be impossible to say with truth that it has been returned intact; and if
every book is to be collated on its restoration to the library, we shall
have no small increase of work, and increase of work always means, as we
well know, increased expense.
The lending of books to private houses then involves the very probable,
and in many cases the absolutely certain, damage of the book, and its
possible total loss without the least remedy, and without the slightest
recompense or penalty. A manuscript was lent to the late Professor ----,
and it is hardly necessary to say that it has never been returned, and
this is, I fancy, at least the second instance within a very few years
of total loss, for which neither the public nor the University ever
received one atom of benefit.
Even if the Bodleian were not one of the two great reference libraries
of this country, if it were merely a large and fine library of no very
great national importance, there would still be no excuse for borrowing
from it; for there is no town of its size that contains so many books as
Oxford. In every College there is a library, which is not unfrequently
full of fine books--Christ Church, All Souls', St. John's, Worcester,
Merton, Corpus, Oriel, Magdalen and Queen's are all remarkable; and if
we count in manuscripts there is hardly a single College without its
gems and rarities. Nor is there the slightest difficulty in making a
proper use of all these treasures. Any one really fit to use a College
book is always permitted to do so, nor is there in general any objection
to lending if the borrower is known to be trustworthy: the fault, if
any, is rather the other way. 'But,' says some borrower, 'the book that
I want is in no College library, and it is in the Bodleian.' Is it not
plain to every man of sense, that the book which is in no College
library, and is in the Bodleian, is just the book which ought not to be
lent, under any conceivable circumstances? Lending even from College
libraries has been the cause of innumerable losses--in fact, nothing in
Euclid is more true than the proposition, that sooner or later A BOOK
LENT IS A BOOK LOST.
Of the losses which the library at Cambridge has sustained, something
has been said above (p. 51). All libraries, however carefully kept, are
exposed to occasional and exceptional depredations. Paulus, the
celebrated German professor, stole one manuscript at least from the
Bodleian; the thefts in German, Russian, Italian, and French libraries
are only too notorious. Are we to give additional facilities by lending
books out? Even when lent to the greatest scholars, and presumably to
careful men, books are by no means safe. Every one knows how, not so
long ago, two or more of the most ancient manuscripts of Jornandes were
destroyed while in the hands of Mommsen. Fire invaded his rooms; the
professor escaped unharmed (of course he did), but the manuscripts were
destroyed. Literature and scholarship gained nothing by this loan,
though all future generations have lost much. Had common sense been the
ruling principle of the libraries from which Mommsen obtained these
manuscripts, they would have been safe at this moment. The convenience,
perhaps the laziness, of an individual was consulted, and the world has
lost what can never be replaced.
Mr. Watts, whom I have already quoted, says in speaking of lending, 'The
testimony of Molbech, the librarian of the Royal Library of Copenhagen,
where lending is permitted, is to the effect, not only that the risk is
greater, as must of course be the case where books are removed from
supervision and control, but that in practice great damage is found to
ensue.' If we are told, as very likely we shall be told, that no such
damage occurs here, I am somewhat at a loss to answer; perhaps it will
be enough to observe that different men unavoidably have different ideas
of what constitutes damage, and that what is not always immediately
discovered may hereafter be detected when it is too late to assign the
blame to the real offender.
Under the present system of administration, for which the Curators are
responsible, the actual, and, it may be, the unavoidable wear and tear
of books in the library itself, even in the choicer portions of it, is
great enough to deter any man in the future from acting as Douce did in
the past. The way in which very precious volumes are knocked about is
plain enough to any one who visits the interior of the library as
constantly as I do, and as all Curators are by statute empowered and
even ordered to do. Readers are impatient, sometimes unreasonable;
immense numbers of books can only be reached by means of ladders; the
whole establishment is undermanned, and though the small staff does its
best to protect the books, they are notwithstanding much bumped about.
One consequence of this rough usage is that the standard of carefulness,
as it may be called, is very naturally lowered, and as a further
consequence the estimate of what constitutes damage is lowered in
proportion.
There are many readers, or there certainly have been readers in the
library, who have not hesitated to make marks in printed books and
manuscripts. The man who will do such a thing as this in the library,
will not hesitate to do it when he gets the book into his own
possession. Now all avoidable wear and tear is so much real loss to the
library, and detracts in that proportion from its utility. It may be
useful to A or B to borrow books from the Bodleian, but it cannot be
useful to the University or to future generations that the life of any
book should be carelessly or needlessly abridged.
It will be admitted that no book can be in two places at the same time;
if a volume is in the rooms of Mr. X or Mr. Y, it cannot at that moment
be produced in the Bodleian should a reader happen to want it. One of
the great advantages of such a library as the Bodleian, if it were
properly administered, is that a visitor is sure to find the book which
he comes to consult. This is perfectly well understood by such men as
Mr. Watts (see above, p. 49); it was brought home to the mind of
Niebuhr, and it has been one of the reasons why all lending has up to
the present moment been most rigidly forbidden at the British Museum. In
a library like the Bodleian, where the practice of lending prevails as
it now does, a man may put himself to great inconvenience in order to
visit it; he may even travel from Berlin, and when he arrives he may
find that all his trouble has been in vain; the very book he wants is
out: at the British Museum, where up to the present time knowledge and
common sense have prevailed, every man is sure that he can at once get
any book whatever that he finds in the catalogue. It is a thousand
pities to destroy this confidence; one of the great uses of a library
like ours disappears when things are so ill managed, and I believe that
there are in the Bodleian men who could tell of some grievous
disappointments caused by our modern laxity. I know very well that we
shall be told that such cases are few and trivial: be it so. Who does
not see that as the present practice extends, as extend it must, one of
the great advantages of a grand library will at last vanish? Nothing can
be more strictly useful to all real students than the absolute certainty
of obtaining at once any book that can be found in the catalogue.
No limit seems to be placed on the borrower's powers; he may, for
anything that appears to the contrary, have any number of books or
manuscripts out. Now when we see the practice of more than one reader
_in_ the library, we may form a pretty shrewd guess of what men will do
in the way of borrowing. I am well within the mark when I say that at
least _one hundred_ volumes have been ere now allowed out to one reader
at a time.
The present Librarian has been trying, I believe, to check this morbid
appetite for superfluous volumes; but it is not always an easy thing to
root out a bad habit.
Any one who examines the slips in the various parts of the Bodleian, as
I habitually do, will be struck by two things; the immense number of
volumes had out by the same reader or readers, and the length of time
that volumes are allowed to remain off the shelves; and this is in great
measure the fault of a system for which we are answerable. What takes
place in the library will undoubtedly sooner or later take place out of
it. A borrower is not, so far as I know, limited as to the number of
volumes he may have out; neither is he limited as to the time he may
keep them out. The present Librarian informed me that when he came into
office he found that one book had been out of the library for _nine_
years, and that others had been off the shelves for very long periods of
time. And such things must happen, if you sanction this wretched system
of lending. It is perfectly easy to do what constant experience has
shown to entail on the whole the minimum of evil; it is easy to keep
your books within the library as they do at the British Museum; but if
you once lend, there is no drawing of lines possible. Altogether there
are about one hundred and eleven persons on the borrowers' list already.
It is said that the Curators can refuse any application if they choose;
of course they can, but as a matter of fact no application ever has been
refused, and every name added will make it more and more difficult, more
and more invidious to refuse any one. Every Oxford resident is
potentially on the list, and he may be actually on it whenever he likes.
What is this but the beginning, and something more than the beginning,
of that wretched system which Mr. Bradshaw speaks of above? (p. 50.) The
dissolution of our magnificent library is already insidiously begun; and
why is all this gratuitous and irreparable mischief to be done? why is
that vast storehouse intended for the use and benefit of generation
after generation of scholars to be scattered and at last destroyed?
Simply to gratify the vulgar, selfish convenience of this or that
individual regardless of the general good. The whole is to be
sacrificed for a part, and for what a part! The present Librarian has
been trying to do something to check this disastrous and ruinous
practice, but the Curators are responsible for it, not the Librarian.
Manuscripts and printed books when lent out of Oxford are as a rule not
lent to private houses but deposited in some library. What happens
abroad I do not know, though I confess to having my suspicions. If a
manuscript were lent to some one in a Cathedral town, it would be
deposited in the Cathedral library; and we comfort ourselves with the
belief that in such a place it would be secure, and that it would not on
any account be removed from that library elsewhere. An acquaintance of
my own, a very safe man, has had a Bodleian manuscript of great value
out for some years, and it is lent not to him directly, but to a library
where alone he is to use it. It may be that this arrangement is actually
carried out, and I do not know that it is not, yet I would bet five
pounds to a penny that if I went to his house I should find the Bodleian
book kicking about in his study, where, in fact, though exposed to a
thousand risks of damage and even destruction, it is really safer than
in the library where we suppose it to be. For one Cathedral library I
can answer: a book would hardly be safer there than it would be on a
public and unwatched book-stall, and such I have no doubt whatever is
the case with more than half the places to which we send books for safe
custody. There is as little conscience about books in this stupid and
wicked world as there is about umbrellas, and one of the most important
and most useful functions of a body like the Curators of the Bodleian is
to set up a high standard in such matters. It is our duty as trustees to
take lofty ground, and to be sensitive where the world is listless and
careless; and even if we do not really feel exactly as we ought, we are
bound, like Gertrude, to 'assume a virtue though we have it not'; it is
very laudable hypocrisy if the real article cannot be had. Yet I hope
that it can, and that upon consideration we may all see that the
convenience of a few is not for a moment to be compared with the
convenience of many, and that we shall awake to the fact that we, of all
people, ought not to countenance in any way whatever any practice which
may tend in the remotest degree to damage the only institution in Oxford
of which any rational being can in the present day be justly proud.
Lending of books has many more evil consequences, proximate and remote,
than I have enumerated; but there is one which at the risk of being
tedious must be mentioned. The glorious part of the Bodleian, the part
contributed by Bodley himself, by Laud, by Selden, Pembroke, Digby, Roe,
Rawlinson, &c., consists largely of gifts. Every man who knows anything
at all about books, every one who loves them, is perfectly well aware
that very few men will bequeath their libraries to an institution which
emulates the American or the English circulating and commercial
establishment. Barlow knew this, Bradshaw knew it (see above, p. 50);
every one knows it, who has the least acquaintance with the habits and
peculiarities of collectors. The Bodleian has to my certain knowledge
already lost very rare books indeed which it might have had, but for
this penny-wise and pound-foolish policy. Neither Rawlinson nor Douce
would ever have been such fools as to leave us what they did, could they
have foreseen how little sense of our duties and of our interests we
have shown. Bodley over and over again, and in the strongest terms,
forbad the lending of his books; Selden's executors only delivered his
books to us on the express condition that they never should under any
circumstances be lent; Laud stipulated that his books should not be
lent, except for one particular purpose and in one particular way. The
Bodleian is what it is, because till quite recent times we adhered to
the rule of common sense, not to say to that of common honesty, and it
is ever to be regretted that we departed from a course which was at once
safe and honourable. There will be no more Douces, no more Rawlinsons,
until we have returned to better ways and proved the sincerity of our
repentance. I have heard it maintained that the days of great
benefactors are over, that in some way not explained men's characters
and habits have changed. I cannot admit this; men are now what they
always were, and collectors in all ages are singularly alike. Only let
us be as prudent, as worldly wise, and, I will add, as honest as our
predecessors were, and there is no reason why the munificent benefactors
of the past should not be rivalled by equally munificent benefactors in
the future. Mr. Bradshaw (above, p. 50) is decidedly of opinion that
carelessness with regard to books prevents benefactions, and that care
attracts them. Barlow is of the same mind, and indeed the thing is too
obvious to be insisted on. It is only those who know little or nothing
of the feelings which actuate the real lovers of books who doubt about
such very simple facts as these.
To conclude this part of the subject; the arguments against the lending
of books out of such a library as the Bodleian may be briefly summed up
thus: lending is bad, because books are necessarily exposed to needless
and certain risks of damage and of downright loss; because one of the
great ends served by a large library is defeated, in that no man can be
certain of obtaining a book known to be in it; because lending leads
sooner or later to the destruction of a library; because it dries up the
great sources from which large numbers of the most valuable books are
derived; because it is disapproved of by all those who have the largest
and widest experience of books and their management; because, finally,
it is in violation of the express directions of Bodley, of Selden, of
Laud and others, and almost certainly contrary to the wishes of all our
great benefactors, even though they may not have said as much. Reason
and authority are equally against it; and the cause of learning and of
literature can never be permanently served by a practice which tends to
destroy that without which learning and literature alike are impossible:
whatever advantages may seem to attend it, are more than counterbalanced
by disadvantages so great, that none but those who recklessly sacrifice
the future to the present, the interests of generations yet to come, to
the selfishness of the generation that now is, can regard it with any
favour or even with common patience. We have by the sturdy honesty of
our predecessors received a vast treasure which they carefully preserved
intact; we are its guardians and trustees, and we are bound in honour
and honesty to hand on to our successors, undiminished and unimpaired,
what we have received only as a trust, not as a something which we may
spend or destroy at our pleasure. Any wilful act of ours which tends,
however remotely, to damage the Bodleian Library is not only a
scandalous breach of duty, but a crime against learning itself, in which
I for one will have no part or share.
BAXTER, PRINTER, OXFORD.
Transcriber's Note:
The plus character (+) is used to enclose transliterated Greek.