Books of One's Own

I

QUITE recently an Englishman, Holbrook Jackson, published a book called The Anatomy of Bibliomania. One large volume appeared six months ago, and another and final volume is promised this autumn. Of all the books in praise of books ever written, this is the most exhaustive and best. Consider that wise men for several thousand years have been hymning, in many languages, the praise of books; Mr. Jackson has collected these references, not by the hundred merely, but by the thousand, and for the most part every quotation has been traced and keyed. He quotes Homer, Plutarch, Vergil, Cicero, Rabelais, Blake, Milton, and Morley (Kit), even A. E. N. What a range! It is an amazing compilation. One wonders if Jackson be a man or a whole regiment of men. It would seem that no one man’s reading could have been so extensive. The quotations are embedded in a series of essays written in the quaint style of old Burton, him of The Anatomy of Melancholy — ‘the only book,’ Dr. Johnson told Boswell, ‘that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.’ One docs not get such a book out of a library; one must own it, if one has to steal it. ‘Passion decays; avarice is a vice which remains to the end of life,’ says Byron. It may be so — I do not know; it never much afflicted me. Books are my vice. They are my ‘ substantial world,’ as they were to Wordsworth, whose own books pleased him best — which must be a great comfort to an author.

In turning the leaves of Mr. Jackson’s fascinating book, an experience of a few months before recurred to me. I had received a letter from a man I esteem highly, Professor Spiller of the Department of English at Swarthmore College (he is known for his work upon James Fenimore Cooper, once neglected, but now coming into his own), asking if he could bring ten or a dozen students, boys and girls, ‘to see my books.’

Now if a man were lucky enough to have a collection of paintings or of prints, or indeed of anything that would display itself, it would be easy enough to say, ‘Yes, certainly, come when you like,’ and, on the arrival of one’s guests, turn them loose in one’s gallery. But with books, which must be shown and explained, it is a very different matter.

This is what I mean. There is a little volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (actually the three Brontë sisters); a copy with the Aylott and Jones imprint may be worth five or six hundred pounds, while the same book with a Smith, Elder imprint is no great bargain at ten. A ‘collector’ of English poetry hardly needs to be told the sad history of this slender volume: how one day Charlotte Bronte found a blank book filled with verses in the handwriting of Emily, and how after much discussion and some correspondence the three sisters — for they all wrote poetry — decided upon the publication of a small volume which should contain verses by all of them. But no publisher cared for the venture, until finally Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of London, agreed to publish upon the payment to them of thirty-odd pounds. The girls agreed, but stipulated for clear type, not too small, and good paper. After some delay the volume appeared, and after a year the publishers reported the sale of just two copies. The disappointment of the sisters may be imagined, but they took the blow philosophically and, giving away a few copies to friends, decided to send the remaining sheets to the trunk makers; but finally they received a better offer from Smith, Elder and Company, and the sheets were transferred to them, and in due course to the public. Hence it is that a copy of the book with the Aylott and Jones imprint is excessively rare, it being either one of the two copies sold or a copy given by one of the sisters to a friend.

Such an explanation as this, more or less, has to be made about pretty much every book one shows to a young student if he is to carry away with him any proper idea of what a collection of first editions really means. One can make such an explanation once, or even ten times, with a certain amount of enthusiasm; after that it becomes a task.

Then I thought of the rage I once fell into when I found a man rubbing his hand over a fine copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and assuring another that it must be lithographed because it was colored. Thinking of this, I was about to make some excuse, when I remembered how a wise friend of mine deals with such a situation. My friend has a fine collection of modern poetry: Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and the rest, all in excellent condition. Well, when strangers descend upon him to see his books, he does not show them, but he docs something which pleases his visitors quite as well. Taking a small key from his pocket, and pointing to a case over in a comer, he says something like this: ‘You know poetry is my strong point. Very well, here is the key to that bookcase yonder; be very careful, but enjoy my books to your heart’s content.’

Then when he sees a book tumble to the floor, or someone set a teacup on a book instead of in a saucer, he never turns a hair, for all the books in that case have been picked up at odd times and places for from twenty-five to fifty cents a volume and invariably lack the ‘points’ which would make them valuable; they might, indeed, be called lightning rods designed to protect first editions from destruction. By this little chicane, all parties are pleased: Mr. Blank has ‘shown his books,’ and Miss Splash and Miss Dash have seen them.

Then I had another thought, or rather a recollection — a better one. Some years before, that same Professor Spiller had brought a company of young men and maidens from Swarthmore, and I remembered being struck with their keenness and intelligence, and how one of them, a mere slip of a girl, had stood me up and put me through an oral examination on Boswell’s Life of Johnson from which it was difficult for me to escape with credit.

The remembrance of that group changed my attitude, and I wrote Spiller that I would take on ten or a dozen on any afternoon that would be convenient to all parties.

And in due course Professor Spiller and his students arrived; some entered my library shyly, some inquiringly, most with the idea of seeing a first edition of some particular book which they had been studying or which for some reason especially interested them. And here let me digress long enough to say that if I were a teacher of English literature I should try to instill into pupils the idea that literature is a reflex of life and endeavor, to make it as interesting as life itself. It is a terrible thing to let a student get the idea into his head that some great world-rocking book is ‘required’ reading. And if I were asked how this was to be done, I should say, ‘Treat every great book as though it were a great man.’ In the words of Walt Whitman, —

But, however much of a man a book may be to-day, it was once almost certainly a child; its birth occasioned its parent an amount of anguish which the mother who bore you never knew. The great books one reads today almost certainly have had a struggle for existence; for every book that survives, a thousand — ten thousand — fall. It is worth while, then, to examine the survivor carefully and to discover why it has withstood the changes and chances of this wicked world.

II

But to return to my visitors. There was, I fancy, a certain amount of shyness, at first, on the part of all of us; then someone asked a question, and before it was fully answered another was asked, and almost before we knew it the ice was broken, and we all began to have a good time. I never met a more intelligent lot of boys and girls; one lad instantly challenged my attention by asking if I had a first Lyrical Ballads.

To ask such a question is to start something, for this is perhaps the most significant, interesting, and tricky volume of poetry in our literary history, and almost before I knew it I was engaged in telling my interrogator the story of the first issue of this book, which is indeed not unlike that of the Brontë sisters’ Poems, except that in due course it was seen that Lyrical Ballads marked a turning point in English poetry. And I went on to say that when the first issue was brought out by Biggs and Cottle at Bristol, in 1798, its sale was but little larger than the first issue of the Brontë Poems, and that the book, for the copyright of which Cottle had paid Wordsworth thirty guineas, was also in peril of the trunk maker, when he decided to ship it, in ‘quires,’ up to London, where it appeared under the patronage of J. and J. Arch, and very gradually made its way. All this took place in 1798. The first poem in the little volume was the Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, no mention being made of the fact that it was by Coleridge.

Two years later another Lyrical Ballads, in two volumes, with Wordsworth’s name on the title-page, appeared, with a long and elaborate preface in which the author developed his idea of what poetry is and should be. A quick sale is usually synonymous with an early death; a slow, halting sale, like a flickering flame never quite going out but always looking as though it would, may presage a conflagration. But the Lyrical Ballads in two volumes we now know contains some of the finest poetry ever written.

At length comes the bibliophile, the collector, and says to himself, or out loud, ‘I must have a Lyrical Ballads with the Bristol imprint,’ and there you are. How many are there? I don’t know. Mr. T. J. Wise, of London, whose word is law, tells me he knows of six.

I once, many years ago, had a copy offered me for seven hundred and fifty dollars, but I could n’t see it. Harry Widener did, however, and it is now in the Widener Memorial Library at Harvard. Swinburne calls it the Black Tulip of English Literature. What is a copy worth to-day? Who shall say? Five or ten thousand dollars, perhaps; they are unobtainable. A copy with the London imprint is worth five hundred dollars at present and is pointed to ten times the figure. My copy, bound, but uncut, with the errata and the two pages of advertisements, was once dear at five pounds.

All this may be dull going to the reader, but to a student who is reading seriously it is a great delight to hold in his hands the cluster of little volumes which once made such a stir in the world before the theories which they expounded had gained acceptance. While I was endeavoring to make this, or something like this, clear, I could see a girl who was eagerly awaiting a pause to break in with a question: had I a copy of Blake’s Poetical Sketches, and was it not published earlier, and did he not anticipate Wordsworth in his breaking with the school of Pope?

‘Yes, to all your questions,’ was the reply. ‘Here is the Poetical Sketches, 1783. But Blake was a shooting star whose light went out. Wordsworth founded a school: his influence continues right down to the present. Matthew Arnold, who is only now taking his proper place as a poet, was especially influenced by him. . . . Yes, I think Arnold’s sonnet to Shakespeare very fine: I don’t know that it shows the influence of Wordsworth especially, but it is magnificent. . . .

‘It is almost an impertinence to praise Shakespeare. . . . Yes, I have visited Nether Stowey, and a more sordid, miserable town I have seldom seen. . . . Coleridge does not interest me much: I was early set against him by an essay in Augustine Birrell’s Obiter Dicta. Let me read you a bit out of the volume I bought in 1885 and have read many times since: —

‘Speaking of his [Lamb’s] sister Mary, who, as everyone knows, throughout “ Elia ” is called his Cousin Bridget, he says: “It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener, perhaps, than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine freethinkers, leaders and disciples of novel philosophies and systems, but she neither wrangles with nor accepts their opinions.” Nor did her brother. He lived his life cracking his little jokes and reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the opinions of the friends he loved to see around him. To a contemporary stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers. They discussed their great schemes and affected to probe deep mysteries, and were constantly asking, “What is Truth?” He sipped his glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with the humbler inquiry, “What are Trumps?” But to us, looking back upon that little group, and knowing what we now do about each member of it, no such mistake is possible. To us it is plain beyond all question that, judged by whatever standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the churches — with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “logician, metaphysician, bard.”

‘There are some men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of them. How gladly we would love the author of “Christabel" if we could! But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. . . . In early manhood Coleridge planned a Pantisocracy where all the virtues were to thrive. Lamb did something far more difficult: he played cribbage every night with his imbecile father, whose constant stream of querulous talk and faultfinding might well have goaded a far stronger man into practising and justifying neglect. . . . Coleridge married. Lamb, at the bidding of duty, remained single, wedding himself to the sad fortune of his father and sister. Shall we pity him? No; he had his reward — the surpassing reward that is only within the power of literature to bestow. It was Lamb, and not Coleridge, who wrote “Dream Children : A Reverie.” ’

III

That was a long quotation, but it served to introduce one of my most valued possessions: the original manuscript of ‘Dream Children.’ It was written on India House paper, when Charles Lamb should have been busying himself with the price of ivory and indigo and such matters. If one holds the manuscript of ‘Dream Children’ against the light, it is seen that Lamb originally called it ‘My Children,’ and then, recognizing that a bachelor should not have children, he erased this title and with his unerring taste called his essay ‘Dream Children.’ I think the last paragraph of ‘Dream Children ’ ties with Sterne’s recording-angel paragraph in Tristram Shandy as the finest bit of prose in the language, and I feel sure that Professor Winchester, that admirable critic, would have agreed with me. ‘ Tristram Shandy? Yes, and a great book it is: first edition, in nine volumes in red levant, there.’

Then I went on to say that I little thought, forty-five years ago, that one day I should call Augustine Birrell a personal friend. Yes, I know him very well; he is a crusty old bookman, but I hope some day to be a crusty old bookman myself. I wish I might hope to be in Birrell’s class. His advice about books is always good: ‘If one reads for any better purpose than to waste time, the great thing is to keep pegging away at masterpieces in cheap editions.’ I had a letter from him only a few days ago, in which, speaking of Dickens, he said, ‘My love for him burns as brightly as ever.’

Bless his heart, Birrell is now in his eighty-second year and is a good deal of a prisoner in his home in Chelsea and seldom leaves his house. He is a fellow trustee of the Johnson House in Gough Square, and used to be one of the best after-dinner speakers in London, full of grit, wisdom, and wit, with the grit first.

‘My Johnsons are over there under the portrait, quite a row of ’em. . . . No, I do not pretend to understand Blake’s Prophetic Books and I mistrust the man who says he does. . . . Moby Dick? Now you are talking. That is our one great contribution to literature. I have the English edition in three volumes, which was published in London in 1851, and the New York edition in one, published the same year. It is said that the three-volume edition is shorter than the one-volume edition. It would be interesting to compare the differences between the two texts and discover what, if anything, is omitted. But Moby Dick, any edition, English or American, is not one book, but two: there is the book which you may read at a glance and a book written between the lines, as it were, a book as psychical and as mystical as if it had been written by Swedenborg, whose disciple, in a sense, its author surely was. Melville was a genius and, like most great geniuses, was neglected in his lifetime. He was only a little more than thirty years of age when he wrote the book by which he will always be remembered. With its publication, he practically ceased to exist, for, while he lived in New York until 1891, he did nothing important—his candle went out, but not until he had illuminated with it the paths of countless other men. Everyone who has written of the sea since Herman Melville’s time is indebted to him. . . . My Pickwick Papers? I have two Pickwicks, also: one too good to show and one just good enough. . . . Paradise Lost? Yes, in the vault in the other room, and a Comus, too. . . . No, I have no Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; it’s an eight-thousand-pound book. Yes, Dr. Rosenbach has one, and my friend Sir Leicester Harmsworth has two. My ambition has been to get a copy of the first issue of every great, superlatively great book in English literature. No, I have not achieved it — who does? And my progress is now very slow. Understand rightly the terms which we are using. Gray’s Elegy is a great poem, but not very rare. Congreve’s Incognita is excessively rare, but not very great. The Pilgrim’s Progress is not only very great, but it is excessively rare. . . . My favorite novelist? Dickens, in spots, but for steady reading, Trollope. My favorite novel? Well, that depends on the weather.’

And so it went on for several hours, first one question, then another, light and heavy, like the dissimilar objects which the great Cinquevalli used to keep tossing into the air and catching again just as they were about to fall on the floor. ‘You don’t remember him. How should you? He’s been dead for years. He was the idol of the London music halls, and his great stunt was to keep three objects in the air at the same time, tossing them from hand to hand: a cannon ball, an egg, and a lighted lamp. At the end of his turn, the egg fell into the lamp and put it out, and the cannon ball fell to the floor with a thud. He was a great artist, and a gentleman — an Austrian.’

Then I went over to where Spiller was regarding my mental acrobatics with some amusement, and said: ‘You can afford to smile! You are highly paid (hear! hear!) for answering such questions; I’m doing it for fun. How on earth did you arouse in these young people such an interest in books?’

And then he let me into the secret : now comes the pith of this paper.

It appears that several years ago a gentleman, now dead, conceived the idea of giving to Swarthmore College a small sum of money each year to be awarded as a prize to the student, man or woman, who during his or her term at college formed the best collection of books. It was not, originally, thought to be a matter of much importance, and the rules laid down for the selection of the winner were not too rigid. Someone in authority appointed a committee of three to make an award of fifty dollars to the student, either junior or senior, who during his college term had built up the best personal library.

At the death of the originator of the award, it was found that no provision had been made for carrying on the idea and it was feared that the present year would be the last in which the prize would be awarded. Immediately it struck me that here was a way in which I might do much good with little money, as Benjamin Franklin sometimes did with a scheme of his invention. He once wrote a friend: ‘I have invented a scheme by which much good may be done with little. When a man seeks to borrow money from me, as many do, I lend it if I can. With the money I send a note in which I say, “I do not pretend to give you this sum. I only lend it to you. I hope that in lime you will be enabled to pay your debts. In that case, when you meet with another honest man in similar distress, you must pay me by lending this sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the debt by a like operation, when he shall be able to pay and shall meet with such another opportunity. I hope the money may thus go through many hands before it meets with a knave that will stop its progress.” This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money. I am not rich enough to afford much in good works, and so am obliged to be cunning and to make the most of a little.’ One can hardly improve upon any scheme of Franklin’s, but this Swarthmore idea, as I called it, appealed to me as I talked it over with Spiller; so I then and there offered to carry on the plan, taking care that the scheme should not lapse at my death. President Aydelotte was made acquainted with my offer and graciously accepted it.

The idea of making the award permanent seemed to make it advisable to formulate a set of rules. With these I wished to have nothing to do, for I am, personally, an unruly fellow; it seemed, however, necessary to consider some standards to which those entering the competition might be referred, and the following ideas were suggested by those having the matter in charge:—

That the award should be made annually to the student who, during an agreed-upon term,

(а) Had formed the best, not the largest, collection of books in one or more departments in which the student was specializing, be it literature, chemistry, engineering, etc., etc.;

(b) Had given evidence, by the selection and care of his books, of his appreciation of the joy of ownership (it was recognized that few, if any, students can, while at college, afford the luxury of first editions, but welledited editions printed by responsible publishers are always to be preferred to showy books made to sell rather than to be read);

(c) Could pass reasonably well an oral examination upon his library and knew why the edition he had selected was to be preferred to some other.

IV

It would not be worth my while, even if I were able, to attempt to make a set of rules which would be acceptable without alteration to this institution or to that. But, as Jeff says to Mutt, ’I maintain the idea is clever’ and can be made of great, and lasting benefit and delight to those who in the formative years of their life learn the joy of having a collection of books in a room of one’s own. And there is no college so poor as not to have a man, or group of men, who will give every year fifty or a hundred dollars for the purpose indicated; and the idea can be developed indefinitely and to immense usefulness. God forbid that I should say a word against a public library, but nothing will take the place of a rack or a shelf full of books by one’s own chair, close to a well-adjusted light, whether it be a lamp or a window. Everyone’s shelf will contain different books, and the books which give one joy as a boy may not delight a man, but the pleasure of reading continues. If we live in a vale of tears, it behooves us to make the best of it. The habit of reading, firmly established, enables one to endure, if need be, misfortune and even disgrace. I see to-day greater anxiety written on the faces of my millionaire friends than I do on the faces of the poor men who resort day after day to our public libraries, there to solace themselves with a book. In an established love of reading there is a policy of insurance guaranteeing certain happiness till death. I would assist, as far as I can, in the issuing of such an insurance policy.

The afternoon was drawing to a close; I was tired, but my visitors were inexhaustible. I asked someone — I have forgotten who — to send me an essay he had written on the subject of the award, which subsequently I read with pleasure and with increased belief in the plan, which I regret is not original with me. I agreed to visit Swarthmore and make the next award; I did so, and had no difficulty out of sixteen entries in selecting the best. It was the ‘library’ of William H. Cleveland, the young fellow who had questioned me upon Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. If he had any first or scarce editions, I did not see them. There were no sets, but a better-selected lot of books — poetry, essays, fiction, and biography — I never saw. In many of the books a special index of ideas rather than of names had been made on the blank leaves at the end, supplemented with a few extra sheets, very much such an index as I make of my reading, except that my lists are always in a mess and are largely unintelligible, whereas his were alphabetically arranged and neatness itself.

In these days it is not necessary for a man to spend much money upon the purchase of a representative collection of books. While it is a pleasant thing to have many and fine books, it is by no means necessary, for, as Voltaire said, ‘it is with books as with men — a very small number play a very great part.’ The great publishing houses vie with one another in bringing out ‘libraries’ of books which have the merit of being clearly printed, on good paper, well bound, and of a size which may be easily held in the hand and carried in one’s pocket. What could be better, and cheaper, than the volumes in the Everyman’s Library of Messrs. Dent, or the World’s Classics issued by the Oxford University Press, to mention only two out of the many ‘ libraries ’ which have very largely taken the place of the old ‘Bohn books’ which were popular when I was a lad? Carlyle suggests, somewhere, that the main use of college training is to teach one to read, ‘the true university being a collection of books.’ A hundred great books, or half that number, may well supply one with the intellectual stimulation, and recreation, of a lifetime. We have been told that no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures. Quite so; and a man may so train himself that his pleasure may be had from reading the best books. I know whereof I speak.

It would be a pleasant thing to compile a list of one hundred great books which nobody reads to-day. This is not to suggest that they are useless, by any means; it means simply that they have done their work, that they have been ‘chewed and digested,’ in Bacon’s phrase, and have unconsciously become a part of us, and we, without our knowing it, have become a part of them. Lewis Hind, a few years ago, published a book in London in which he showed that by the expenditure of only twelve pounds one could buy one hundred of the world’s best books. His list would not be my list, nor would my list be his, but almost any list is a good list provided it is selected honestly.

Shortly after my experience with my young college friends, I sat next to an important New York publisher at dinner and I talked to him about the Swarthmore scheme, as I called it. He was strong for it, wanted me to write a little book about it which he said he would publish, but I wanted a wider spreading of the idea. It is for that reason that I send this paper to the Atlantic. That a publisher would be taken by the idea is not remarkable: the number of book buyers would be increased by the general acceptance of the scheme. Publishers have to think of sales. But I am not a publisher; I am thinking only of the pleasure with which a man in after years will point to the collection of books made when he was a student at college. ’Those books,’ he may say, ‘established in me the love of reading, and the love of reading has been the joy and solace of my life.’

V

And so this paper is, in a way, an advertisement, — an advertisement of an idea, — and any skillful advertising man will tell you that, provided the idea is good, it is just as easy to advertise an idea as it is to advertise a hat or a pair of shoes. And the thoughtful reader is asked to answer — to himself — whether the idea of which I have told is good or no. I repeat that it is not mine; I am — to use a modern phrase — merely selling it.

In the year 1759, Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote in one of his at present almost neglected Idlers: ‘The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement.’ And Dr, Johnson knew something of the ‘trade’ of advertising, which we now, and properly, call an ‘art.’ His pen was ever in request for a dedication or an introduction to some book or other, without which it was supposed that its sale would be less. But of the art of the advertiser as we know it, he, of course, had no inkling. To carry on one’s business ‘in the same manner that my father did at the Sign of the Dial, opposite the Bolt and Tun Inn in Fleet Street,’ was, in Dr. Johnson’s day, to suggest that ‘it is not easy to propose any improvement.’ To-day, such a method would spell RUIN. I hope I have advertised a good idea neatly. In any event, Swarthmore College is committed to it, and that, in the minds of the judicious, is a guarantee of its excellence.