The Book-Hunter
mercy of the scorner. The office was indeed conspicuous, not by its
dignities or emoluments, but by the extensive opportunities it afforded
for self-devotion. One may have noticed his successor of later times
giving lustre to newspaper paragraphs as "The Lord Bishop of Moray and
Ross." It did not fall to the lot of him of whom I write to render his
title so flagrantly incongruous. A lordship was not necessary, but it
was the principle of his Church to require a bishop, and in him she got
a bishop. In reality, however, he was the parish clergyman of the small
and poor remnant of the Episcopal persuasion who inhabited the
odoriferous fishing-town of Fraserburgh. There he lived a long life of
such simplicity and abstinence as the poverty of the poorest of his
flock scarcely drove them to. He had one failing to link his life with
this nether world--he was a book-hunter. How with his poor income, much
of which went to feed the necessities of those still poorer, he should
have accomplished anything in a pursuit generally considered expensive,
is among other unexplained mysteries. But somehow he managed to scrape
together a curious and interesting collection, so that his name became
associated with rare books, as well as with rare Christian virtues.
When it was proposed to establish an institution for reprinting the
works of the fathers of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, it was
naturally deemed that no more worthy or characteristic name could be
attached to it than that of the venerable prelate who, by his learning
and virtues, had so long adorned the Episcopal chair of Moray and Ross,
and who had shown a special interest in the department of literature to
which the institution was to be devoted. Hence it came to pass that,
through a perfectly natural process, the association for the purpose of
reprinting the works of certain old divines was to be ushered into the
world by the style and title of THE JOLLY CLUB.
There happened to be amongst those concerned, however, certain persons
so corrupted with the wisdom of this world, as to apprehend that the
miscellaneous public might fail to trace this designation to its true
origin, and might indeed totally mistake the nature and object of the
institution, attributing to it aims neither consistent with the ascetic
life of the departed prelate, nor with the pious and intellectual
objects of its founders. The counsels of these worldly-minded persons
prevailed. The Jolly Club was never instituted,--at least, as an
association for the reprinting of old books of divinity, though I am not
prepared to say that institutions more than one so designed may not
exist for other purposes. The object, however, was not entirely
abandoned. A body of gentlemen united themselves together under the name
of another Scottish prelate, whose fate had been more distinguished, if
not more fortunate; and the Spottiswoode Society was established. Here,
it will be observed, there was a passing to the opposite extreme; and so
intense seems to have been the anxiety to escape from all excuse for
indecorous jokes or taint of joviality, that the word Club, wisely
adopted by other bodies of the same kind, was abandoned, and this one
called itself a Society. To that abandonment of the _medio tutissimus_
has been attributed its early death by those who contemn the taste of
those other communities, essentially Book Clubs, which have taken to the
devious course of calling themselves "Societies."
In fact, all our _societies_, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends
downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain,
flat--not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be
good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite
destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have
accompanied the career of _Clubs_. Societies there are, indeed, which
identify themselves through their very nomenclature with misfortune and
misery, seeming proudly to proclaim themselves victims to all the
saddest ills that flesh is heir to--as, for instance, Destitute Sick
Societies, Indigent Blind Societies, Deaf and Dumb Societies, Burial
Societies, and the like. The nomenclature of some of these benevolent
institutions seems likely to test the etymological skill of the next
generation of learned men. Perhaps some ethnological philosopher will
devote himself to the special investigation and development of the
phenomenon; and if such things are done then in the way in which they
are now, the result will appear in something like the following shape:--
"Man, as we pursue his destiny from century to century, is still found
inevitably to resolve himself into a connected and antithetic series of
consecutive cycles. The eighteenth century having been an age of
individuative, the nineteenth necessarily became an age of associative
or coinonomic development. He, the man--to himself the _ego_, and to
others the mere _homo_--ceased to revolve around the centre of gravity
of his own personality, and, following the instincts of his adhesive
nature, resolved himself into associative community. In this necessary
development of their nature all partook, from the congresses of mighty
monarchs down to those humbler but not less majestic types of the
predominant influence, which, in the expressive language of that age,
were recognised as twopenny goes. It is known only to those whose
researches have led them through the intricacies of that phase of human
progress, how multifarious and varied were the forms in which the inner
spirit, objectively at work in mankind, had its external subjective
development. Not only did associativeness shake the monarch on his
throne, and prevail over the counsels of the assembled magnates of the
realm, but it was the form in which each shape and quality of humanity,
down even to penury and disease, endeavoured to express its instincts;
and so the blind and the lame, the deaf and dumb, the sick and poor,
made common stock of their privations, and endeavoured by the force of
union to convert weakness into strength," &c.
When the history of clubs is fully written, let us hope that it will be
in another fashion. If it sufficiently abound in details, such a history
would be full of marvels, from the vast influences which it would
describe as arising from time to time by silent obscure growth out of
nothing, as it were. Just look at what clubs have been, and have done; a
mere enumeration is enough to recall the impression. Not to dwell on the
institutions which have made Pall Mall and its neighbourhood a
conglomerate of palaces, or on such lighter affairs as "the
Four-in-Hand," which the railways have left behind, or the "Alpine,"
whose members they carry to the field of their enjoyment: there was the
Mermaid, counting among its members Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont,
Fletcher, and Jonson; then came the King's Head; the October; the
Kit-Cat; the Beef-Steak; the Terrible Calves Head; Johnson's club,
where he had Bozzy, Goldie, Burke, and Reynolds; the Poker, where Hume,
Carlyle, Ferguson, and Adam Smith took their claret.
In these, with all their varied objects--literary, political, or
convivial--the one leading peculiarity was the powerful influence they
exercised on the condition of their times. A certain club there was with
a simple unassuming name,--differing, by the way, only in three letters
from that which would have commemorated the virtues of Bishop Jolly. The
club in question, though nothing in the eye of the country but an easy
knot of gentlemen who assembled for their amusement, cast defiance at a
sovereign prince, and shook the throne and institutions of the greatest
of modern states. But if we want to see the club culminating to its
highest pitch of power, we must go across the water and saturate
ourselves with the horrors of the Jacobin clubs, the Breton, and the
Feuillans. The scenes we will there find stand forth in eternal protest
against Johnson's genial definition in his Dictionary, where he calls a
club "an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions."
The Structure of the Book Clubs.
There has been an addition, by no means contemptible, to the influence
exercised by these institutions on the course of events, in the Book
Clubs, or Printing Clubs as they are otherwise termed, of the present
day. They have within a few years added a department to literature. The
collector who has been a member of several may count their fruit by the
thousand, all ranging in symmetrical and portly volumes. Without
interfering either with the author who seeks in his copyrights the
reward of his genius and labour, or with the publisher who calculates on
a return for his capital, skill, and industry, the book clubs have
ministered to literary wants, which these legitimate sources of supply
have been unable to meet.
I hope no one is capable of reading so far through this book who is so
grossly ignorant as not to know that the Book Clubs are a set of
associations for the purpose of printing and distributing among their
members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which
has brought them together and united them into a club. An opportunity
may perhaps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic
notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and
monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian
efficiency of this arrangement--on the blank in the order of terrestrial
things which the Book Club was required to fill, and the manner in which
it has accomplished its function.
There is a class of books of which the production has in this country
always been uphill work;--large solid books, more fitted for authors and
students than for those termed the reading public at large--books which
may hence, in some measure, be termed the raw materials of literature,
rather than literature itself. They are eminently valuable; but, since
it is to the intellectual manufacturer who is to produce an article of
saleable literature that they are valuable, rather than to the general
consumer, they do not secure an extensive sale. Of this kind of
literature the staple materials are old state papers and letters--old
chronicles--specimens of poetic, dramatic, and other literature, more
valuable as vestiges of the style and customs of their age than for
their absolute worth as works of genius--massive volumes of old
divinity--disquisitions on obsolete science, and the like.
It is curious, by the way, that costly books of this sort seem to
succeed better with the French than with us, though we do not generally
give that people credit for excelling us in the outlay of money. Perhaps
it is because they enjoy the British market as well as their own that
they are enabled to excel us; but they certainly do so in the
publication, through private enterprise, of great costly works, having a
sort of national character. The efforts to rival them in this country
have been considerable and meritorious, but in many instances signally
unfortunate. Take, for instance, the noble edition of Hollingshed and
the other chroniclers, published in quarto volumes by the London trade;
the Parliamentary History, in thirty-six volumes, each containing about
as much reading as Gibbon's Decline and Fall; the State Trials; Sadler's
and Thurlow's State Papers; the Harleian Miscellany, and several other
ponderous publications of the same kind. All of them are to be had
cheap, some at just a percentage above the price of waste paper. When an
attempt was made to publish in the English language a really thorough
Biographical Dictionary, an improvement on the French Biographie
Universelle, it stuck in letter A, after the completion of seven dense
octavo volumes--an abortive fragment bearing melancholy testimony to