The Book-Hunter
not midnight wanderings and musings made him familiar with all its
intricacies? Roofed by a huge wideawake, which makes his tiny figure
look like the stalk of some great fungus, with a lantern of more than
common dimensions in his hand, away he goes down the wooded path, up the
steep bank, along the brawling stream, and across the waterfall--and
ever as he goes there comes from him a continued stream of talk
concerning the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and other kindred matters.
Surely if we two were seen by any human eyes, it must have been supposed
that some gnome, or troll, or kelpie was luring the listener to his
doom. The worst of such affairs as this was the consciousness that, when
left, the old man would continue walking on until, weariness overcoming
him, he would take his rest, wherever that happened, like some poor
mendicant. He used to denounce, with his most fervent eloquence, that
barbarous and brutal provision of the law of England which rendered
sleeping in the open air an act of vagrancy, and so punishable, if the
sleeper could not give a satisfactory account of himself--a thing which
Papaverius never could give under any circumstances. After all, I fear
this is an attempt to describe the indescribable. It was the commonest
of sayings when any of his friends were mentioning to each other "his
last," and creating mutual shrugs of astonishment, that, were one to
attempt to tell all about him, no man would believe it, so separate
would the whole be from all the normal conditions of human nature.
The difficulty becomes more inextricable in passing from specific little
incidents to an estimation of the general nature of the man. The
logicians lucidly describe definition as being _per genus et
differentiam_. You have the characteristics in which all of the _genus_
partake as common ground, and then you individualise your object by
showing in what it differs from the others of the genus. But we are
denied this standard for Papaverius, so entirely did he stand apart,
divested of the ordinary characteristics of social man--of those
characteristics without which the human race as a body could not get on
or exist. For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a
loose man in money matters; those who knew him closer laughed at the
idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility
with his nature. You might as well attack the character of the
nightingale, which may have nipped up your five-pound note and torn it
to shreds to serve as nest-building material. Only immediate craving
necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common
vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civilised society; and only
while the necessity lasted did the acknowledgment exist. Take just one
example, which will render this clearer than any generalities. He
arrives very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission--a
process in which he often endured impediments--he represents, with his
usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his
being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of
the realm--the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which
he very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or
fancying he discovers, signs that his eloquence is likely to be
unproductive, he is fortunately reminded that, should there be any
difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he
is at that moment in possession of a document, which he is prepared to
deposit with the lender--a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to
remove any feeling of anxiety which the most prudent person could
experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which
develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable
possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled
bit of paper, and spreads it out--a fifty-pound bank-note! The friend,
who knew him well, was of opinion that, had he, on delivering over the
seven shillings and sixpence, received the bank-note, he never would
have heard anything more of the transaction from the other party. It was
also his opinion that, before coming to a personal friend, the owner of
the note had made several efforts to raise money on it among persons who
might take a purely business view of such transactions; but the lateness
of the hour, and something in the appearance of the thing altogether,
had induced these mercenaries to forget their cunning, and decline the
transaction.
He stretched till it broke the proverb that to give quickly is as good
as to give twice. His giving was quick enough on the rare occasions when
he had wherewithal to give, but then the act was final, and could not
be repeated. If he suffered in his own person from this peculiarity, he
suffered still more in his sympathies, for he was full of them to all
breathing creatures, and, like poor Goldy, it was agony to him to hear
the beggar's cry of distress, and to hear it without the means of
assuaging it, though in a departed fifty pounds there were doubtless the
elements for appeasing many a street wail. All sums of money were
measured by him through the common standard of immediate use; and with
more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note, might he
inform you that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had hitherto
been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be nearest to him at the
time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in
negotiating a loan of "twopence." He was and is a great authority in
political economy. I have known great anatomists and physiologists as
careless of their health as he was of his purse, whence I have inferred
that something more than a knowledge of the abstract truth of political
economy is necessary to keep some men from pecuniary imprudence, and
that something more than a knowledge of the received principles of
physiology is necessary to bring others into a course of perfect
sobriety and general obedience to the laws of health. Further,
Papaverius had an extraordinary insight into practical human life; not
merely in the abstract, but in the concrete; not merely as a philosopher
of human nature, but as one who saw into those who passed him in the
walk of life with the kind of intuition attributed to expert
detectives--a faculty that is known to have belonged to more than one
dreamer, and is one of the mysteries in the nature of J.J. Rousseau;
and, by the way, like Rousseau's, his handwriting was clear, angular,
and unimpassioned, and not less uniform and legible than printing--as if
the medium of conveying so noble a thing as thought ought to be
carefully, symmetrically, and decorously constructed, let all other
material things be as neglectfully and scornfully dealt with as may be.
This is a long proemium to the description of his characteristics as a
book-hunter--but these can be briefly told. Not for him were the common
enjoyments and excitements of the pursuit. He cared not to add volume
unto volume, and heap up the relics of the printing-press. All the
external niceties about pet editions, peculiarities of binding or of
printing, rarity itself, were no more to him than to the Arab or the
Hottentot. His pursuit, indeed, was like that of the savage who seeks
but to appease the hunger of the moment. If he catch a prey just
sufficient for his desires, it is well; yet he will not hesitate to
bring down the elk or the buffalo, and, satiating himself with the
choicer delicacies, abandon the bulk of the carcass to the wolves or the
vultures. So of Papaverius. If his intellectual appetite were craving
after some passage in the Oedipus, or in the Medeia, or in Plato's
Republic, he would be quite contented with the most tattered and
valueless fragment of the volume, if it contained what he wanted; but,
on the other hand, he would not hesitate to seize upon your tall copy in
russia gilt and tooled. Nor would the exemption of an _editio princeps_
from everyday sordid work restrain his sacrilegious hands. If it should
contain the thing he desires to see, what is to hinder him from
wrenching out the twentieth volume of your Encyclopedie Methodique, or
Ersch und Gruber, leaving a vacancy like an extracted front tooth, and
carrying it off to his den of Cacus? If you should mention the matter to
any vulgar-mannered acquaintance given to the unhallowed practice of
jeering, he would probably touch his nose with his extended palm and
say, "Don't you wish you may get it?" True, the world at large has
gained a brilliant essay on Euripides or Plato--but what is that to the
rightful owner of the lost sheep?
The learned world may very fairly be divided into those who return the
books borrowed by them, and those who do not. Papaverius belonged
decidedly to the latter order. A friend addicted to the marvellous
boasts that, under the pressure of a call by a public library to replace
a mutilated book with a new copy, which would have cost L30, he
recovered a volume from Papaverius, through the agency of a person
specially bribed and authorised to take any necessary measures,
insolence and violence excepted--but the power of extraction that must
have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections.
Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into
the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of
volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the
plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into
certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding
landlady. In other instances the book has been recognised at large,
greatly enhanced in value by a profuse edging of manuscript notes from a
gifted pen--a phenomenon calculated to bring into practical use the
speculations of the civilians about pictures painted on other people's
panels.[27] What became of all his waifs and strays, it might be well
not to inquire too curiously. If he ran short of legitimate _tabula
rasa_ to write on, do you think he would hesitate to tear out the most
convenient leaves of any broad-margined book, whether belonging to
himself or another? Nay, it is said he once gave in copy written on the
edges of a tall octavo Somnium Scipionis; and as he did not obliterate
the original matter, the printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny
jumble between the letterpress Latin and the manuscript English. All
these things were the types of an intellectual vitality which despised
and thrust aside all that was gross or material in that wherewith it
came in contact. Surely never did the austerities of monk or anchorite
so entirely cast all these away as his peculiar nature removed them from
him. It may be questioned if he ever knew what it was "to eat a good
dinner," or could even comprehend the nature of such a felicity. Yet in
all the sensuous nerves which connect as it were the body with the
ideal, he was painfully susceptible. Hence a false quantity or a wrong
note in music was agony to him; and it is remembered with what ludicrous
solemnity he apostrophised his unhappy fate as one over whom a cloud of
the darkest despair had just been drawn--a peacock had come to live
within hearing distance from him, and not only the terrific yells of the
accursed biped pierced him to the soul, but the continued terror of
their recurrence kept his nerves in agonising tension during the
intervals of silence.
[Footnote 27: "Si quis in aliena tabula pinxerit, quidam putant, tabulam
picturae cedere: aliis videtur picturam (qualiscunque sit) tabulae cedere:
sed nobis videtur melius esse tabulam picturae cedere. Ridiculum est enim
picturam Apellis vel Parrhasii in accessionem vilissimae tabulae
cedere."--_Inst._ ii. 1. 34.]