The Book-Hunter
"treatment." In Owen's parallelograms there were to be no prisons: he
admitted no power in one man to inflict punishment upon another for
merely obeying the dictates of natural propensities which could not be
resisted. But, at the same time, there were to be "hospitals" in which
not only the physically diseased, but also the mentally and _morally_
diseased, were to be detained until they were cured; and when we reflect
that the laws of the parallelogram were very stringent and minute, and
required to be absolutely enforced to the letter, otherwise the whole
machinery of society would come to pieces, like a watch with a broken
spring,--it is clear that these hospitals would have contained a very
large proportion of the unrationalised population.
There is rather an alarming amount of this sort of communism now among
us, and it is therefore with some little misgiving that one sets down
anything that may betray a brother's weakness, and lay bare the
diagnosis of a human frailty. Indeed, the bad name that proverbially
hangs the dog has already been given to the one under consideration, for
bibliomania is older in the technology of this kind of nosology than
dipsomania, which is now understood to be an almost established ground
for seclusion, and deprivation of the management of one's own affairs.
There is one ground of consolation, however,--the people who, being all
right themselves, have undertaken the duty of keeping in order the rest
of the world, have far too serious a task in hand to afford time for
idle reading. There is a good chance, therefore, that this little book
may pass them unnoticed, and the harmless class, on whose peculiar
frailties the present occasion is taken for devoting a gentle and kindly
exposition, may yet be permitted to go at large.
So having spoken, I now propose to make the reader acquainted with some
characteristic specimens of the class.
A Vision of Mighty Book-Hunters.
As the first case, let us summon from the shades my venerable friend
Archdeacon Meadow, as he was in the body. You see him now--tall,
straight, and meagre, but with a grim dignity in his air which warms
into benignity as he inspects a pretty little clean Elzevir, or a tall
portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a
peculiar grunting chuckle, known by the initiated to be an important
announcement. This is no doubt one of the milder and more inoffensive
types, but still a thoroughly confirmed and obstinate case. Its parallel
to the classes who are to be taken charge of by their wiser neighbours
is only too close and awful; for have not sometimes the female members
of his household been known on occasion of some domestic emergency--or,
it may be, for mere sake of keeping the lost man out of mischief--to
have been searching for him on from bookstall unto bookstall, just as
the mothers, wives, and daughters of other lost men hunt them through
their favourite taverns or gambling-houses? Then, again, can one forget
that occasion of his going to London to be examined by a committee of
the House of Commons, when he suddenly disappeared with all his money in
his pocket, and returned penniless, followed by a waggon containing 372
copies of rare editions of the Bible? All were fish that came to his
net. At one time you might find him securing a minnow for sixpence at a
stall--and presently afterwards he outbids some princely collector, and
secures with frantic impetuosity, "at any price," a great fish he has
been patiently watching year after year. His hunting-grounds were wide
and distant, and there were mysterious rumours about the numbers of
copies, all identically the same in edition and minor individualities,
which he possessed of certain books. I have known him, indeed, when
beaten at an auction, turn round resignedly and say, "Well, so be
it--but I daresay I have ten or twelve copies at home, if I could lay
hands on them."
It is a matter of extreme anxiety to his friends, and, if he have a
well-constituted mind, of sad misgiving to himself, when the collector
buys his first _duplicate_. It is like the first secret dram swallowed
in the forenoon--the first pawning of the silver spoons--or any other
terrible first step downwards you may please to liken it to. There is no
hope for the patient after this. It rends at once the veil of decorum
spun out of the flimsy sophisms by which he has been deceiving his
friends, and partially deceiving himself, into the belief that his
previous purchases were necessary, or, at all events, serviceable for
professional and literary purposes. He now becomes shameless and
hardened; and it is observable in the career of this class of
unfortunates, that the first act of duplicity is immediately followed by
an access of the disorder, and a reckless abandonment to its
propensities. The Archdeacon had long passed this stage ere he crossed
my path, and had become thoroughly hardened. He was not remarkable for
local attachment; and in moving from place to place, his spoil, packed
in innumerable great boxes, sometimes followed him, to remain unreleased
during the whole period of his tarrying in his new abode, so that they
were removed to the next stage of his journey through life with modified
inconvenience.
Cruel as it may seem, I must yet notice another and a peculiar vagary of
his malady. He had resolved, at least once in his life, to part with a
considerable proportion of his collection--better to suffer the anguish
of such an act than endure the fretting of continued restraint. There
was a wondrous sale by auction accordingly; it was something like what
may have occurred on the dissolution of the monasteries at the
Reformation, or when the contents of some time-honoured public library
were realised at the period of the French Revolution. Before the affair
was over, the Archdeacon himself made his appearance in the midst of the
miscellaneous self-invited guests who were making free with his
treasures,--he pretended, honest man, to be a mere casual spectator,
who, having seen, in passing, the announcement of a sale by auction,
stepped in like the rest of the public. By degrees he got excited,
gasped once or twice as if mastering some desperate impulse, and at
length fairly bade. He could not brazen out the effect of this escapade,
however, and disappeared from the scene. It was remarked by the
observant, that an unusual number of lots were afterwards knocked down
to a military gentleman, who seemed to have left portentously large
orders with the auctioneer. Some curious suspicions began to arise,
which were settled by that presiding genius bending over his rostrum,
and explaining in a confidential whisper that the military hero was in
reality a pillar of the Church so disguised.
The Archdeacon lay under what, among a portion of the victims of his
malady, was deemed a heavy scandal. He was suspected of reading his own
books--that is to say, when he could get at them; for there are those
who may still remember his rather shamefaced apparition of an evening,
petitioning, somewhat in the tone with which an old schoolfellow down in
the world requests your assistance to help him to go to York to get an
appointment--petitioning for the loan of a volume of which he could not
deny that he possessed numberless copies lurking in divers parts of his
vast collection. This reputation of reading the books in his collection,
which should be sacred to external inspection solely, is, with a certain
school of book-collectors, a scandal, such as it would be among a
hunting set to hint that a man had killed a fox. In the dialogues, not
always the most entertaining, of Dibdin's Bibliomania, there is this
short passage: "'I will frankly confess,' rejoined Lysander, 'that I am
an arrant _bibliomaniac_--that I love books dearly--that the very sight,
touch, and mere perusal----' 'Hold, my friend,' again exclaimed
Philemon; 'you have renounced your profession--you talk of _reading_
books--do _bibliomaniacs_ ever _read_ books?'"
Yes, the Archdeacon read books--he devoured them; and he did so to full
prolific purpose. His was a mind enriched with varied learning, which he
gave forth with full, strong, easy flow, like an inexhaustible perennial
spring coming from inner reservoirs, never dry, yet too capacious to
exhibit the brawling, bubbling symptoms of repletion. It was from a
majestic heedlessness of the busy world and its fame that he got the
character of indolence, and was set down as one who would leave no
lasting memorial of his great learning. But when he died, it was not
altogether without leaving a sign; for from the casual droppings of his
pen has been preserved enough to signify to many generations of students
in the walk he chiefly affected how richly his mind was stored, and how
much fresh matter there is in those fields of inquiry where compilers
have left their dreary tracks, for ardent students to cultivate into a
rich harvest. In him truly the bibliomania may be counted among the many
illustrations of the truth so often moralised on, that the highest
natures are not exempt from human frailty in some shape or other.
Let us now summon the shade of another departed victim--Fitzpatrick
Smart, Esq. He, too, through a long life, had been a vigilant and
enthusiastic collector, but after a totally different fashion. He was
far from omnivorous. He had a principle of selection peculiar and
separate from all other's, as was his own individuality from other
men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the
accepted nomenclatures peculiar to the initiated. He was not a
black-letter man, or a tall copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge
man, or an early-English-dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider,
or a pasquinader, or an old-brown-calf man, or a Grangerite, or a
tawny-moroccoite, or a gilt-topper, a marbled-insider, or an _editio
princeps_ man; neither did he come under any of the more vulgar
classifications of collectors whose thoughts run more upon the
usefulness for study than upon the external conditions of their library,
such as those who affect science, or the classics, or English poetic and
historical literature. There was no way of defining his peculiar walk
save by his own name--it was the Fitzpatrick-Smart walk. In fact, it
wound itself in infinite windings through isolated spots of literary
scenery, if we may so speak, in which he took a personal interest. There
were historical events, bits of family history, chiefly of a tragic or a
scandalous kind,--efforts of art or of literary genius on which, through
some hidden intellectual law, his mind and memory loved to dwell; and it
was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one
desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged
for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it
might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or
costly as it could be.
It was difficult, almost impossible, for others to predicate what would
please this wayward sort of taste, and he was the torment of the
book-caterers, who were sure of a princely price for the right article,
but might have the wrong one thrown in their teeth with contumely. It
was a perilous, but, if successful, a gratifying thing to present him
with a book. If it happened to hit his fancy, he felt the full force of
the compliment, and overwhelmed the giver with his courtly thanks. But
great observation and tact were required for such an adventure. The
chances against an ordinary thoughtless gift-maker were thousands to
one; and those who were acquainted with his strange nervous temperament,
knew that the existence within his dwelling-place of any book not of his
own special kind, would impart to him the sort of feeling of uneasy