The Pleasures of a Book-Man

THE pleasures of a book-man, like those of any pursuer of hobbies or other fallow deer, may be divided into several classes: there are the pleasures of the chase, the pleasures of possession, the pleasures of creation, the pleasures of association, and the pleasures of contemplation.

The crude zest of making a collection of books for any the most elementary purpose is clearly a pleasure of the chase. But if, behind the object

of self-education by means of books which shall be always at one’s disposal, there is some definite aim such as most book-men have, the chase is more exciting than that of merely finding means to get and to house the books you want to read and re-read. If you collect in order to illustrate a period, or a department of literature, there will always be books enough of a rare or elusive kind to stimulate the huntsman’s appetite for pursuit; but it is perhaps when rarity itself really adds to the charms of a book a sort of beauty which is certainly in the eye of the gazer, that the spirit of Nimrod enters most completely into the book-man. When one has bought as a boy for fourpence a largepaper Poems by Two Brothers, turned it out in a subsequent clearance of rubbish at about the same price, and then, suddenly learning it was by the Tennysons, has run the same copy to earth a second time, one feels a glow of triumph; and when, after years of patient insistence, one has got an idle old bookseller, whose stock should, if there be any virtue in reasoning, include Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant, to search his loft and produce a copy of that pamphlet, spotless and not even cut open, — price one shilling, — then indeed one feels that one is worthy to be called ‘ a mighty hunter '; and for me the pleasures of the chase have included these and many other such incidents.

In the subsequent enjoyment of a few triumphs of that class, and many minor ones of like kind, I have experienced the pleasures of possession in an acute form; and I take my own case to be typical, although book-men are divided on the question whether you actually love more the books which have cost you much or those which have cost you little. The pleasures of possession are not connected with the most amiable of our qualities; and yet there is much to justify them. The knowledge that our treasures cannot reasonably be alienated from us, or abused by others, is a perfectly justifiable source of satisfaction if we do anything with our books beyond putting them on our shelves, as any moneypig can do. But I will not dwell upon the pleasures of possession, because I am not disposed to risk the charge of hypocrisy in pleading among those pleasures that of lending one’s most cherished books to other people. Frankly, I hate lending any books that are not, expressly, lending copies; I have lent in my time hundreds of volumes, and have had scores returned damaged, and dozens never returned at all. Whose the lost ones shall be in the Kingdom of Heaven, I know not, — whose the spoiled ones, I care not; but here on earth I get no satisfaction out of them.

The pleasures of creation are not for all book-men. And yet, I think, most book-men deserving of the name must have moments when sparks of the divine fire fly off in the course of their proceedings. Just as the coherent arrangement of building-materials may become architecture and highly creative, so the arrangement of a library may readily present a creative side; and the moment the book-man employs his or another’s library for the purposes of some work in literature, science, or philosophy which is a real contribution to the world’s intellectual wealth, then that book-man has a right to say that he has tasted of the highest pleasure allowed to his kind — the pleasure of creation. It is my belief that the poet is the book-man of all book-men — perhaps the man of all men — who tastes most fully that supreme pleasure, and confers on the world the highest and most lasting delight. He is the ideal creative book-man; and it is not to be imputed to him for anything but righteousness that, when he has gone through the several phases of creation and has his poem down in black and white, in its final form of words, he cannot put aside the desire that it also shall increase and multiply by means of the press, so that others may share the pleasure of those impressions which have clamored in his soul for creation.

The pleasures of association even in their cruder form are far from mean. Why is it that the rational first-edition man among collectors wants to have the first edition rather than the best? It is because he desires to associate the creative personality of the author with the visible, tangible thing created. The invisible, intangible thing which is the true creation — the conception embodied, with spiritual stress and conflict, in imperishable combinations of words — he can only associate with the author in his mind, by spiritual touch and psychic vision. But after all there was a form in which the author first saw his work embodied and made communicable to his fellow men; and that is the visible, tangible thing created which the book-man may hope to possess for the satisfaction of his craving after some common ground on which his soul and the artist’s soul may stand.

If the book-man is also an autograph collector he can get closer yet to the author: the soul of the Shelley-man — crede experto — is closer to the soul of Shelley when he reads Julian and Maddalo in the tiny holograph manuscript written at Este in 1818, than when he reads it as first printed by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems of 1824, — or even than when he reads Adonais or The Cenci as printed in Italy under the poet’s supervision. The pleasures of association grow with the book-man’s growth, and change with his knowledge; the time comes when he will no longer be content with the author’s first issues preserved in sumptuous, adventitious bindings, and changed in form to suit some other’s taste; he must have them in the very clothing which they first wore, — paper boards or cloth covers, printed labels or blocked designs; and if he can get copies written upon by the author, whether for presentation or for correction, or for both, he will obtain a still more intimate association with the author than he had dreamed possible when he started years before on the quest. This is no far-fetched apologia pro vita Philobibli: it is all literally true; and the pleasures of association on which I have touched are mainly, though not wholly, spiritual.

Having said thus much in our mutual defense, I will admit that by comparison with the best and holiest pleasures of a book-man, even the spiritual pleasures at which I have been glancing, and certainly all the grosser ones, can but be classed as the frivolities of a book-man. In the pleasures of contemplation are to be found the highest synthesis of joyful impressions to be experienced in the book-man’s Paradise. All those who have read much have carried away from the printed pages, not only some impression of what the author was talking about, but also some impression of the author’s personality. If you have known him, you have his face, his form, his voice, his action, and his garb, and maybe something of his character; all of which you inevitably contemplate as your mind dwells upon his work. But in any case your soul is in communion with his soul when you read or think about his works, whether he be Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Burns, Shelley, whom on the one hand you cannot have seen; or Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Rossetti,Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, whom on the other hand you may perchance have seen or known.

When I am asked why I love to walk out alone and lose myself in woods and solitudes, I answer,‘Because I am such good company,’ — and this not in any arrogance of egotism, but because in virtue of half a century of commune with the great of many lands and ages, the words and records they have left have become a part of me; and when I am alone I am free to summon up from that part of me just which mighty ’spirit from the vasty deep ’ of all time I may choose to commune with and make the subject of my contemplation. It is in my mind, as I think, that the older we grow, the less we shall love our visible tangible books, and the more we shall love the fellow book-men who created them. It is in my mind that there will come for all of us who are spared from foundering in the eclipse of those final tortures which, alas! usher so many of us through what should be for all the stately and comfortable portals of death, a time when we shall still care greatly for the great makers of books, but very little for the books themselves. For me that time has not yet come; but the thought of what others may do to my library when I need it no more, has no terrors for me; I have pleased myself in the matter of collecting it; let my executors e’en please themselves in the matter of dispersing it or keeping it whole.

To-day I have ‘ the mania of owning things ’ acutely enough; and the books I most love are treasures which no money would induce me to give up. But I can believe that such wielders of the book-man’s rake as I am, if spared from any of the more poignant and protracted horrors through which this mortality is dissolved, — if permitted to pass into a serene and sane old age, — will not at last be greatly moved with solicitude as to their possessions. I can believe that, although wild horses may be wholly incompetent to-day to tear my bibliographical treasures from my grasp, I shall not, in that serene and sane old age that I am figuring to myself, greatly care what is to be the ultimate (or say the next) resting-place of the things I have taken so much pleasurable trouble to get together.

So long as Shelley, still and forever only twenty-nine years old, walks about with all his coruscating splendors behind this wrinkled forehead and steadily-calcifying skull, what shall it be to me — when I can see and handle them no more — who is to own Shelley’s copies of Laon and Cythna and Queen Mab, altered in his own affluent handwriting into The Revolt of Islam and The Dœmon of the World? So long as the pathetic figure of Keats, dead of passion and phthisis at twentyfive, and whom yet ‘ no hungry generations ’ shall ever ‘ tread down,’ still chants his haunting melodies within them, what shall I care whether student or millionaire, national librarian or dainty blue-stockinged maiden, shall be the custodian, after me, of his own books given by his own hand to Fanny Brawne, his own pocket Dante carried in his knapsack through Scotland, or the copy of Foliage given to him by Leigh Hunt and by him to her who was in some sort his undoing? With Byron’s tremendous if not wholly lovable personality to ramp through my brain and quicken my flagging pulses with those masculine strokes in which he was wont in his intellectual maturity to ’paint your world exactly as it goes,’ how should I be preoccupied with solicitude as to who shall next pluck from the burning that peccant little quarto volume of his young lordship’s wild oats which the Reverend Mr. Becher saved for himself from the holocaust of 1806— the holocaust which he himself forced upon the budding poet?

Perhaps my readers will say, ‘How the old leaven sticks! ’ if I hark back one moment on the pleasures of the chase, and recall a little sacred volume of verse—sacred in more senses than one — of which I know no extant copy save that in my own library, acquired in circumstances of a most exhilarating kind. It is the Divine Poems of Edmund Waller, Esq.,—a little collection of what may be called devotional poetry issued by the old poet, politician, and reprieved traitor to his country, in the year 1685, when he was already over eighty years old. Not a hundred miles from my parish church, the Church of St. Marylebone, I bought this treasurable tract a few years ago, bound-up with a bundle of those base reprints of 1708 and 1709 with which most of us are familiar. With great joy I paid prompt cash for my acquisition: no less a sum than three shillings and sixpence in good and lawful money of my late sovereign lady, Queen Victoria; and I have never yet repented or regretted that I did not offer a bonus to the dear innocent man who sold me that jewel of gold in a swine’s snout. The snout is gone the way of all such flesh; but the Divine Poems, in a suitable morocco binding, perennially rejoice my bookish soul. I read them on Sundays till I come to the end of the ‘ Reflections upon the several Petitions in the Lord’s Prayer ’ with which the tract closes; and as I put down the book, I feel that the old man whose intellect and creative energy still lived on to such result when he was so far gone in general decay that he must needs dictate to an amanuensis this beautiful copy of verses, was a spectacle for the envy and emulation of all good book-men.

In the next year, as we know from another copy of verses appended to the reprint of the Divine Poems in the fifth edition of his works, the old man still possessed his intellectual and creative faculty, however sparingly used. The ‘Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer ’ are followed by a poem (also dictated) ‘On the Last Verse, in the Book,’ —a poem which opens thus: —

In this noble couplet lies the thought to which I have been endeavoring to wade, through the clogging medium of the book-man’s grosser pleasures. What can be a happier aspiration than that of the old book-man whose visible,

tangible possessions are no longer of moment to him? He can neither read nor write; but his thoughts, the thoughts of the great men who have come and gone before him, rise up still in his mind, and he can even lay them out in new combinations for his own satisfaction, and peradventure for the delight of future ages.

Those splendid verses are absolutely the last of Waller’s that have come down to us, though who shall say what melodious thoughts sang in that unique brain even as he crossed the Threshold, with no breath to dictate withal?

Some of us live in the conviction that, when our turn comes to cross that threshold, we shall meet Waller and the rest of the men who have built up the glories of English literature. Others hold that

If we are to meet again the book-men we have known, and become acquainted with those whom we have not known, so much the better. I for one am equal to either fortune — ready when my time comes to wake or sleep as it may be. If to wake, well! If to sleep, well also; but not so well. In either case, I shall have no further use for my books; and I am convinced that that is the frame of mind in which best to enjoy while still able the pleasures — even the more frivolous pleasures— on which I have been touching.

The ideal book-man’s old age and death are those recorded of Edmund Waller; and in utter seriousness I wish for every one such ‘a happy issue out of all the afflictions’ which are inseparable from our present mainly pleasurable pursuits.