The Book-Hunter
ista conquisita, cum imaginibus suis descripta et sacrorum opera
ingeniorum in speciem et cultum parietum comparantur."--_Seneca_, De
Tranquillitate, c. ix.
There are some good hits here, which would tell at the present day.
Seneca is reported to have had a large library; it is certain that he
possessed and fully enjoyed enormous wealth; and it is amusing to find
this commendation of literary moderation following on a well-known
passage in praise of parsimonious living, and of the good example set by
Diogenes. Modern scepticism about the practical stoicism of the ancients
is surely brought to a climax by a living writer, M. Fournier, who
maintains that the so-called tub of Diogenes was in reality a commodious
little dwelling--neat but not gorgeous. It must be supposed, then, that
he spoke of his tub much as an English country gentleman does of his
"box."]
To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength,
there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings,
the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find
ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or
more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by
the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough
for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more
hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to
be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the
immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however
vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it
will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have
faded away; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it
will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get
over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space
allotted to the life of man.
That the night cometh when no man can work, haunts those who have gone
so far in their investigations, and draws their entire energies into
their pursuit with an exclusiveness which astonishes the rest of the
world. But the energies might be more unfitly directed. Look back, for
instance--no great distance back--on the great high-priest of our
national school of logic and metaphysics,--he who gathered up its divers
rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human
knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could
look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm
compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful
within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human
learning, must have sought it elsewhere. You see in him the nature that
must follow up all inquiries, not by languid solicitation but hot
pursuit. His conquests as he goes are rapid but complete. Summing up the
thousands upon thousands of volumes, upon all matters of human study and
in many languages, which he has passed through his hands, you think he
has merely dipped into them or skimmed them, or in some other shape put
them to superficial use. You are wrong: he has found his way at once to
the very heart of the living matter of each one; between it and him
there are henceforth no secrets.[39]
[Footnote 39: How a nature endowed with powerful impulses like these
might be led along with them into a totally different groove, I am
reminded by a traditionary anecdote of student life. A couple of college
chums are under the impression that their motions are watched by an
inquisitive tutor, who for the occasion may be called Dr Fusby. They
become both exceeding wroth, and the more daring of the two engages on
the first opportunity to "settle the fellow." They are occupied in
ardent colloquy, whether on the predicates or other matters it imports
not, when a sudden pause in the conversation enables them to be aware
that there is a human being breathing close on the other side of the
"oak." The light is extinguished, the door opened, and a terrific blow
from a strong and scientifically levelled fist hurls the listener
down-stairs to the next landing-place, from which resting-place he hears
thundered after him for his information, "If you come back again, you
scoundrel, I'll put you into the hands of Dr Fusby." From that source,
however, no one had much to dread for some considerable period, during
which the Doctor was confined to his bedroom by serious indisposition.
It refreshed the recollection of this anecdote, years after I had heard
it, and many years after the date attributed to it, to have seen a
dignified scholar make what appeared to me an infinitesimally narrow
escape from sharing the fate of Dr Fusby, having indeed just escaped it
by satisfactorily proving to a hasty philosopher that he was not the
party guilty of keeping a certain copy of Occam on the sentences of
Peter Lombard out of his reach.]
Descending, however, from so high a sphere, we shall find that the
collector and the scholar are so closely connected with each other that
it is difficult to draw the line of separation between them. As dynamic
philosophers say, they act and react on each other. The possession of
certain books has made men acquainted with certain pieces of knowledge
which they would not otherwise have acquired. It is, in fact, one of the
amiable weaknesses of the set, to take a luxurious glance at a new
acquisition. It is an outcropping of what remains in the man, of the
affection towards a new toy that flourished in the heart of the boy.
Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his
new-bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken
his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under
observation in the course of my own clinical inquiries into the malady;
but I am not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest
many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far
on in the night. In this incidental manner is a general notion sometimes
formed of the true object and tenor of a book, which is retained in the
mind, stored for use, and capable of being refreshed and strengthened
whenever it is wanted. In the skirmish for the Caxtons, which began the
serious work in the great conflict of the Roxburghe sale, it was
satisfactory to find, as I have already stated, on the authority of the
great historian of the war, that Earl Spencer, the victor, "put each
volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of
victory and consciousness of triumph."[40] Ere next morning he would
know a good deal more about the contents of the volumes than he did
before.
[Footnote 40: The author, from a vitiated reminiscence, at first made
the unpardonable blunder of attributing this touching trait of nature to
the noble purchaser of the Valderfaer Boccaccio. For this, as not only a
mistake, but in some measure an imputation on the tailor who could have
made for his lordship pockets of dimensions so abnormal, I received due
castigation from an eminent practical man in the book-hunting field.]
The Gleaner and his Harvest.
There are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disappointing surprises in
encountering the interiors of books. The title-page is not always a
distinct intimation of what is to follow. Whoever dips into the Novellae
of Leo, or the Extravagantes, as edited by Gothofridus, will not find
either of them to contain matter of a light, airy, and amusing kind.
Dire have been the disappointments incurred by The Diversions of
Purley--one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade
over one of our best story-books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the
late Mrs Johnston. The great scholar, Leo Allatius, who broke his heart
when he lost the special pen with which he wrote during forty years,
published a work called Apes Urbanae--Urban Bees. It is a biographical
work, devoted to the great men who flourished during the Pontificate of
Urban VIII., whose family carried bees on their coat-armorial. The
History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, has sorely perplexed
certain strong-minded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The
book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's
Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search
of the absolutely correct and improving; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish
Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders.
There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called
MacEwen on the Types--a theological book, in fact, treating of the types
of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me
that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an
acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The
latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might
have it and be d----d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a
word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means
rams: but the other competitor also declined the lot; he was a
compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly
devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr
Ruskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing
the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive
influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the
matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of
sheepfolds." I have been informed that this work had a considerable run
among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. I
think I could also point to a public library in England, the keeper of
which justified his high character for classification and arrangement by
binding up this production between "suggestions as to eating off turnips
with stock" and "an inquiry concerning the best materials for smeering."
Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a
department in Bibliography, "Titres de livres qui ont induit en erreur
des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits." After mentioning a
treatise De Missis Dominicis, which was not a religious book, as it
might seem, but an inquiry into the functions of certain officers sent
into the provinces by the emperors and the early kings of France, he
comes nearer to our own door in telling how "un ignorant avait place le
_Traite des Fluxions de Maclaurin_ avec les livres de pathologie,
prenant pour une maladie les fluxions mathematiques."[41]
[Footnote 41: Dict. de Bibliologie, i. 391.]
Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a
title-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and constitute an
infallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of
all literature it may be said that man has been continually struggling
after this achievement, and struggling in vain; and it is a humiliating
fact, that the greatest adepts, abandoning the effort in despair, have
taken refuge in some fortuitous word, which has served their purpose
better than the best results of their logical analysis. The book which
has been the supreme ruler of the intellect in this kind of work, stands
forth as an illustrious example of failure. To those writings of
Aristotle which dealt with mind, his editing pupils could give no
name,--therefore they called them the things after the physics--the
_metaphysics_; and that fortuitous title the great arena of thought to
which they refer still bears, despite of efforts to supply an apter
designation in such words as Psychology, Pneumatology, and
Transcendentalism.
Writhing under this nightmare kind of difficulty, men in later times