I have recently been in the throes of a double removal, and in the
course of the operation comments were made by one person or another
concerned in it on the prominence of books in my belongings. The
van-man, with a large experience of removals, paid the tribute of
astonishment at the spectacle, and the people who came to look at the
house gaped at the books as though they were the last thing they
expected to see in a decent suburban residence. Hitherto I had been
rather ashamed of my library. In the course of a longish life I have
accumulated some 2000 books. There is not much rubbish among them,
for I have thinned them out periodically, but there are shameful
blanks that are unfilled, and it had never occurred to me to think
that they formed an unusual collection for a middle-class household.
But the inquiries I have made since lead me to the conclusion that
they do, and that in the average suburban home the last thing that is
thought about is the furnishing of a library. People who will spend
many hundreds and even thousands of pounds in the course of years in
making their house beautiful never give a serious thought to books.
They will ransack London for suitable fittings, for rugs and
hangings, china and cut-glass, mirrors and what-nots, but the idea of
providing themselves with a moderate and well-selected library does
not occur to them. If they gather books at all they gather them
haphazard and without thought. A well-known publisher told me the
other day that he was recently asked to equip a library in a new
house in North London, and the instruction he received was to provide
books that would fit the shelves which had been fixed. It was not
the contents of the books that mattered, but the size.
This was no doubt an exceptional case, but it does represent
something of the attitude of the average man to books. People who
will spend one hundred and fifty pounds on a piano as a matter of
course will not spend ten pounds a year or even five pounds a year in
enriching their homes with all the best thought of all time. Go into
any average provincial town and the last thing you will find is a
decent book-shop. I recall more than one great industrial town of a
population of over a hundred thousand which has only one such shop,
and that is generally kept going by the sale of school-books. It is
not because we cannot afford to buy books. We spend two hundred
millions sterling a year on beer, and I doubt whether we spend two
hundred million pence on literature. Many people can afford to buy
motor-cars at anything from two hundred pounds who would be aghast at
the idea of spending half a guinea occasionally on a book. They
think so meanly of their minds as that.
Yet, merely as furniture, books are a cheaper and better decoration
than blue china or Chippendale chairs. They are better because they
put the signature of individuality upon a house. The taste for
Chippendale chairs and blue china may be a mere vanity, a piece of
coxcombry and ostentation, a fancy that represents, not a genuine
personal taste for beautiful things, but an artificial passion for
rare or expensive things. But a row of books will give a house
character and meaning. It will tell you about its owner. It is a
window let into the landscape of his life. When I go into a
stranger's library I wander round the bookshelves to learn what sort
of a person the stranger is, and when he comes in I feel that I know
the key to his mind and the range of his interests. A house without
books is a mindless and characterless house, no matter how rich the
Persian rugs and how elegant the settees and the ornaments. The
Persian rugs only tell you that the owner has got money, but the
books will tell you whether he has got a mind as well. I was staying
not long ago in a Northern town with a man who had a great house and
fine grounds, two or three motor-cars, a billiard-room, and a
multitude of other luxuries. The only thing he had not got was
books. And the effect left on the mind by all his splendours was
that he was pauper. "And where are your books?" asked a famous
bookman of my acquaintance who was being shown over a West-End palace
by the owner, who, in the last twenty years, had made a colossal
fortune. "In the City," was the plutocrat's unblushing reply. He
gloried in his poverty.
It is not a question of money. I repeat that books are the cheapest
as well as the best part of the equipment of a house. You can begin
your library with the expenditure of a couple of shillings. Nearly
all the best literature in the world is at your command at two
shillings a volume. For five pounds you can get a library of fifty
books which contain "riches fineless." Even if you don't read them
yourself, they are a priceless investment for your children. Holmes
used to say that it took three generations of sprawling in a library
to create a reading man; but I believe that any intelligent child who
stumbles upon, let us say, Herodotus or _Two Years Before the Mast_
or Prescott's _Conquest of Peru_, or any similar masterpiece, will be
caught by the glamour of books and will contract the reading habit
for life. And what habit is there to compare with it? What delight
is there like the revelation of books, the sudden impact of a
master-spirit, the sense of windows flung wide open to the universe?
It is these adventures of the mind, the joy of which does not pass
away, that give the adventure of life itself beauty and fragrance,
and make it
Rich as the oozy bottom of the deep,
With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries.