whenever I am with them. One would get very tired of a friend if, every
time one met him, he should suggest a touch for fifty or five hundred
dollars. On the shelves in my office are some books that are mine, some
in which there is at the moment a joint ownership, and some which will
be mine in the near future, I hope--and doubtless in this hope I am not
alone; but the books on the shelves around the room in which I write
are mine, all of them.
The advice given by "Punch" to those about to marry--"Don't"--seems,
then, to be the best advice to a man who is tempted to buy by the hope
of making a profit out of his books; but I observe that this short and
ugly word deters very few from following their inclinations in the
matter of marriage, and this advice may fall, as advice usually falls,
on deaf ears. Only when a man is safely ensconced in six feet of earth,
with several tons of enlauding granite upon his chest, is he in a
position to give advice with any certainty, and then he is silent; but
it will nevertheless be understood that I do not recommend the purchase
of rare books as an investment, and this in spite of the fact that many
collectors have made handsome profits out of the books they have sold.
While a man may do much worse with his money than buy rare books, he
cannot be certain that he can dispose of them at a profit, nor is it
necessary that he should do so. He should be satisfied to eat his cake
and have it; books selected with any judgment will almost certainly
afford this satisfaction, and of what other hobby can this be said with
the same assurance?
[Illustration: Title of Meredith's "Modern Love," with Autograph
Inscription to Swinburne]
The possession of rare books is a delight best understood by the owners
of them. They are not called upon to explain. The gentle will
understand, and the savage may be disregarded. It is the scholar whose
sword is usually brandished against collectors; and I would not have him
think that, in addition to our being ignorant of our books, we are
speculators in them also. Let him remember that we have our uses.
Unlearned men of books assume the care,
As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair.
It may as well be admitted that we do not buy expensive books to read.
We may say that it is a delight to us to look upon the very page on
which appeared for the first time such a sonnet as "On First Looking
into Chapman's Homer," or to read that bit of realism unsurpassed, where
Robinson Crusoe one day, about noon, discovered the print of a man's
naked foot upon the sand; but when we sit down with a copy of Keats, we
do not ask for a first edition; much less when we want to live over
again the joys of our childhood, do we pick up a copy of Defoe which
would be a find at a thousand dollars. But first editions of Keats's
Poems, 1817, in boards, with the paper label if possible, and a Defoe
unwashed, in a sound old calf binding, are good things to have. They are
indeed a joy forever, and will never pass into nothingness. I cannot see
why the possession of fine books is more reprehensible than the
possession of valuable property of any other sort.
In speaking of books as an investment, one implies first editions. First
editions are scarce; tenth editions, as Charles Lamb stutteringly
suggested, are scarcer, but there is no demand for them. Why, then,
first editions? The question is usually dodged; the truth may as well
be stated. There is a joy in mere ownership. It may be silly, or it may
be selfish; but it is a joy, akin to that of possessing land, which
seems to need no defense. We do not walk over our property every day; we
frequently do not see it; but when the fancy takes us, we love to forget
our cares and responsibilities in a ramble over our fields. In like
manner, and for the same reason, we browse with delight in a corner of
our library in which we have placed our most precious books. We should
buy our books as we buy our clothes, not only to cover our nakedness,
but to embellish us; and we should buy more books and fewer clothes.
I am told that, in proportion to our numbers and our wealth, less money
is spent on books now than was spent fifty years ago. I suppose our
growing love of sport is to some extent responsible. Golf has taken the
place of books. I know that it takes time and costs money. I do not play
the game myself, but I have a son who does. Perhaps when I am his age, I
shall feel that I can afford it. My sport is book-hunting. I look upon
it as a game, a game requiring skill, some money, and luck. The pleasure
that comes from seeing some book in a catalogue priced at two or three
times what I may have paid for a copy, is a pleasure due to vindicated
judgment. I do not wish to rush into the market and sell and secure my
profit. What is profit if I lose my book? Moreover, if one thinks of
profit rather than of books, there is an interest charge to be
considered. A book for which I paid a thousand dollars a few years ago,
no longer stands me at a thousand dollars, but at a considerably greater
sum. A man neat at figures could tell with mathematical accuracy just
the actual cost of that book down to any given minute. I neither know
nor want to know.
There is another class of collector with whom I am not in keen sympathy,
and that is the men who specialize in the first published volumes of
some given group of authors. These works are usually of relatively
little merit, but they are scarce and expensive: scarce, because
published in small editions and at first neglected; expensive, because
they are desired to complete sets of first editions. Anthony Trollope's
first two novels have a greater money value than all the rest of his
books put together--but they are hard to read. In like manner, a
sensational novel, "Desperate Remedies," by Hardy, his first venture in
fiction, is worth perhaps as much as fifty copies of his "Woodlanders,"
one of the best novels of the last half century. George Gissing, when he
was walking our streets penniless and in rags, could never have supposed
that a few years later his first novel, "Workers in the Dawn," would
sell for one hundred and fifty dollars, but it has done so. I have a
friend who has just paid this price.
Just here I would like to remark that for several years I have been
seeking, without success, a copy of the first edition of that very
remarkable book, Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh." Booksellers
who jauntily advertise, "Any book got," will please make a note of this
one.
Nor do I think it necessary to have every scrap, every waif and stray,
of any author, however much I may esteem him. My collection of Johnson
is fairly complete, but I have no copy of Father Lobo's "Abyssinia." It
was an early piece of hack-work, a translation from the French, for
which Johnson received five pounds. It is not scarce; one would hardly
want to read it. It was the recollection of this book, doubtless, that
suggested the "Prince of Abissinia" to Johnson years later, when he
wanted to write "fiction," as the dear old ladies in "Cranford" called
"Rasselas"; but it has never seemed necessary to my happiness to have a
copy of "Lobo." On the other hand I have "stocked" "Rasselas" pretty
considerably, and could supply any reasonable demand. Such are the
vagaries of collectors.
[Illustration: IN A COPY OF "RASSELAS"]
Only once, I think, have I been guilty of buying a book I did not
particularly want, because of its speculative value--that was when I
stumbled across a copy of Woodrow Wilson's "Constitutional Government in
the United States" with a long inscription in its author's cursive hand.
Even in this case I think it was my imagination rather than avarice
that led me to pay a fancy price for a book which some day when I am not
"among those present" will fetch as many thousands as I paid hundreds.
In 1909, when the inscription was written, its author was a relatively
unimportant man--to-day he is known throughout the world and is in a
position to influence its destinies as no other man has ever been.
[Illustration: The constitution of the United States, like the
constitution of every living state, grows and is altered by force of
circumstances and changes in affairs. The effect of a written
constitution is only to render the growth more subtle, more studious,
more conservative, more a thing of carefully, almost unconsciously,
wrought sequences. Our statesmen must, in the midst of origination, have
the spirit of lawyers.
Woodrow Wilson
Princeton, 18 Oct., '09.
]
No paper dealing with the prices of books would be complete without the
remark that condition is everything. Any rare book is immensely more
valuable if in very fine condition. Imagine for a moment a book worth,
say, six hundred dollars in good condition,--for example, the "Vicar of
Wakefield,"--and then imagine--if you can--a copy of this same book in
boards uncut. Would twenty-five hundred dollars be too high a price for
such a copy? I think not.
Another point to be remembered is that the price of a book depends, not
only on its scarcity, but also on the universality of the demand for it.
And once again I may take the "Vicar" as an example of what I mean. The
"Vicar" is not a scarce book. For from six to eight hundred dollars,
dependent upon condition, one could, I think, lay his hands on as many
as ten copies in as many weeks. It is what the trade call a
bread-and-butter book--a staple. There is always a demand for it and
always a supply at a price; but try to get a copy of Fanny Burney's
"Evelina," and you may have to wait a year or more for it. It was the
first book of an unknown young lady; the first edition was very small,
it was printed on poor paper, proved to be immensely popular, and was
immediately worn out in the reading; but there is no persistent demand
for it as there is for the "Vicar," and it costs only half as much.
In reading over whatever I have written on the subject of the prices of
rare books, I am aware that my remarks may sound to some like a
whistle--a whistle to keep up my courage at the thought of the prices I
am paying. But so long as the "knockout" does not get a foothold in this
country,--and it would immediately be the subject of investigation if it
did, and be stopped, as other abuses have been,--the prices of really
great books will always average higher and higher. "Of the making of
many books there is no end," nor is there an end to the prices men will
be willing to pay for them.
[Illustration: This first book of my writings is dearest to my soul,
Because all of 'em's bought called "The Old Swimmin' Hole."
Ever thine,
{Benj. F. Johnson, Boone Co., Ind.--
{James Whitcomb Riley.
For--Wallace H. Cathcourt(?), Cleveland, Ohio Indianapolis, Jan. 23
1899]
V
"WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN"
On a cold, raw day in December, 1882, there was laid to rest in Brompton
Cemetery, in London, an old lady,--an actress,--whose name, Frances
Maria Kelly, meant little to the generation of theatre-goers, then busy
with the rising reputation of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. She was a
very old lady when she died--ninety-two, to be exact; she had outlived
her fame and her friends, and few followed her to her grave.
I have said that the day was cold and raw. I do not know certainly that
it was so; I was not there; but for my sins I have passed many Decembers
in London, and take the right, in Charles Lamb's phrase, to damn the
weather at a venture.
Fanny Kelly, as she was called by the generations that knew her, came of
a theatrical family, and most of her long life had been passed on the
stage. She was only seven when she made her first appearance at Drury
Lane, at which theatre she acted for some thirty-six years, when she
retired; subsequently she established a school of dramatic art and gave
from time to time what she termed "Entertainments," in which she
sometimes took as many as fourteen different parts in a single evening.
With her death the last link connecting us with the age of Johnson was
broken. She had acted with John Philip Kemble and with Mrs. Siddons. By
her sprightliness and grace she had charmed Fox and Sheridan and the
generations which followed, down to Charles Dickens, who had acted with
her in private theatricals at her own private theatre in Dean
Street,--now the Royalty,--taking the part of Captain Bobadil in _Every
Man in his Humor_.
Nothing is more evanescent than the reputation of an actor. Every age
lingers lovingly over the greatness of the actors of its own youth; thus
it was that the theatre-goer of the eighteen-eighties only yawned when
told of the grace of Miss Kelly's Ophelia, of the charm of her Lydia
Languish, or of her bewitchingness in "breeches parts." To some she was
the old actress for whom the government was being solicited to do
something; a few thought of her as the old maiden lady who was obsessed
with the idea that Charles Lamb had once made her an offer of marriage.
It was well known that, half a century before, Lamb had been one of her
greatest admirers. Every reader of his dramatic criticisms and his
letters knew that; they knew, too, that in one of his daintiest essays,
perhaps the most exquisite essay in the language, "Dream Children, A
Reverie," Lamb, speaking apparently more autobiographically than usual
even for him, says:--
[Illustration: Charles Lamb]
"Then I told how, for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in
despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W----n; and,
as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness,
and difficulty, and denial meant to maidens--when suddenly, turning to
Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a
reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood
there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood
gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding
and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were
seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech:--
"'We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The
children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than
nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.'"
I am quoting, not from the printed text, but from the original
manuscript, which is my most cherished literary possession; and this
lovely peroration, if such it may be called, is the only part of the
essay which has been much interlineated or recast. It appears to have
occasioned Lamb considerable difficulty; there was obviously some
searching for the right word; a part of it, indeed, was entirely
rewritten.
The coyness, the difficulty, and the denial of Alice: was it not
immortally written into the record by Lamb himself? Miss Kelly's
rejection of an offer of marriage from him must be a figment of the
imagination of an old lady, who, as her years approached a century, had
her dream-children, too--children who called Lamb father.
There the matter rested. Fanny Kelly was by way of being forgotten; all
the facts of Lamb's life were known, apparently, and he had lain in a
curiously neglected grave in Edmonton Churchyard for seventy years.
Innumerable sketches and lives and memorials of him, "final" and
otherwise, had been written and read. His letters--not complete,
perhaps, but volumes of them--had been published and read by the
constantly increasing number of his admirers, and no one suspected that
Lamb had had a serious love-affair--the world accepting without reserve
the statement of one of his biographers that "Lamb at the bidding of
duty remained single, wedding himself to the sad fortunes of his
sister."
Then, quite unexpectedly, in 1903, John Hollingshead, the former manager
of the Gaiety Theatre, discovered and published two letters of Charles
Lamb written on the same day, July 20, 1819. One, a long letter in
Lamb's most serious vein, in which he formally offers his hand, and in a
way his sister's, to Miss Kelly, and the other a whimsical, elfish
letter, in which he tries to disguise the fact that in her refusal of
him he has received a hard blow.
[Illustration: Miss Frances Maria Kelly]
By reason of this important discovery, every line that Lamb had written
in regard to Fanny Kelly was read with new interest, and an admirable
biography of him by his latest and most sympathetic critic, Edward
Verrall Lucas, appearing shortly afterwards, was carefully studied to
see what, if any, further light could be thrown upon this interesting
subject. But it appears that the whole story has been told in the
letters, and students of Lamb were thrown back upon the already
published references.
In the Works of Lamb, published in 1818, he had addressed to Miss Kelly
a sonnet:--
You are not, Kelly, of the common strain,
That stoop their pride and female honor down
To please that many-headed beast, the town,
And vend their lavish smiles and tricks for gain;
By fortune thrown amid the actor's train,
You keep your native dignity of thought;
The plaudits that attend you come unsought,
As tributes due unto your natural vein.
Your tears have passion in them, and a grace
Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow;
Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace,
That vanish and return we know not how--
And please the better from a pensive face,
And thoughtful eye, and a reflecting brow.
And early in the following year he had printed in a provincial journal
an appreciation of her acting, comparing her, not unfavorably, with Mrs.
Jordan, who, in her day, then over, is said to have had no rival in
comedy parts.
Lamb's earliest reference to Miss Kelly, however, appears to be in a
letter to the Wordsworths, in which he says that he can keep the
accounts of his office, comparing sum with sum, writing "Paid" against
one and "Unpaid" against t'other (this was long before the days of
scientific bookkeeping and muchvaunted efficiency), and still reserve a
corner of his mind for the memory of some passage from a book, or "the
gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face." This is an always quoted
reference and seems correctly to describe the lady, who is spoken of by
others as an unaffected, sensible, clear-headed, warm-hearted woman,
plain but engaging, with none of the vanities or arrogance of the
actress about her. It will be recalled that Lamb had no love for
blue-stocking women, and speaking of one, said, "If she belonged to me I
would lock her up and feed her on bread and water till she left off
writing poetry. A female poet, or female author of any kind, ranks below
an actress, I think." This shortest way with minor poets has, perhaps,
much to recommend it.
It was Lamb's whim in his essays to be frequently misleading, setting
his signals at full speed ahead when they should have been set at
danger, or, at least, at caution. Thus in his charming essay "Barbara
S----" (how unconsciously one invariably uses this adjective in speaking
of anything Lamb wrote), after telling the story of a poor little stage
waif receiving by mistake a whole sovereign instead of the half a one
justly due for a week's pay, and how she was tempted to keep it, but did
not, he adds, "I had the anecdote from the mouth of the late Mrs.
Crawford." Here seemed to be plain sailing, and grave editors pointed
out who Mrs. Crawford was: they told her maiden name, and for good
measure threw in the names of her several husbands. But Lamb, in a
letter to Bernard Barton in 1825, speaking of these essays, said: "Tell
me how you like 'Barbara S----.' I never saw Mrs. Crawford in my life,
nevertheless 'tis all true of somebody." And some years later, not long
before he died, to another correspondent he wrote: "As Miss Kelly is
just now in notoriety,"--she was then giving an entertainment called
"Dramatic Recollections" at the Strand Theatre,--"it may amuse you to
know that 'Barbara S----' is all of it true of her, being all
communicated to me from her own mouth. Can we not contrive to make up a
party to see her?"
There is another reference to Miss Kelly, which, in the light of our
subsequent knowledge, is as dainty a suggestion of marriage with her as
can be found in the annals of courtship. It appeared in "The Examiner"
just a fortnight before Lamb's proposal. In a criticism of her acting as
Rachel in "The Jovial Crew," now forgotten, Lamb was, he says,
interrupted in the enjoyment of the play by a stranger who sat beside
him remarking of Miss Kelly, "What a lass that were to go a gypsying
through the world with!"
Knowing how frequently Lamb addressed Elia, his other self, and Elia,
Lamb, may we not suppose that on this occasion the voice of the stranger
was the voice of Elia? Was it unlikely that Miss Kelly, who would see
the criticism, would hear the voice and recognize it as Lamb's? I love
to linger over these delicate incidents of Lamb's courtship, which was
all too brief.
But what of Mary? I think she cannot but have contemplated the
likelihood of her brother's marriage and determined upon the line she
would take in that event. Years before she had written, "You will smile
when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world who could
live with a brother's wife, and make a real friend of her, partly from
early observations of the unhappy example I have just given you, and
partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people's real
character, and never expecting them to act out of it--never expecting
another to do as I would in the same case."
Mary Lamb was an exceptional woman; and even though her brother might
have thought he kept the secret of his love to himself, she would know
and, I fancy, approve. Was it not agreed between them that she was to
die first? and when she was gone, who would be left to care for Charles?
Before I come to the little drama--tragedy one could hardly call it--of
Lamb's love-affair as told in his own way by his letters, I may be
permitted to refer to two letters of his to Miss Kelly, one of them
relatively unimportant, the other a few lines only, both unpublished,
which form a part of my own Lamb collection. These letters, before they
fell from high estate, formed a part of the "Sentimental Library" of
Harry B. Smith, to whom I am indebted for much information concerning
them. It will be seen that both these letters work themselves into the
story of Lamb's love-affair, which I am trying to tell. So far as is
known, four letters are all that he ever addressed to the lady: the two
above referred to, and the proposal and its sequel, in the collection of
Mr. Huntington of New York, where I saw them not long ago. I have held
valuable letters in my hand before, but these letters of Lamb! I confess
to an emotional feeling with which the mere book-collector is rarely
credited.
[Illustration: Miss Kelly in Various Characters.]
The earlier and briefer letter is pasted into a copy of the first
edition of the "Works of Charles Lamb," 1818, "in boards, shaken," which
occupies a place of honor on my shelves. It reads: "Mr. Lamb having
taken the liberty of addressing a slight compliment to Miss Kelly in his
first volume, respectfully requests her acceptance of the collection.
7th June, 1818." The compliment, of course, is the sonnet already
quoted.
[Illustration: Mr Lamb having taken the liberty of addressing a
slight compliment to Mrs. Kelly in his first volume, respectfully
requests her acceptance of the Collection.
7th June 1818]
The second letter was written just ten days before Lamb asked Miss Kelly
to marry him. The bones playfully referred to were small ivory discs,
about the size of a two-shilling piece, which were allotted to leading
performers for the use of their friends, giving admission to the pit.
On one side was the name of the theatre; on the other the name of the
actor or actress to whom they were allotted. The letter reads:
DEAR MISS KELLY,--