The Book-Hunter
But here follows, on the same authority, a more wonderful performance
still. "The famous Bourdaloue reperused every year St Paul, St
Chrysostom, and Cicero."[37] The sacred author makes but a slight
addition to the bulk, but the works of St Chrysostom are entombed in
eleven folios. Bourdaloue died at the age of seventy-two; and if he
began his task at the age of twenty-two, he must have done it over fifty
times. It requires nerves of more than ordinary strength to contemplate
such a statement with equanimity. The tortures of the classic Hades, and
the disgusting inflictions courted by the anchorites of old, and the
Brahmins of later times, do not approach the horrors of such an act of
self-torture.
[Footnote 37: Curiosities of Literature, iii. 339.]
Of course any one ambitious of enlightening the world on either the
political or the literary history of Rome at the commencement of the
empire, must be as thoroughly acquainted with every word of Cicero as
the writer of the Times leader on a critical debate is with the
newly-delivered speeches. The more fortunate vagabond reader, too,
lounging about among the Letters, will open many little veins of curious
contemporary history and biography, which he can follow up in Tacitus,
Sallust, Caesar, and the contemporary poets. Both are utterly different
from the stated-task reader, who has come under a vow to work so many
hours or get through so many pages in a given time. _They_ are drawn by
their occupation, whether work or play; _he_ drives himself to his. All
such work is infliction, varying from the highest point of martyrdom
down to tasteless drudgery; and it is as profitless as other
supererogatory inflictions, since the task-reader comes to look at his
words without following out what they suggest, or even absorbing their
grammatical sense, much as the stupid ascetics of old went through their
penitential readings, or as their representatives of the present day,
chiefly of the female sex, read "screeds of good books," which they have
not "the presumption" to understand. The literary Bohemian is sometimes
to be pitied when his facility of character exposes him to have a
modification of this infliction forced upon him. This will occur when he
happens to be living in a house frequented by "a good reader," who
solemnly devotes certain hours to the reading of passages from the
English or French classics for the benefit of the company, and becomes
the mortal enemy of every guest who absents himself from the torturing
performance.
As to collectors, it is quite true that they do not in general read
their books successively straight through, and the practice of desultory
reading, as it is sometimes termed, must be treated as part of their
case, and if a failing, one cognate with their habit of collecting. They
are notoriously addicted to the practice of standing arrested on some
round of a ladder, where, having mounted up for some certain book, they
have by wayward chance fallen upon another, in which, at the first
opening, has come up a passage which fascinates the finder as the eye of
the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding-guest, and compels him to
stand there poised on his uneasy perch and read. Peradventure the matter
so perused suggests another passage in some other volume which it will
be satisfactory and interesting to find, and so another and another
search is made, while the hours pass by unnoticed, and the day seems all
too short for the pursuit which is a luxury and an enjoyment, at the
same time that it fills the mind with varied knowledge and wisdom.
The fact is that the book-hunter, if he be genuine, and have his heart
in his pursuit, is also a reader and a scholar. Though he may be more or
less peculiar, and even eccentric, in his style of reading, there is a
necessary intellectual thread of connection running through the objects
of his search which predicates some acquaintance with the contents of
the accumulating volumes. Even although he profess a devotion to mere
external features--the style of binding, the cut or uncut leaves, the
presence or the absence of the gilding--yet the department in
literature holds more or less connection with this outward sign. He who
has a passion for old editions of the classics in vellum
bindings--Stephenses or Aldines--will not be put off with a copy of
Robinson Crusoe or the Ready Reckoner, bound to match and range with the
contents of his shelves. Those who so vehemently affect some external
peculiarity are the eccentric exceptions; yet even they have some
consideration for the contents of a book as well as for its coat.
The Collector and the Scholar.
Either the possession, or, in some other shape, access to a far larger
collection of books than can be read through in a lifetime, is in fact
an absolute condition of intellectual culture and expansion. The library
is the great intellectual stratification in which the literary
investigator works--examining its external features, or perhaps driving
a shaft through its various layers--passing over this stratum as not
immediate to his purpose, examining that other with the minute attention
of microscopic investigation. The geologist, the botanist, and the
zoologist, are not content to receive one specimen after another into
their homes, to be thoroughly and separately examined, each in
succession, as novel-readers go through the volumes of a circulating
library at twopence a-night--they have all the world of nature before
them, and examine as their scientific instincts or their fancies
suggest. For all inquirers, like pointers, have a sort of instinct,
sharpened by training and practice, the power and acuteness of which
astonish the unlearned. "Reading with the fingers," as Basnage said of
Bayle--turning the pages rapidly over and alighting on the exact spot
where the thing wanted is to be found--is far from a superficial
faculty, as some deem it to be,--it is the thoroughest test of active
scholarship. It was what enabled Bayle to collect so many flowers of
literature, all so interesting, and yet all found in corners so distant
and obscure.
In fact, there are subtle dexterities, acquired by sagacious experience
in searching for valuable little trinkets in great libraries, just as in
other pursuits. A great deal of that appearance of dry drudgery which
excites the pitying amazement of the bystander is nimbly evaded. People
acquire a sort of instinct, picking the valuables out of the useless
verbiage, or the passages repeated from former authors. It is soon found
what a great deal of literature has been the mere "pouring out of one
bottle into another," as the Anatomist of melancholy terms it. There are
those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the
canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into
rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations. Compared with these,
all the intellectual efforts of our recent degenerate days seem the work
of pigmies; and for any of us even to profess to read all that some of
those indomitable giants wrote, would seem an audacious undertaking.
But, in fact, they were to a great extent solemn shams, since the bulk
of their work was merely that of the clerk who copies page after page
from other people's writings.
Surely these laborious old writers exhibited in this matter the
perfection of literary modesty. Far from secretly pilfering, like the
modern plagiarist, it was their great boast that they themselves had not
suggested the great thought or struck out the brilliant metaphor, but
that it had been done by some one of old, and was found in its
legitimate place--a book. I believe that if one of these laborious
persons hatched a good idea of his own, he could experience no peace of
mind until he found it legitimated by having passed through an earlier
brain, and that the author who failed thus to establish a paternity for
his thought would sometimes audaciously set down some great name in his
crowded margin, in the hope that the imposition might pass undiscovered.
Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in
literature. First come Aristotle and Plato, with the other great
classical ancients; next the primitive fathers; then Abailard, Erigena,
Peter Lombard, Ramus, Major, and the like. If the matter be
jurisprudence, we shall have Marcianus, Papinianus, Ulpianus,
Hermogenianus, and Tryphonius to begin with; and shall then pass through
the straits of Bartolus and Baldus, on to Zuichemus, Sanchez,
Brissonius, Ritterhusius, and Gothofridus. If all these say the same
thing, each of the others copying it from the first who uttered it, so
much the more valuable to the literary world is deemed the idea that has
been so amply backed--it is like a vote by a great majority, or a
strongly-signed petition. There is only one quarter in which this
practice appears to be followed at the present day--the composition, or
the compilation, as it may better be termed, of English law-books.
Having selected a department to be expounded, the first point is to set
down all that Coke said about it two centuries and a half ago, and all
that Blackstone said about it a century ago, with passages in due
subordination from inferior authorities. To these are added the rubrics
of some later cases, and a title-page and index, and so a new
"authority" is added to the array on the shelves of the practitioner.
Whoever is well up to such repetitions has many short cuts through
literature to enable him to find the scattered originalities of which he
may be in search. Whether he be the enthusiastic investigator resolved
on exhausting any great question, or be a mere wayward potterer, picking
up curiosities by the way for his own private intellectual museum, the
larger the collection at his disposal the better--it cannot be too
great.[38] No one, therefore, can be an ardent follower of such a
pursuit without having his own library. And yet it is probably among
those whose stock is the largest that we shall find the most frequent
visitors to the British Museum and the State Paper Office; perhaps, for
what cannot be found even there, to the Imperial Library at Paris, or
the collections of some of the German universities.
[Footnote 38: I am quite aware that the authorities to the contrary are
so high as to make these sentiments partake of heresy, if not a sort of
classical profanity.
"Studiorum quoque, quae liberalissima impensa est, tamdiu rationem habet,
quamdiu modum. Quo innumerabiles libros et bibliothecas, quarum dominus
vix tota vita indices perlegit? Onerat discentem turba, non instruit:
multoque satius est paucis te auctoribus tradere, quam errare per
multos. Quadraginta millia librorum Alexandrae arserunt: pulcherrimum
regiae opulentiae monumentum alius laudaverit, sicut et Livius, qui
elegantiae regum curaeque egregium id opus ait fuisse. Non fuit elegantia
illud aut cura, sed studiosa luxuria. Immo ne studiosa quidem: quoniam
non in studium, sed in spectaculum comparaverant: sicut plerisque,
ignaris etiam servilium literarum libri non studiorum instrumenta, sed
coenationum ornamenta sunt. Paretur itaque librorum quantum satis sit,
nihil in apparatum. Honestius, inquis, hoc te impensae, quam in Corinthia
pictasque tabulas effuderint. Vitiosum est ubique, quod nimium est. Quid
habes, cur ignoscas homini armaria citro atque ebore captanti, corpora
conquirenti aut ignotorum auctorum aut improbatorum, et inter tot millia
librorum oscitanti, cui voluminum suorum frontes maxime placent
titulique? Apud desidiosissimos ergo videbis quicquid orationum
historiarumque est, tecto tenus exstructa loculamenta; jam enim inter
balnearia et thermas bibliotheca quoque ut necessarium domus ornamentum
expolitur. Ignoscerem plane, si studiorum nimia cupidine oriretur: nunc