Captivity Waite never approved of my fondness for fairy literature.
She shared the enthusiasm which I expressed whenever "Robinson Crusoe"
was mentioned; there was just enough seriousness in De Foe's romance,
just enough piety to appeal for sympathy to one of Captivity Waite's
religious turn of mind. When it came to fiction involving witches,
ogres, and flubdubs, that was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of
the little Puritan revolted.
Yet I have the documentary evidence to prove that Captivity's ancestors
(both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as
abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined. The Waites of
Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and Sinai Higginbotham
(Captivity's great-great-grandfather on her mother's side of the
family) was Cotton Mather's boon companion, and rode around the gallows
with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young
women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little
children with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human thought is like
a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an
uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at
everything involving the play of fancy.
I felt harshly toward Captivity Waite for a time, but I harbor her no
ill-will now; on the contrary, I recall with very tender feelings the
distant time when our sympathies were the same and when we journeyed
the pathway of early youth in a companionship sanctified by the
innocence and the loyalty and the truth of childhood. Indeed, I am not
sure that that early friendship did not make a lasting impression upon
my life; I have thought of Captivity Waite a great many times, and I
have not unfrequently wondered what might have been but for that book
of fairy tales which my Uncle Cephas sent me.
She was a very pretty child, and she lost none of her comeliness and
none of her sweetness of character as she approached maturity. I was
impressed with this upon my return from college. She, too, had pursued
those studies deemed necessary to the acquirement of a good education;
she had taken a four years' course at South Holyoke and had finished at
Mrs. Willard's seminary at Troy. "You will now," said her father, and
he voiced the New England sentiment regarding young womanhood; "you
will now return to the quiet of your home and under the direction of
your mother study the performance of those weightier duties which
qualify your sex for a realization of the solemn responsibilities of
human life."
Three or four years ago a fine-looking young fellow walked in upon me
with a letter of introduction from his mother. He was Captivity
Waite's son! Captivity is a widow now, and she is still living in her
native State, within twenty miles of the spot where she was born.
Colonel Parker, her husband, left her a good property when he died, and
she is famous for her charities. She has founded a village library, and
she has written me on several occasions for advice upon proposed
purchases of books.
I don't mind telling you that I had a good deal of malicious pleasure
in sending her not long ago a reminder of old times in these words:
"My valued friend," I wrote, "I see by the catalogue recently published
that your village library contains, among other volumes representing
the modern school of fiction, eleven copies of 'Trilby' and six copies
of 'The Heavenly Twins.' I also note an absence of certain works whose
influence upon my earlier life was such that I make bold to send copies
of the same to your care in the hope that you will kindly present them
to the library with my most cordial compliments. These are a copy each
of the 'New England Primer' and Grimm's 'Household Stories.'"
At the age of twenty-three, having been graduated from college and
having read the poems of Villon, the confessions of Rousseau, and
Boswell's life of Johnson, I was convinced that I had comprehended the
sum of human wisdom and knew all there was worth knowing. If at the
present time--for I am seventy-two--I knew as much as I thought I knew
at twenty-three I should undoubtedly be a prodigy of learning and
wisdom.
I started out to be a philosopher. My grandmother's death during my
second year at college possessed me of a considerable sum of money and
severed every tie and sentimental obligation which had previously held
me to my grandmother's wish that I become a minister of the gospel.
When I became convinced that I knew everything I conceived a desire to
see something, for I had traveled none and I had met but few people.
Upon the advice of my Uncle Cephas, I made a journey to Europe, and
devoted two years to seeing sights and to acquainting myself with the
people and the customs abroad. Nine months of this time I spent in
Paris, which was then an irregular and unkempt city, but withal quite
as evil as at present. I took apartments in the Latin Quarter, and,
being of a generous nature, I devoted a large share of my income to the
support of certain artists and students whose talents and time were
expended almost exclusively in the pursuit of pleasure.
While thus serving as a visible means of support to this horde of
parasites, I fell in with the man who has since then been my intimate
friend. Judge Methuen was a visitor in Paris, and we became boon
companions. It was he who rescued me from the parasites and revived
the flames of honorable ambition, which had well-nigh been extinguished
by the wretched influence of Villon and Rousseau. The Judge was a year
my senior, and a wealthy father provided him with the means for
gratifying his wholesome and refined tastes. We two went together to
London, and it was during our sojourn in that capital that I began my
career as a collector of books. It is simply justice to my benefactor
to say that to my dear friend Methuen I am indebted for the inspiration
which started me upon a course so full of sweet surprises and precious
rewards.
There are very many kinds of book collectors, but I think all may be
grouped in three classes, viz.: Those who collect from vanity; those
who collect for the benefits of learning; those who collect through a
veneration and love for books. It is not unfrequent that men who begin
to collect books merely to gratify their personal vanity find
themselves presently so much in love with the pursuit that they become
collectors in the better sense.
Just as a man who takes pleasure in the conquest of feminine hearts
invariably finds himself at last ensnared by the very passion which he
has been using simply for the gratification of his vanity, I am
inclined to think that the element of vanity enters, to a degree, into
every phase of book collecting; vanity is, I take it, one of the
essentials to a well-balanced character--not a prodigious vanity, but a
prudent, well-governed one. But for vanity there would be no
competition in the world; without competition there would be no
progress.
In these later days I often hear this man or that sneered at because,
forsooth, he collects books without knowing what the books are about.
But for my part, I say that that man bids fair to be all right; he has
made a proper start in the right direction, and the likelihood is that,
other things being equal, he will eventually become a lover, as well as
a buyer, of books. Indeed, I care not what the beginning is, so long as
it be a beginning. There are different ways of reaching the goal.
Some folk go horseback via the royal road, but very many others are
compelled to adopt the more tedious processes, involving rocky pathways
and torn shoon and sore feet.
So subtile and so infectious is this grand passion that one is hardly
aware of its presence before it has complete possession of him; and I
have known instances of men who, after having associated one evening
with Judge Methuen and me, have waked up the next morning filled with
the incurable enthusiasm of bibliomania. But the development of the
passion is not always marked by exhibitions of violence; sometimes,
like the measles, it is slow and obstinate about "coming out," and in
such cases applications should be resorted to for the purpose of
diverting the malady from the vitals; otherwise serious results may
ensue.
Indeed, my learned friend Dr. O'Rell has met with several cases (as he
informs me) in which suppressed bibliomania has resulted fatally. Many
of these cases have been reported in that excellent publication, the
"Journal of the American Medical Association," which periodical, by the
way, is edited by ex-Surgeon-General Hamilton, a famous collector of
the literature of ornament and dress.
To make short of a long story, the medical faculty is nearly a unit
upon the proposition that wherever suppressed bibliomania is suspected
immediate steps should be taken to bring out the disease. It is true
that an Ohio physician, named Woodbury, has written much in defence of
the theory that bibliomania can be aborted; but a very large majority
of his profession are of the opinion that the actual malady must needs
run a regular course, and they insist that the cases quoted as cured by
Woodbury were not genuine, but were bastard or false phases, of the
same class as the chickenpox and the German measles.
My mania exhibited itself first in an affectation for old books; it
mattered not what the book itself was--so long as it bore an ancient
date upon its title-page or in its colophon I pined to possess it.
This was not only a vanity, but a very silly one. In a month's time I
had got together a large number of these old tomes, many of them
folios, and nearly all badly worm-eaten, and sadly shaken.
One day I entered a shop kept by a man named Stibbs, and asked if I
could procure any volumes of sixteenth-century print.
"Yes," said Mr. Stibbs, "we have a cellarful of them, and we sell them
by the ton or by the cord."
That very day I dispersed my hoard of antiques, retaining only my
Prynne's "Histrio-Mastix" and my Opera Quinti Horatii Flacci (8vo,
Aldus, Venetiis, 1501). And then I became interested in British
balladry--a noble subject, for which I have always had a veneration and
love, as the well-kept and profusely annotated volumes in cases 3, 6,
and 9 in the front room are ready to prove to you at any time you
choose to visit my quiet, pleasant home.
V