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot through both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of the seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a certain place in English literature.

When people are raving between the soup and fish about some popular novel which to-morrow will be forgotten, but which doubtless, like the moths which make beautiful the summer-time, has its purpose in the world of speech, it gives one bookman whom I know the keenest pleasure to ask his fair companion whether she has read _Mark Rutherford_. He is proudly conscious at the time that he is a witness to perfection in a gay world which is content with excitement, and he would be more than human if he had not in him a touch of the literary Pharisee. She has _not_ read _Mark Rutherford_, and he does not advise her to seek it at the circulating library, because it will not be there, and if she got it she would never read more than ten pages. Twenty thousand people will greedily read _Twice Murdered and Once Hung_ and no doubt they have their reward, while only twenty people read _Mark Rutherford_; but then the multitude do not return to _Twice Murdered_, while the twenty turn again and again to _Mark Rutherford_ for its strong thinking and its pure sinewy English style. And the children of the twenty thousand will not know _Twice Murdered_, but the children of the twenty, with others added to them, will know and love _Mark Rutherford_. Mr. Augustine Birrell makes it, I think, a point of friendship that a man should love George Borrow, whom I think to appreciate is an excellent but an acquired taste; there are others who would propose _Mark Rutherford_ and the _Revelation in Tanner’s Lane_ as a sound test for a bookman’s palate. But . . . de gustibus . . . !

It is the chief office of the critic, while encouraging all honest work which either can instruct or amuse, to distinguish between the books which must be content to pass and the books which must remain because they have an immortality of necessity.

According to the weightiest of French critics of our time the author of such a book is one “who has enriched the human mind, who has really added to its treasures, who has got it to take a step further . . . who has spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the style of everybody, in a style that is at once new and antique, and is the contemporary of all the ages.” Without doubt Sainte-Beuve has here touched the classical quality in literature as with a needle, for that book is a classic to be placed beside Homer and Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare—among the immortals—which has wisdom which we cannot find elsewhere, and whose form has risen above the limitation of any single age. While ordinary books are houses which serve for a generation or two at most, this kind of book is the Cathedral which towers above the building at its base and can be seen from afar, in which many generations shall find their peace and inspiration. While other books are like the humble craft which ply from place to place along the coast, this book is as a stately merchantman which compasses the great waters and returns with a golden argosy.

The subject of the book does not enter into the matter, and on subjects the bookman is very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of all sects. He does not require Mr. Froude’s delightful apology to win the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ a place on his shelf, because, although the bookman may be far removed from Puritanism, yet he knows that Bunyan had the secret of English style, and although he may be as far from Romanism, yet he must needs have his A’Kempis (especially in Pickering’s edition of 1828), and when he places the two books side by side in the department of religion, he has a standing regret that there is no _Pilgrim’s Progress_ also in Pickering.

Without a complete Milton he could not be content. He would like to have Masson’s Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to consider the great Puritan’s prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo, but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While he counts Gibbon’s Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in 8 vols., blue cloth, the very model of histories, yet he revels in those books which are the material for historians, the scattered stones out of which he builds his house, such as the diaries of John Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and that scandalous book, _Grammont’s Memoirs_, and that most credulous but interesting of Scots annalists, Robert Wodrow.

According to the bookman, but not, I am sorry to say, in popular judgment, the most toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and you will find close to his hand a dainty volume of Lamb open perhaps at that charming paper on “Imperfect Sympathies,” and though the bookman be a Scot yet his palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb’s description of his national character—Lamb and the Scots did not agree through an incompatibility of humour—and near by he keeps his Hazlitt, whom he sometimes considers the most virile writer of the century: nor would he be quite happy unless he could find in the dark _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. He is much indebted to a London publisher for a very careful edition of the _Spectator_, and still more to that good bookman, Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction. As the bookman’s father was also a bookman, for the blessing descendeth unto the third and fourth generation, he was early taught to love De Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has read every page in all the fifteen volumes—roxburghe calf—yet he knows his way about in that whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will write on anything, or any person, always with freshness and in good English, from the character of Judas Iscariot and “Murder as a Fine Art” to the Lake Poets—there never was a Lake school—and the Essenes. He has much to say on Homer, and a good deal also on “Flogging in Schools”; he can hardly let go Immanuel Kant, but if he does it is to give his views, which are not favourable, of _Wilhelm Meister_; he is not above considering the art of cooking potatoes or the question of whether human beings once had tails, and in his theological moods he will expound St. John’s Epistles, or the principles of Christianity. The bookman, in fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare not claim that he searches for accurate information in his books as for fine gold, and he has been known to say that that department of books of various kinds which come under the head of “what’s what,” and “why’s why,” and “where’s where,” are not literature. He does not care, and that may be foolish, whether he agrees with the writer, and there are times when he does not inquire too curiously whether the writer be respectable, which is very wrong, but he is pleased if this man who died a year ago or three hundred years has seen something with his own eyes and can tell him what he saw in words that still have in them the breath of life, and he will go with cheerful inconsequence from Chaucer, the jolliest of all book companions, and Rabelais—although that brilliant satirist had pages which the bookman avoids, because they make his gorge rise—to Don Quixote. If he carries a Horace, Pickering’s little gem, in his waistcoat pocket, and sometimes pictures that genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he has none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius. The bookman has a series of love affairs before he is captured and settles down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged married man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are perilous to his inflammable heart.

In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the sweetness of literature in two of the best novels ever written, as well as two of the best pieces of good English. One is _Robinson Crusoe_ and the other the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. Both were written by masters of our tongue, and they remain until this day the purest and most appetising introduction to the book passion. They created two worlds of adventure with minute vivid details and constant surprises—the foot on the sand, for instance, in _Crusoe_, and the valley of the shadow with the hobgoblin in _Pilgrim’s Progress_—and one will have a tenderness for these two first loves even until the end. Afterwards one went afield and sometimes got into queer company, not bad but simply a little common. There was an endless series of Red Indian stories in my school-days, wherein trappers could track the enemy by a broken blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by coming down the river under a log, and the price was sixpence each. We used to pass the tuck-shop at school for three days on end in order that we might possess _Leaping Deer_, _the Shawnee Spy_. We toadied shamefully to the owner of _Bull’s Eye Joe_, who, we understood, had been the sole protection of a frontier state. Again and again have I tried to find one of those early friends, and in many places have I inquired, but my humble companions have disappeared and left no signs, like country children one played with in holiday times.

It appears, however, that I have not been the only lover of the trapper stories, nor the only one who has missed his friends, for I received a letter not long ago from a bookman telling me that he had seen my complaint somewhere, and sending me the _Frontier Angel_ on loan strictly that I might have an hour’s sinless enjoyment. He also said he was on the track of _Bill Bidden_, another famous trapper, and hoped to send me word that Bill was found, whose original value was sixpence, but for whom this bookman was now prepared to pay gold. One, of course, does not mean that the Indian and trapper stories had the same claim to be literature as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, for, be it said with reverence, there was not much distinction in the style, or art in the narrative, but they were romances, and their subjects suited boys, who are barbarians, and there are moments when we are barbarians again, and above all things these tales bring back the days of long ago. It was later that one fell under the power of two more mature and exacting charmers, Mayne Reid’s _Rifle Rangers_ and Dumas’ _Monte Christo_. The _Rangers_ has vanished with many another possession of the past, but I still retain in a grateful memory the scene where Rube, the Indian fighter, who is supposed to have perished in a prairie fire and is being mourned by the hero, emerges with much humour from the inside of a buffalo which was lying dead upon the plain, and rails at the idea that he could be wiped out so easily. Whether imagination has been at work or not I do not know, but that is how my memory has it now, and to this day I count that resurrection a piece of most fetching work.