I hate an orderly library. It has a formal air which repels familiarity;
one cannot ramble in it, stroll aimlessly about it, come upon unexpected
“finds”, or pluck a blossom here and there without fear of consequences.
It is as devoid of charm as the stiff, uncompromising gardens of the
eighteenth century which arouse ill temper by their arrogant
right-angles. The card-catalogue itself is an encourager of angry
passions; and glass doors are odiously inhospitable. What care I if dust
accumulate? It is a blessed privilege to brush it off. What need have I
of a card-index, when in hunting for what I want I may discover
treasures hitherto lost to memory? When I encounter glass doors, those
grudging guardians of the sanctuary, I long to fracture the panes with
one mighty kick, for they are offensive with their _noli me tangere_
exclusiveness. I want my books where I need not open a door to get at
them or climb a ladder to reach them.
Not that I am averse to a certain method of arrangement, or to a
well-defined color-scheme in the matter of bindings. No one wishes to
put a tiny 16mo by the side of a towering quarto, or to fill the lower
shelves with duodecimos and the upper ones with folios; nor does any one
desire to fret his eyes by massing together colors which scream at each
other and disturb the peace. I would not have Petroleum V. Nasby or the
Orpheus C. Kerr Papers elbowing the “voluminous pages” of Gibbon or the
serious dignity of Grote; but Boswell and Trevelyan need not be
aggrieved by a close proximity to such inferior productions as
Collingwood’s _Life of Lewis Carroll_ or Hallam Tennyson’s disappointing
Memoir of his illustrious father. “There are few duller biographies”,
says Augustine Birrell, “than those written by wives, secretaries, or
other domesticated creatures. Neither the purr of the hearth-rug nor the
unemancipated admiration of the private secretary should be allowed to
dominate a biography”. True, Trevelyan was Macaulay’s nephew, but he was
barely of age when his uncle died, and had not yet been wholly
“domesticated”.
It is almost needless to say that these wise utterances are not intended
to apply to public libraries, those mausoleums of books, where one may
“consult volumes” but never really read them; for how is it possible for
anybody who is not endowed with a power of phenomenal self-absorption,
to forget that the custodians, although unseen, are perpetually on
guard, while the enforced silence of the place is a constant temptation,
well-nigh irresistible, to arouse the echoes with defiant yells. In one
of those halls of grandeur miscalled “reading rooms”, I am always
reminded of “study hour” in school, and am in momentary expectation of
hearing some one ask of the grim presiding functionary the old, familiar
question, “Please, sir, may I go out?”
In every true library, there are sacred corners. In their cosy precincts
you do not usually come upon the dress-parade volumes, imposing in their
garb of polished calf or of velvety morocco, addressing you in solemn
accents, reminding you of the aristocracy of their long descent,
forbidding you to disturb them by casual pullings-down or thoughtless
turning of their chilly pages. Their glacial aspect appals the ardent
lover and freezes the founts of affection. These are seldom to be found
in corners; they demand the showy places on the shelves where they may
intimidate the beholder and turn him away abashed at their impressive
array. They are as much shut off from the admirer’s fond touch as are
the alleged crown-jewels in the Tower or the priceless manuscripts in
the British Museum. My ideal library is composed chiefly of corners
where one may linger in morning-jacket and slippers, and not be
conscious of the need of attiring himself in the evening garments which
conventionality decrees to be necessary for those who take part in
stately functions. I often long to disarrange the symmetry of some
“gentleman’s library”, just as when reading Johnson, or Gibbon, or
Hamilton W. Mabie I have a fiendish propensity to split an infinitive or
to end a sentence with a preposition.
Now if I were bent on making a foolish pretense of what is known as
“good taste”, which I have no right or disposition to boast of, I would
assert untruthfully, but no one could disprove it, that in these snug
retreats I feast upon “The Proficience and Advancement of Learning”, or
Evelyn’s Diary, or Pepys, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Elia. Every one who
affects a literary “pose” is given to praising Elia; and there are few
more precious books in the world. Yet if those immortal essays should
appear to-day for the first time, they would have only what the
newspapers style a “limited circulation”. A dinosaurus would have just
as much popularity in the annual Horse Show, for they belong to the era
of the stage-coach when people did not “do the Lake Country” in an
escorted tour on a Hodgman car, and the Venetian gondola had not been
crowded out of the Grand Canal by snorting motor-boats; when there were
great men; poets, novelists, essayists, historians and statesmen. To the
question, “Why have we no great men?” Mr. Chesterton rejects the answer
that it is because of “advertisement, cigarette smoking, the decay of
religion, the decay of agriculture, too much humanitarianism, too little
humanitarianism, the fact that people are educated insufficiently, the
fact that they are educated at all”. But his own answer, “We have no
great men chiefly because we are always looking for them”, may be smart,
but it is not convincing. The fact is that we do not have great men
chiefly because we think we have no need of them.
The craze for equality has so possessed our minds that if one of us is
presumptuous enough to thrust his head above the struggling mob that
surrounds him, we set to work with one accord to pull him down, for who
is he, forsooth, that he should assume to know more than we do or to be
more than we are? In the days when the ignorant and the mediocre had not
come to understand the might of their power, there were leaders; but
however greatly they may need wise leaders now, they have become the
leaders themselves and the ambitious are only astute and adroit
followers. The state of the times is reflected in our literature; and as
every man has arrived at the belief that he is an infallible judge upon
questions of politics and of government, so he fancies that he is
divinely endowed as a judge of all things literary. Thus it has come to
pass that the guerdon of fame is bestowed, not upon the best book but
upon the best seller. It has also come to pass that the only individual
who is allowed to dominate his race is the editor of a newspaper. Great
is the power of humbug; there is but one god, which is “the people”,—and
the editor is his prophet. Every one from the cardinal to the curate,
from the President to the postmaster, trembles before the majesty of a
malicious monkey who by some mischance has contrived to get hold of a
printing-press; for his penny compendium of slander and of crimes
reaches the sons of manual toil who go to their work in the early
morning, filled with envy of the well-to-do, grumbling at the fate which
condemns them to labor while men whom they regard as no better than
themselves enjoy sports and luxuries denied to them, ready to drink in
the flattery addressed to them and rejoicing in the bitterest of
assaults upon wealth and vested interests. No one is great to them
except the crafty demagogue who ministers to their self-importance.
The mild and gentle Thomas Bailey Aldrich said in a moment of unusual
irritation: “American newspapers are fearfully and wonderfully made. If
about twenty thousand of them could be suppressed, the average decency
of the world would be increased from twenty-five to fifty per cent.”
This is no new cry; but it does not avail much to us soured old
sufferers from their multitudinous lies and libels, to retire to our
library corners and scold at them. In spite of our complaints, we think
it a hardship if we cannot peer at them through our glasses over the
matutinal coffee and enjoy their lies—about other people.
Great is the power of humbug, I repeat, with an air of imparting a new
and important truth. I have just been reading—in a corner—a sketch of
James Kent by Mr. James Brown Scott. He says of Charles Sumner that he,
said Sumner, was “an ornament of the bar as he later was an ornament of
the Senate”. But Sumner was not a real lawyer; he was not fitted for the
conflicts of the bar. There is nothing like the battles of the law to
take the vanity and pomposity out of a man. I do not wish to be
understood as saying that there are no vain or pompous members of the
legal profession, but they seldom win much respect or distinction. I
doubt even if Sumner can justly be called “an ornament of the Senate”.
He never _did_ anything, he never originated anything; he only “orated”,
so that in a sense he may have been ornamental; surely not useful. His
speeches were carefully prepared and rehearsed; he was weak in debate.
If any one cares to waste time upon the speech for which he was caned by
Preston Brooks, he will be amazed at the scurrility of the language and
the indecency of the vituperation. It is hard to believe that a man of
his stalwart frame could be permanently injured by the blows of a light
stick such as the one which Brooks used that day. The assault was a
wicked performance, but Washington laughed in its sleeve over the outcry
which the castigated one made about it. In those days the anti-slavery
speakers were hunting for martyrdom, and Sumner made the most of his
beating. In course of time, he was supplanted, as a martyr, by the
deified horse-thief and murderer, John Brown. When the Senator assumed
to dictate to Grant, he found his well-merited fate, and he has passed
into oblivion. His useful, modest, hard-working colleague, Henry Wilson,
as earnest and enthusiastic an opponent of slavery as Sumner was, is far
better entitled to be called “an ornament of the Senate” than his more
cultured but less effective associate.
Down in a quiet corner hides an humble cloth-clad little book which
scarcely any one cares for except myself, and its interest to me comes
less from its mild satire than from my affection for its author.
“Salander and the Dragon, by Frederick William Shelton, M.A. Rector of
St. John’s Church, Huntington, N. Y.”, with its Goodman, its Duke
d’Envy, its Gudneiburud, Drownthort, and all the other parodies of
Bunyan’s nomenclature, makes dull reading for the present generation,
and it may be that my liking for it is only a form of perverse vanity.
As I glance over the faded leaves, they bring before me the gentle,
scholarly Shelton, who had been my father’s class-mate at
Princeton—delightfully old-fashioned in the time when I had a boyish
acquaintance with him. He was quite like his books, small, decorous,
with a gleam of the humorous mingled with reflective sadness. I can
fancy his shudder of dismay over most of our present-day sensational,
highly-colored “literature” falsely so-called. I never knew more than
two persons who had ever read “Salander”. But it aroused my indignation
a year or two ago to read in a flippant review published in one of our
magazines, a contemptuous reference to Doctor Shelton, whose nature and
whose style were too sweet and pure for the taste of the pert, feminine
scribbler.
Near the unoffending duodecimo is the well-beloved “Squibob Papers”, not
as good as the immortal “Phoenixiana” which George Derby’s friends
induced him to publish in the middle fifties, a famous precursor of our
later and more elaborate “books of American humor”. My copy is not of
the issue of 1859, but one which was printed by Carleton in 1865, after
the author’s death. As most people know, poor Derby, who died at
thirty-eight, was an officer of the Corps of Topographical Engineers,
or, in his own words, “a Topographical Engineer who constantly wears a
citizen’s dress, for fear some one will find it out.” Comparing them
with the Engineers, he remarked that “the Corps of Topographical
Engineers was only formed in 1838, while the Engineers date from the
time when Noah, sick of the sea, landed and threw up a field-work on
Mount Ararat”. It was an odd training school for a humorist, but Derby
did not need much training.
His “great railroad project” of “The Belvidere and Behrings’ Straits
Union Railroad”, with its branches to the North Pole “to get the ice
trade”, to Kamchatka “to secure the seal trade for the Calcutta market”,
and to Cochin China “to secure the fowl trade”, reads very much like the
prospectus of an exceedingly modern enterprise. His “Sewing Machine with
Feline Attachment”, by which a cat, induced by a suspended mouse,
operates the mechanism, is an ingenious device, and he records that he
“has seen one cat (a tortoise-shell) of so ardent and unwearying
disposition, that she made eighteen pairs of men’s pantaloons, two dozen
shirts, and seven stitched shirts, before she lay down exhausted”. The
Fourth of July Oration, commemorating our forefathers who “planted corn
and built houses, killed the Indians, hung the Quakers and Baptists,
burned the witches and were very happy and comfortable indeed, and
fought the battle named ‘the battle of Bunker Hill’, on account of its
not having occurred on a hill of that name”, should never be forgotten
if only for the story of the boy who picked his nose on the Fourth of
July because it was Independence Day. Not very refined fun, you may say,
but food for laughter, and with no taint of a peculiar kind of vulgarity
which mars the fun of certain more classic fooling.
Among the tenants of the corner is a cheap and shabby American edition,
in two fat, awkward volumes, of my pet novel, “Ten Thousand a Year”,
much pawed over and alas! dog’s eared; while the first English edition,
in three volumes, (Blackwood, 1841, “original cloth”), is seldom aroused
from its serene repose on a conspicuous shelf. Ten thousand pounds a
year then stood for colossal wealth; and when my boyish mind first
applied itself to the study of the fitful fortunes of Tittlebat
Titmouse, that income still appeared to represent riches beyond the
dreams of avarice. When I began the study of law, I was one day toiling
over Kent’s Commentaries, and the senior partner, bluff and kindly Aaron
J. Vanderpoel, came upon me suddenly, crying out “What are you reading,
young man?” I confessed, with the conscious pride which one feels when
detected in doing something supposed to be virtuous, that I was reading
Kent. “Don’t read Kent!” he shouted, “read ‘Ten Thousand a Year’”.
Perhaps his advice was good; at all events I took it, and I did not tell
him that I knew it already from cover to cover.
It is the best “lawyer’s novel” ever written, even if it is full of
doubtful law. For the hundredth time you will follow with eager interest
the progress of the great suit of _Doe ex dem. Titmouse vs. Jolter_, and
await in breathless suspense the momentous decision of Lord Widdrington
upon the question of the admission of that famous deed with the erasure,
however well you may know that he is sure to exclude it; a ruling
undeniably wrong, but if his lordship had held otherwise the story must
have come to a sudden and ignominious close at the end of the first
volume. This would have been a calamity, although the Aubreys and their
woes become quite fatiguing and Oily Gammon turns out to be “more kinds
of a villain” than is to be met with in actual life. He deserved a
different fate; he ought to have married Kate Aubrey, and lived
unhappily ever afterwards. I refuse to believe that he was guilty of the
meaner crimes attributed to him in the account of his dying moments; but
Warren probably thought that as Gammon had to die, he might as well
depart this life in the odor of perfect villainy. He, Gammon, was a
liar, thief, perjurer, forger—almost a murderer; but his crowning act of
infamy was to devise an elaborate method of suicide to defraud a
life-insurance company. If he had lived a little longer, he might have
been found giving a rebate or riding on a Third Avenue car without
paying his fare.
Warren had about all the worst faults chargeable against a novelist, yet
the book has life. It may not be found in the drawing room or on my
lady’s table, or in the languid hands of those who continually do
recline on the sunny side of transatlantic steamers, but it endures. The
account of the election in which, to my secret satisfaction, Titmouse
defeats Mr. Delamere, is far better than Dickens’s attempt to describe
the Eatanswill contest and fully as good as Trollope’s effort in the
same field. Mr. Delamere, one of those impeccable figureheads created
chiefly for the purpose of providing a husband for the equally
impeccable young female angel who is so transcendently pure that she
blushes deeply at the mere thought of a lover, oblivious of the fact
that her adored parents must at some time have surrendered shamelessly
to the sway of Cupid, is almost too noble for words; and as for Charles
Aubrey, did not Thackeray pronounce him to be the greatest of all snobs?
But he is such a precious snob.
Yet after we leave the nobility and gentry we find an abundance of
humanity in the numerous “characters” who throng the pages, particularly
among the lawyers. They would be just as well off without their
impossible names which give them an air of unreality. But at that time
it was a favorite custom of fiction-writers to label their personages
with tags, and if Dickens may be pardoned for his Verisophts and his
Gradgrinds, and Thackeray for Mr. Deuceace, Warren may surely be
forgiven for Quicksilver, Subtle, Tag-rag and Going-Gone; and the world
will continue to apply the name of “Quirk, Gammon and Snap” to
attorneys’ firms as long as we have those useful adjuncts of
civilization. In my time I have known several Quirks, not a few Gammons,
and many Snaps. Snap is a sort of lawyer whom only a lawyer could
conceive of; and Gammon, stripped of the basest of his qualities, may be
encountered a dozen times a day between the Court House and the Battery.
Not far removed from the company of Titmouse and Gammon, is “Trilby”;
the copy with the autograph letter of Du Maurier to Osgood, not the
elaborately bound assemblage of the original _Harper_ chapters, whose
illustrations are so much more attractive than those in the
later-published book, with the cancelled pages about Lorrimer and Joe
Sibley which so offended the shrinking, diffident Whistler that they
were remorselessly cut out—Whistler, who never hurt the feelings of a
friend or learned “the gentle art of making enemies”. Then there are
“The Bab Ballads”, and Lear’s “Nonsense Book,” and Alice, my Lady of
Wonderland, and my Lady of Looking Glass country, whom so many adore and
so many fail to comprehend. For there are myriads who, like the little
Scotch lad, can see nothing in Carroll’s playful extravagances except
that they contain “a great deal of feection”.
It is sad that the modern disposition to overdo everything should have
so trampled upon such a delicious thing as “Trilby”; made it so common;
worn it threadbare; and when it was no longer fresh, thrown it aside
like a shattered toy. It is a manifestation of the childishness of the
multitude which goes wild over some temporary hero and then lets him
fall into the limbo of the forgotten when there are none so poor to do
him reverence. There must be some magical elixir in “Pinafore”, for
although thirty years have gone by since it sprang into universal favor,
it still survives, is laughed at and admired, and is even quoted in
after-dinner speeches. The mention of these speeches, without which no
public or semi-public dinner is considered to be worth eating, brings
painful reflections. We seem to be losing the art; perhaps we are
approaching the heaviness and prosiness of our English cousins on such
occasions. It is a melancholy thought that some reformers have
introduced the plan of hearing the speeches first and devouring the
dinner afterwards; and very lately diners were encouraged by the
engraved announcement on the cards of invitation, that there would be
“only six speeches, strictly limited to ten minutes each”. Yet, as a
rule, the speakers are not burning for an opportunity to talk; they may
truly say, as a beloved college president was wont to remark to a
disorderly class, disturbing his lecture with horse-play, “Young men,
this may be a bore to you but it is infinitely more of a bore to me.”
There is difficulty in adjusting a speech to the tastes of the
present-day dinner crowds; the time of the unending stream of anecdotes
has passed, with its everlasting “that reminds me”, and it seems to be
succeeded by an epidemic of the serious, which is not easily dealt with
in the presence of a mob flushed with champagne and shrouded in
tobacco-smoke. Some resort to epigram, but in fifteen minutes the
epigram begins to degenerate into jerky twaddle and palls upon the jaded
appetite. Now and again the orator exhibits an inclination to do what
our newspapers are forever howling about—to “probe” something or
somebody; but probing is always a painful operation and frequently does
much more harm than good. It is not given to many to be really
entertaining in discourse, so that our few entertainers are sadly
overworked. This unhappy condition of affairs has brought us to the
latest stage of infamy, when post-prandial talkers demand pay for their
performances: and we may expect to see the day or the night, when the
star of the evening will refuse to rise in his place and do his act
until the pecuniary reward has been tendered to him in specie, bills, or
certified cheque. Fancy the toast-master’s emotions if as he begins the
familiar “We have with us to-night” he is interrupted by a cry from the
hired guest, “You’re a saxpence short!”
Much unlike the books of which we have been speaking, but in its own way
as attractive, is Mr. Atlay’s “Victorian Chancellors”, a collection of
model biographies, of interest not only to lawyers but to lovers of
history. Atlay makes no claim that his undertaking is to be regarded as
a continuation of Lord Campbell’s “Lives”, and his methods are
absolutely different from those of Campbell, who is amusing but so
palpably unfair and often inaccurate that full faith and credit cannot
be given to him. I regret that the “Lives of the Chief Justices of the
Supreme Court” have not been written by some competent lawyer of our
time, with sufficient leisure and a taste for authorship, as fair and
free from personal prejudice as Atlay’s work proves him to be. The
“Lives” that have hitherto appeared are by no means satisfactory.
Flanders, Van Santvoord, and Tyler, the biographer of Roger Brooke
Taney, are painstaking enough and undoubtedly conscientious, but they
are of the old school, dull in style, with little or no sense of
historical perspective. The biographies of Jay and of Marshall are not
adequate; they do not reveal the men to us with that distinctness which
is necessary to hold the reader’s attention. The “Lives” of Chase are
weak and flimsy. Some of the great Associate Justices might be included
in the series—Story, Curtis, Nelson, Miller; and perhaps others—famous
for long and faithful judicial service if not for surpassing legal
ability. Somehow our modern writers are not at their best in biography;
those of sufficient skill and industry, like Henry Adams and James Ford
Rhodes, are led to devote themselves to general history which affords a
broader field. Moreover, a Justice of the Supreme Court is not as
closely identified with politics and the administration of the
government as an English Chancellor usually is, and the dry technical
details of the career of a mere lawyer are not tempting to the man of
letters.
There is a different corner, in a darker part of the library, where one
may well linger when the wind is in the east and teeth are in need of
gnashing. One of the discomforts of advanced years is that you are
unable to do any gnashing without inflicting more pain upon the gnasher
than is actually worth while. In this corner are gathered together some
of the few books which cannot be loved; wall-flowers of literature,
which never made the bookman’s heart palpitate with any fond emotion.
Here let us approach with hesitation and timidity, for however dry and
disagreeable a book may be, still it is a book. “Somebody loved it”. The
man who evolved it, who brought it forth, who labored over it, who
corrected the proofs, was pleased with it; deformed and misshapen though
it may be in the eyes of others, it was beautiful to him. Moreover, much
may after all be learned from the poorest of books; and the food from
which I would turn in scorn, may to another be palatable. Therefore I
wish it to be clearly understood that in making what are called
“derogatory” remarks about any book, I am guiltless of the offence of
setting up my own judgment and preference against the view and opinion
of any one else whomsoever; I am merely expressing my own personal
feelings. If it be asserted by some one who chances not to agree with
me, that these feelings are of no importance to any one but to myself, I
may reply that I admit it and that no one is obliged to read what I have
written; and should he complain that he has paid “very hard cash” for my
book and has a right to full consideration, I will answer, as Mr. Lang
answered somebody,—that he should read Mazzini, and learn that man has
no rights worth mentioning, only duties. Moreover I would say to him
that if he can prove that he paid for the volume its full price, and did
not pick it up at a discount in some second-hand book shop, that refuge
of lame, halt and blind books, or at a bargain counter in a department
store, I will cheerfully refund his money, provided he will furnish me
with a sworn affidavit declaring solemnly that he sincerely admires the
book which I detest. But even the omnivorous reader must like some books
better than others. If, as was truly said, no cigars are bad, some are
certainly more smokeable than others, and some pretty women are prettier
than other pretty women. If the books I do not like were the only books
in the world, I suppose that I would be fond of them as Frederick was of
Ruth until he beheld the loveliness of Major-General Stanley’s numerous
daughters.
One of the black sheep of my flock is called “Random Reminiscences: by
Charles H. E. Brookfield”, published in 1902. The author is the son of
Thackeray’s Brookfield, and his portrait shows what manner of man he
must be. How any rational human being could write out or cause to be
published such a flat, stale and unprofitable mess, passes
understanding. The most wretched of anecdotes are retailed, and if he
chances upon a fairly good one he spoils it in the telling. “I am not
aware”, he says in his preface, “that I have included in this volume
anything which appears to me of importance; I trust that I have not
either committed the impertinence of expressing any views.” This may
have been meant in a facetious way, but it is obviously so true that one
is impelled to ask why on earth he wrote it. He is so proud of his
pointless stories that he makes one long to go out and kill something,
thus creating a counter-irritant. How can any one fail to give way to
inextinguishable laughter over this final outburst of glee: “Thanks to
Dr. Walther and his treatment, I put on nearly 2 stone weight in a
little over two months. I was 10 stone 4 before I went, and 12 stone 2
when I left. And I am over 12 stone to-day, three years later”. From his
humor I should think that he was heavier. I have been waiting patiently
for a second edition to ascertain whether he has grown to any extent,
but none has appeared. No wonder that he finished his autobiography with
a quotation from a newspaper which said of him, on his supposed decease:
“But, after all, it is at his club that he will be most missed”. Jolly
dog, how he must have warmed the cockles of their hearts with his merry
jests!
In the same corner with the jovial Brookfield and his “twelve stone” are
gathered together the various biographies whose titles begin with “The
True” or “The Real”. I confess that I have not read through “The True
Thomas Jefferson”, although I am burdened with two copies, but I have
ploughed through “The True Abraham Lincoln”, and found it an ordinary
piece of hack-work, marred by blunders. The calm assumption which leads
a writer to proclaim that he alone portrays “the true” and “the real”,
as if all other accounts were false, is condemnatory at the outset. As
for Jeaffreson’s lot,—“The Real Lord Byron” and “The Real Shelley”,—they
are monuments of dullness, the subjects overloaded with petty details of
no value to any one. Mr. John Cordy Jeaffreson, who was always
publishing “Books About” something or somebody, has presented to mankind
his “Recollections”, conspicuous chiefly for its covert sneers at
Thackeray, whom he hated, and studied disparagement of the personal
character of that giant who towered so far above Jeaffresonian pigmies.
Jeaffreson’s books belong to the Sawdust School of literature. He has
not even the brightness of Percy Fitzgerald, who has so long made the
most of his stock in trade, a certain friendship and association with
Dickens, and who in his two volumes of “Memories of an Author” is almost
as bad as Jeaffreson at his best. It is true that Dickens had a personal
liking for Fitzgerald, when the latter was a contributor to “All The
Year Round”, but I believe that Charles Dickens the Younger not many
years ago expressed some doubts as to the intimacy of the two men.
Jeaffreson was a weak and self-important person, jealous of his betters.
George Somes Layard says, in his interesting “Life of Shirley
Brooks”,[3] that Jeaffreson in his “Book of Recollections” wrote “with
ill concealed envy of a far abler and more successful man than himself”
a silly fling at Brooks concerning the name “Shirley”; and elsewhere
refers to the “Recollections” as a “querulous and pawky book”. The
characterization is undeniably just; plainly in accord with the opinion
of the reading public; and the two pawky volumes rest peacefully in the
trash corner.
In company with Jeaffreson will be found everything written by Mr.
William Carew Hazlitt, who, in a long life of devotion to the
accumulation of miscellaneous information of doubtful value and to the
parading of the name of Hazlitt, has caused a vast number of pages to be
covered with typographical records of his diligence and of his unfailing
capacity for making blunders. Full forty years ago he was unlucky enough
to come into close contact with the keen lance of one James Russell
Lowell, who riddled his editions of Webster and of Lovelace, included in
John Russell Smith’s “Library of Old Authors”. Lowell wrote that “of all
Mr. Smith’s editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst. He is at times
positively incredible, worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is saying
a good deal.”[4] Whether Hazlitt was worth flaying as Lowell flayed him,
may be questioned. But Hazlitt still goes on, in his Boeotian way;
always inept; sometimes so offensive that, as in the case of his “Four
Generations of a Literary Family” it has been necessary to withdraw the
work from circulation.[5] An example of his “foolish notions” may be
seen in one of his latest books, “The Book-Collector” (1904) which has a
sub-title composed of fifty-one words. Mr. Hazlitt announces the
astonishing generalization that the autograph collector does not care
for books or for manuscripts beyond the extent of a fly leaf or
inscribed title-page, and that he is a modern and inexcusable Bagford
who tears out the inscription and throws away the book. He cites the
case of “a copy of Donne’s Sermons, with a brilliant portrait of the
author—and a long inscription by Izaak Walton presenting the volume to
his aunt. It was in the pristine English calf binding, as clean as when
it left Walton’s hands _en route_ to his kinswoman, and such a
delightful signature. What has become of it? It is sad even to commit to
paper the story—one among many. An American gentleman acquired it, tore
the portrait and leaf of inscription out, and threw the rest away”.
I believe him—to use the language of a mighty hunter—to be a meticulous
prevaricator. If the tale be true, and I should like to have Mr. William
Carew Hazlitt under cross-examination for a while, it only shows that
there may be a few vandals in the tribe of autograph collectors, but no
true collector would ever be guilty of such a wanton crime. Bagford tore
out title-pages, but that affords no evidence that book-lovers are
habitually given to the folly of tearing out title-pages. As for the
case being “one of many”, I deny it; if he had known of another instance
he would have gloried in the description of it. But he never knew law,
logic or truth, and upon his indictment for silliness it would be
necessary only to offer in evidence his books,—and rest.
But why should I get so very cross about poor old Hazlitt? The wisest
thing I can do is to recite to him the touching verses of “You are old,
Father William” and remonstrate gently with him in regard to his
pernicious habit of incessantly standing upon his head. It will be a
good plan to return to the favorite corner and soothe my ruffled spirits
by reading Percy Greg’s comical “History of the United States”, or
better still, the dear little story which Roswell Field wrote about “The
Bondage of Ballinger”.
Whether so famous a poem as Young’s _Night Thoughts_ is entitled to the
privileges of the pit of Acheron, may be matter for dispute; but as
Goldsmith said of those gloomy lucubrations, a reader speaks of them
with exaggerated applause or contempt as his disposition “is either
turned to mirth or melancholy”. We have preserved “tired nature’s sweet
restorer, balmy sleep”, and “procrastination is the thief of time,” but
we know that the didactic parson’s famous poem is “hardly ever read now
except under compulsion.” My chief grievance against the man who was
compelled to
“Torture his invention
To flatter knaves or lose his pension,”
is not, however, founded upon his lugubrious pentameters.
The man who turns down the corner of the leaf of a book is not only fit
for treason, stratagems and spoils, but is well qualified to commit any
mean crime in the calendar. If his memory is so poor that he cannot
remember page or passage, let him make a small pencil note on the
margin. Such a note may readily be removed by an eraser, but a “dog’s
ear” can never be wholly removed. Its blight continues during the life
of the book. Now Boswell records this sickening fact: “I have seen
volumes of Dr. Young’s copy of _The Rambler_, in which he has marked the
passages which he thought particularly excellent, by folding down a
corner of the page, and such as he rated in a supereminent degree are
marked by double folds. I am sorry that some of the volumes are lost.” I
do not share in this sorrow; it is well that the testimony of such
brutality should be effaced. Double folds! Insatiate archer, would not
one suffice? Perhaps Johnson himself, Virginius-like, destroyed his
offspring thus shamelessly violated.
It is often difficult to get out of corners; but before I escape, let me
give to the dog’s-earing, nocturnally reflecting Young full credit for a
single utterance—“Joy flies monopolists,”—which proves that it was not
wholly in vain that he burned the midnight oil; for although he speaks
in the present tense, it is manifest that the spirit of prophecy was
strong within him. He looked ahead for more than a century and foresaw
the day when “grafters” might be glorified and exalted, debauchees
acclaimed us apostles of the people, and murderers feasted and honored,
but monopolists hated, shunned and abhorred as miscreants whose sins can
never be forgiven. Joyless indeed are those who dare to deprive their
fellow beings of the inborn right to equality in everything; for we hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and
equal,—that is to say, with the right to do just as they please, to till
the soil, to mine the earth, to invent the telegraph and the telephone,
to manufacture steel, and to construct railways, but not to do it so
well as to prevent any of the great people from doing the same thing.
The abandoned wretch who, by his despicable brains, his virtuous life,
and his pernicious industry, seeks to impair those rights in any degree,
however trifling, must be prepared to bid farewell to happiness and
contentment. If he is able to avoid the jail, it will be well for him to
seek refuge in some secluded spot; let us say, in a peaceful library
corner.