SHELVES A MAN'S INDEX.
In Chelsea, a suburb of London, and on a narrow street, with not even a
house in front, but, instead thereof, a long range of brick wall, is the
house of Thomas Carlyle. You go through a narrow hall and turn to the left,
and are in the literary workshop where some of the strongest thunderbolts
of the world have been forged. The two front windows have on them scant
curtains of reddish calico, hung at the top of the lower sash, so as not to
keep the sun from looking down, but to hinder the street from looking in.
The room has a lounge covered with the same material, and of construction
such as you would find in the plainest house among the mountains. It looks
as if it had been made by an author not accustomed to saw or hammer, and in
the interstices of mental work. On the wall are a few wood-cuts in plain
frames or pinned against the wall; also a photograph of Mr. Carlyle taken
one day, as his family told us, when he had a violent toothache and could
attend to nothing else, it is his favorite picture, though it gives him a
face more than ordinarily severe and troubled.
In long shelves, unpainted and unsheltered by glass or door, is the library
of the world-renowned thinker. The books are worn, as though he had bought
them to read. Many of them are uncommon books, the titles of which we never
saw before. American literature is almost ignored, while Germany
monopolizes many of the spaces. We noticed the absence of theological
works, save those of Thomas Chalmers, whose name and genius he well-nigh
worshiped. The carpets are old and worn and faded--not because he cannot
afford better, but because he would have his home a perpetual protest
against the world's sham. It is a place not calculated to give inspiration
to a writer. No easy chairs, no soft divans, no wealth of upholstery, but
simply a place to work and stay. Never having heard a word about it, it was
nevertheless just such a place as we expected.
We had there confirmed our former theory of a man's study as only a part of
himself, or a piece of tight-fitting clothing. It is the shell of the
tortoise, just made to fit the tortoise's back. Thomas Carlyle could have
no other kind of a workshop. What would he do with a damask-covered table,
or a gilded inkstand, or an upholstered window? Starting with the idea that
the intellect is all and the body naught but an adjunct or appendage, he
will show that the former can live and thrive without any approval of the
latter. He will give the intellect all costly stimulus, and send the body
supperless to bed. Thomas Carlyle taken as a premise, this shabby room is
the inevitable conclusion. Behold the principle.
We have a poetic friend. The backs of his books are scrolled and
transfigured. A vase of japonicas, even in mid-winter, adorns his writing
desk. The hot-house is as important to him as the air. There are soft
engravings on the wall. This study-chair was made out of the twisted roots
of a banyan. A dog, sleek-skinned, lies on the mat, and gets up as you come
in. There stand in vermilion all the poets from Homer to Tennyson. Here and
there are chamois heads and pressed seaweed. He writes on gilt-edged paper
with a gold pen and handle twisted with a serpent. His inkstand is a
mystery of beauty which unskilled hands dare not touch, lest the ink
spring at him from some of the open mouths, or sprinkle on him from the
bronze wings, or with some unexpected squirt dash into his eyes the
blackness of darkness.
We have a very precise friend. Everything is in severe order. Finding his
door-knob in the dark, you could reason out the position of stove, and
chair, and table; and placing an arrow at the back of the book on one end
of the shelf, it would fly to the other end, equally grazing all the
bindings. It is ten years since John Milton, or Robert Southey, or Sir
William Hamilton have been out of their places, and that was when an
ignoramus broke into the study. The volumes of the encyclopedias never
change places. Manuscripts unblotted, and free from interlineation, and
labeled. The spittoon knows its place in the corner, as if treated by
tobacco chewers with oft indignity. You could go into that study with your
eyes shut, turn around, and without feeling for the chair throw yourself
back with perfect confidence that the furniture would catch you. No better
does a hat fit his head, or shoe his foot, or the glove his hand, than the
study fits his whole nature.
We have a facetious friend. You pick off the corner of his writing table
"Noctes Ambrosianæ" or the London "Punch." His chair is wide, so that he
can easily roll off on the floor when he wants a good time at laughing. His
inkstand is a monkey, with the variations. His study-cap would upset a
judge's risibilities. Scrap books with droll caricatures and facetiæ. An
odd stove, exciting your wonder as to where the coal is put in or the poker
thrust for a shaking. All the works of Douglass Jerrold, and Sydney Smith,
and Sterne, the scalawag ecclesiastic. India-rubber faces capable of being
squashed into anything. Puzzles that you cannot untangle. The four walls
covered with cuts and engravings sheared from weekly pictorials and
recklessly taken from parlor table books. Prints that put men and women
into hopeless satire.
We have a friend of many peculiarities. Entering his house, you find
nothing in the place where you expected it. "Don Quixote," with, all its
windmills mixed up with "Dr. Dick on the Sacraments," Mark Twain's "Jumping
Frog," and "Charnock on the Attributes." Passing across the room, you
stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a
piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake
his essay on the "Copernican System" for blotting paper. Many of his books
are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers,
Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the
Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to
unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a
handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If,
some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is
absent, to "clear up," a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For
many days the question is, "Where is my pen? Who has the concordance? What
on earth has become of the dictionary? Where is the paper cutter?" Work is
impeded, patience lost, engagements are broken, because it was not
understood that the study is a part of the student's life, and that you
might as well try to change the knuckles to the inside of the hand, or to
set the eyes in the middle of the forehead, as to make the man of whom we
speak keep his pen on the rack, or his books off the floor, or the blotting
paper straight in the portfolio.
The study is a part of the mental development. Don't blame a man for the
style of his literary apartments any more than you would for the color of
his hair or the shape of his nose. If Hobbes carries his study with him,
and his pen and his inkstand in the top of his cane, so let him carry them.
If Lamartine can best compose while walking his park, paper and pencil in
hand, so let him ramble. If Robert Hall thinks easiest when lying flat on
his back, let him be prostrate. If Lamasius writes best surrounded by
children, let loose on him the whole nursery. Don't criticise Charles
Dickens because he threw all his study windows wide open and the shades up.
It may fade the carpet, but it will pour sunshine into the hearts of a
million readers. If Thomas Carlyle chose to call around an ink-spattered
table Goethe, and Schiller, and Jean Paul Frederick Richter, and dissect
the shams of the world with a plain goose-quill, so be it. The horns of an
ox's head are not more certainly a part of the ox than Thomas Carlyle's
study and all its appointments are a part of Thomas Carlyle.
The gazelle will have soft fur, and the lion a shaggy hide, and the sanctum
sanctorum is the student's cuticle.