Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and Lockhart's "Life of Scott" are accepted
as the models of biography. The third remarkable performance in this
line is Mrs. Gordon's memoir of her father, John Wilson, a volume so
charmingly and tenderly written as to be of interest to those even who
know and care little about that era in the history of English
literature in which "crusty Christopher" and his associates in the
making of "Blackwood's" figured.
It is a significant fact, I think, that the three greatest biographers
the world has known should have been Scotch; it has long been the
fashion to laugh and to sneer at what is called Scotch dulness; yet
what prodigies has not Scotch genius performed in every department of
literature, and would not our literature be poor indeed to-day but for
the contributions which have been made to it by the very people whom we
affect to deride?
John Wilson was one of the most interesting figures of a time when
learning was at a premium; he was a big man amongst big men, and even
in this irreverential time genius uncovers at the mention of his name.
His versatility was astounding; with equal facility and felicity he
could conduct a literary symposium and a cock-fight, a theological
discussion and an angling expedition, a historical or a political
inquiry and a fisticuffs.
Nature had provided him with a mighty brain in a powerful body; he had
a physique equal to the performance of what suggestion soever his
splendid intellectuals made. To him the incredible feat of walking
seventy miles within the compass of a day was mere child's play; then,
when the printer became clamorous, he would immure himself in his
wonderful den and reel off copy until that printer cried "Hold;
enough!" It was no unusual thing for him to write for thirteen hours
at a stretch; when he worked he worked, and when he played he
played--that is perhaps the reason why he was never a dull boy.
Wilson seems to have been a procrastinator. He would put off his task
to the very last moment; this is a practice that is common with
literary men--in fact, it was encouraged by those who were regarded as
authorities in such matters anciently. Ringelbergius gave this advice
to an author under his tuition:
"Tell the printers," said he, "to make preparations for a work you
intend writing, and never alarm yourself about it because it is not
even begun, for, after having announced it you may without difficulty
trace out in your own head the whole plan of your work and its
divisions, after which compose the arguments of the chapters, and I can
assure you that in this manner you may furnish the printers daily with
more copy than they want. But, remember, when you have once begun
there must be no flagging till the work is finished."
The loyalty of human admiration was never better illustrated than in
Shelton Mackenzie's devotion to Wilson's genius. To Mackenzie we are
indebted for a compilation of the "Noctes Ambrosianae," edited with
such discrimination, such ability, such learning, and such enthusiasm
that, it seems to me, the work must endure as a monument not only to
Wilson's but also to Mackenzie's genius.
I have noticed one peculiarity that distinguishes many admirers of the
Noctes: they seldom care to read anything else; in the Noctes they find
a response to the demand of every mood. It is much the same way with
lovers of Father Prout. Dr. O'Rell divides his adoration between old
Kit North and the sage of Watergrass Hill. To be bitten of either
mania is bad enough; when one is possessed at the same time of a
passion both for the Noctes and for the Reliques hopeless indeed is his
malady! Dr. O'Rell is so deep under the spell of crusty Christopher
and the Corkonian pere that he not only buys every copy of the Noctes
and of the Reliques he comes across, but insists upon giving copies of
these books to everybody in his acquaintance. I have even known him to
prescribe one or the other of these works to patients of his.
I recall that upon one occasion, having lost an Elzevir at a book
auction, I was afflicted with melancholia to such a degree that I had
to take to my bed. Upon my physician's arrival he made, as is his
custom, a careful inquiry into my condition and into the causes
inducing it. Finally, "You are afflicted," said Dr. O'Rell, "with the
megrims, which, fortunately, is at present confined to the region of
the Pacchionian depressions of the sinister parietal. I shall
administer Father Prout's 'Rogueries of Tom Moore' (pronounced More)
and Kit North's debate with the Ettrick Shepherd upon the subject of
sawmon. No other remedy will prove effective."
The treatment did, in fact, avail me, for within forty-eight hours I
was out of bed, and out of the house; and, what is better yet, I picked
up at a bookstall, for a mere song, a first edition of "Special
Providences in New England"!
Never, however, have I wholly ceased to regret the loss of the Elzevir,
for an Elzevir is to me one of the most gladdening sights human eye can
rest upon. In his life of the elder Aldus, Renouard says: "How few
are there of those who esteem and pay so dearly for these pretty
editions who know that the type that so much please them are the work
of Francis Garamond, who cast them one hundred years before at Paris."
In his bibliographical notes (a volume seldom met with now) the learned
William Davis records that Louis Elzevir was the first who observed the
distinction between the v consonant and the u vowel, which distinction,
however, had been recommended long before by Ramus and other writers,
but had never been regarded. There were five of these Elzevirs, viz.:
Louis, Bonaventure, Abraham, Louis, Jr., and Daniel.
A hundred years ago a famous bibliophile remarked: "The diminutiveness
of a large portion, and the beauty of the whole, of the classics
printed by the Elzevirs at Leyden and Amsterdam have long rendered them
justly celebrated, and the prices they bear in public sales
sufficiently demonstrate the estimation in which they are at present
held."
The regard for these precious books still obtains, and we meet with it
in curiously out-of-the-way places, as well as in those libraries where
one would naturally expect to find it. My young friend Irving Way
(himself a collector of rare enthusiasm) tells me that recently during
a pilgrimage through the state of Texas he came upon a gentleman who
showed him in his modest home the most superb collection of Elzevirs he
had ever set eyes upon!
How far-reaching is thy grace, O bibliomania! How good and sweet it is
that no distance, no environment, no poverty, no distress can appall or
stay thee. Like that grim spectre we call death, thou knockest
impartially at the palace portal and at the cottage door. And it
seemeth thy especial delight to bring unto the lonely in desert places
the companionship that exalteth humanity!
It makes me groan to think of the number of Elzevirs that are lost in
the libraries of rich parvenus who know nothing of and care no thing
for the treasures about them further than a certain vulgar vanity which
is involved. When Catherine of Russia wearied of Koritz she took to
her affection one Kimsky Kossakof, a sergeant in the guards. Kimsky
was elated by this sudden acquisition of favor and riches. One of his
first orders was to his bookseller. Said he to that worthy: "Fit me
up a handsome library; little books above and great ones below."
It is narrated of a certain British warrior that upon his retirement
from service he bought a library en bloc, and, not knowing any more
about books than a peccary knows of the harmonies of the heavenly
choir, he gave orders for the arrangement of the volumes in this wise:
"Range me," he quoth, "the grenadiers (folios) at the bottom, the
battalion (octavos) in the middle, and the light-bobs (duodecimos) at
the top!"
Samuel Johnson, dancing attendance upon Lord Chesterfield, could hardly
have felt his humiliation more keenly than did the historian Gibbon
when his grace the Duke of Cumberland met him bringing the third volume
of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to the ducal mansion.
This history was originally printed in quarto; Gibbon was carrying the
volume and anticipating the joy of the duke upon its arrival. What did
the duke say? "What?" he cried. "Ah, another ---- big square book,
eh?"
It is the fashion nowadays to harp upon the degeneracy of humanity; to
insist that taste is corrupted, and that the faculty of appreciation is
dead. We seem incapable of realizing that this is the golden age of
authors, if not the golden age of authorship.
In the good old days authors were in fact a despised and neglected
class. The Greeks put them to death, as the humor seized them. For a
hundred years after his death Shakespeare was practically unknown to
his countrymen, except Suckling and his coterie: during his life he was
roundly assailed by his contemporaries, one of the latter going to the
extreme of denouncing him as a daw that strutted in borrowed plumage.
Milton was accused of plagiarism, and one of his critics devoted many
years to compiling from every quarter passages in ancient works which
bore a similarity to the blind poet's verses. Even Samuel Johnson's
satire of "London" was pronounced a plagiarism.
The good old days were the days, seemingly, when the critics had their
way and ran things with a high hand; they made or unmade books and
authors. They killed Chatterton, just as, some years later, they
hastened the death of Keats. For a time they were all-powerful. It
was not until the end of the eighteenth century that these professional
tyrants began to lose their grip, and when Byron took up the lance
against them their doom was practically sealed.
Who would care a picayune in these degenerate days what Dr. Warburton
said pro or con a book? It was Warburton (then Bishop of Gloucester)
who remarked of Granger's "Biographical History of England" that it was
"an odd one." This was as high a compliment as he ever paid a book;
those which he did not like he called sad books, and those which he
fancied he called odd ones.
The truth seems to be that through the diffusion of knowledge and the
multiplicity and cheapness of books people generally have reached the
point in intelligence where they feel warranted in asserting their
ability to judge for themselves. So the occupation of the critic, as
interpreted and practised of old, is gone.
Reverting to the practice of lamenting the degeneracy of humanity, I
should say that the fashion is by no means a new one. Search the
records of the ancients and you will find the same harping upon the one
string of present decay and former virtue. Herodotus, Sallust, Caesar,
Cicero, and Pliny take up and repeat the lugubrious tale in turn.
Upon earth there are three distinct classes of men: Those who
contemplate the past, those who contemplate the present, those who
contemplate the future. I am of those who believe that humanity
progresses, and it is my theory that the best works of the past have
survived and come down to us in these books which are our dearest
legacies, our proudest possessions, and our best-beloved companions.