The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great as he is in many
directions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything
else, has been overheard mournfully to declare that there were more
booksellers' shops in his native town sixty years ago, when he was a boy
in it, than are to-day to be found within its boundaries. And yet the
place 'all unabashed' now boasts its bookless self a city!
Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither
he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a
new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though
surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the
term 'second-hand,' which other crafts have 'soiled to all ignoble use.'
But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are
necessarily second-hand. The writers of to-day need not grumble. Let
them 'bide a wee.' If their books are worth anything, they, too, one day
will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are
ancient trades still in full operation amongst us--the pastrycooks and
the trunkmakers--who must have paper.
But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody now buys books,
meaning thereby second-hand books? The late Mark Pattison, who had
16,000 volumes, and whose lightest word has therefore weight, once stated
that he had been informed, and verily believed, that there were men of
his own University of Oxford who, being in uncontrolled possession of
annual incomes of not less than 500 pounds, thought they were doing the
thing handsomely if they expended 50 pounds a year upon their libraries.
But we are not bound to believe this unless we like. There was a touch
of morosity about the late Rector of Lincoln which led him to take gloomy
views of men, particularly Oxford men.
No doubt arguments _a priori_ may readily be found to support the
contention that the habit of book-buying is on the decline. I confess to
knowing one or two men, not Oxford men either, but Cambridge men (and the
passion of Cambridge for literature is a by-word), who, on the plea of
being pressed with business, or because they were going to a funeral,
have passed a bookshop in a strange town without so much as stepping
inside 'just to see whether the fellow had anything.' But painful as
facts of this sort necessarily are, any damaging inference we might feel
disposed to draw from them is dispelled by a comparison of price-lists.
Compare a bookseller's catalogue of 1862 with one of the present year,
and your pessimism is washed away by the tears which unrestrainedly flow
as you see what _bonnes fortunes_ you have lost. A young book-buyer
might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan his youth, after
comparing old catalogues with new.
Nothing but American competition, grumble some old stagers.
Well! why not? This new battle for the books is a free fight, not a
private one, and Columbia has 'joined in.' Lower prices are not to be
looked for. The book-buyer of 1900 will be glad to buy at to-day's
prices. I take pleasure in thinking he will not be able to do so. Good
finds grow scarcer and scarcer. True it is that but a few short weeks
ago I picked up (such is the happy phrase, most apt to describe what was
indeed a 'street casualty') a copy of the original edition of _Endymion_
(Keats's poem--O subscriber to Mudie's!--not Lord Beaconsfield's novel)
for the easy equivalent of half-a-crown--but then that was one of my
lucky days. The enormous increase of booksellers' catalogues and their
wide circulation amongst the trade has already produced a hateful
uniformity of prices. Go where you will it is all the same to the odd
sixpence. Time was when you could map out the country for yourself with
some hopefulness of plunder. There were districts where the Elizabethan
dramatists were but slenderly protected. A raid into the 'bonnie North
Countrie' sent you home again cheered with chap-books and weighted with
old pamphlets of curious interests; whilst the West of England seldom
failed to yield a crop of novels. I remember getting a complete set of
the Bronte books in the original issues at Torquay, I may say, for
nothing. Those days are over. Your country bookseller is, in fact, more
likely, such tales does he hear of London auctions, and such catalogues
does he receive by every post, to exaggerate the value of his wares than
to part with them pleasantly, and as a country bookseller should, 'just
to clear my shelves, you know, and give me a bit of room.' The only
compensation for this is the catalogues themselves. You get _them_, at
least, for nothing, and it cannot be denied that they make mighty pretty
reading.
These high prices tell their own tale, and force upon us the conviction
that there never were so many private libraries in course of growth as
there are to-day.
Libraries are not made; they grow. Your first two thousand volumes
present no difficulty, and cost astonishingly little money. Given 400
pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course,
without undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround
himself with this number of books, all in his own language, and
thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is
possible to be happy. But pride is still out of the question. To be
proud of having two thousand books would be absurd. You might as well be
proud of having two top coats. After your first two thousand difficulty
begins, but until you have ten thousand volumes the less you say about
your library the better. _Then_ you may begin to speak.
It is no doubt a pleasant thing to have a library left you. The present
writer will disclaim no such legacy, but hereby undertakes to accept it,
however dusty. But good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to
collect one. Each volume then, however lightly a stranger's eye may roam
from shelf to shelf, has its own individuality, a history of its own. You
remember where you got it, and how much you gave for it; and your word
may safely be taken for the first of these facts, but not for the second.
The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate
himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.
No other man but he would have made precisely such a combination as his.
Had he been in any single respect different from what he is, his library,
as it exists, never would have existed. Therefore, surely he may
exclaim, as in the gloaming he contemplates the backs of his loved ones,
'They are mine, and I am theirs.'
But the eternal note of sadness will find its way even through the
keyhole of a library. You turn some familiar page, of Shakspeare it may
be, and his 'infinite variety,' his 'multitudinous mind,' suggests some
new thought, and as you are wondering over it you think of Lycidas, your
friend, and promise yourself the pleasure of having his opinion of your
discovery the very next time when by the fire you two 'help waste a
sullen day.' Or it is, perhaps, some quainter, tenderer fancy that
engages your solitary attention, something in Sir Philip Sydney or Henry
Vaughan, and then you turn to look for Phyllis, ever the best interpreter
of love, human or divine. Alas! the printed page grows hazy beneath a
filmy eye as you suddenly remember that Lycidas is dead--'dead ere his
prime'--and that the pale cheek of Phyllis will never again be relumined
by the white light of her pure enthusiasm. And then you fall to thinking
of the inevitable, and perhaps, in your present mood, not unwelcome hour,
when the 'ancient peace' of your old friends will be disturbed, when rude
hands will dislodge them from their accustomed nooks and break up their
goodly company.
'Death bursts amongst them like a shell,
And strews them over half the town.'
They will form new combinations, lighten other men's toil, and soothe
another's sorrow. Fool that I was to call anything _mine_!
_Elliot Stock_, _Paternoster Row_, _London_.
Footnotes:
{27} See note to Mitford's _Milton_, vol. i., clii.
{59} Not Horace Walpole's opinion. 'Sir Joshua Reynolds has lent me Dr.
Johnson's _Life of Pope_, which Sir Joshua holds to be a _chef d'oeuvre_.
It is a most trumpery performance, and stuffed with all his crabbed
phrases and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.'--_Letters_, vol.
viii., p. 26.
{65} Howell's _State Trials_, vol. xvii., p. 159.
{76} In _Oxford Essays_ for 1858.
{79} _Lectures and Essays on University Subjects_: Lecture on
Literature.
{101} "The late Mr. Carlyle was a brute and a boor."--_The World_,
October 29th, 1884.
{102} In the first edition, by a strange and distressing freak of the
imagination, I took the 'old struggler' out of Lockhart and put her into
Boswell.
{117} Anyone who does not wish this story to be true, will find good
reasons for disbelieving it stated in Mr. Napier's edition of Boswell,
vol. iv., p. 385.
{159} All the difficulties connected with this subject will be found
collected, and somewhat unkindly considered, in Mr. Dilke's _Papers of a
Critic_, vol. ii. The equity draughtsman will be indisposed to attach
importance to statements made in a Bill of Complaint filed in Chancery by
Lord Verney against Burke fourteen years after the transaction to which
it had reference, in a suit which was abandoned after answer put in. But,
in justice to a deceased plaintiff, it should be remembered that in those
days a defendant could not be cross-examined upon his sworn answer.
{178} _Critical Miscellanies_, vol. iii., p. 9.
{189} 'I will answer you by quoting what I have read somewhere or other,
in Dionysius Halicarnassensis I think, that history is philosophy
teaching by examples.' See Lord Bolingbroke's _Second Letter on the
Study and Use of History_.
{204} _The Works of Charles Lamb_. Edited, with notes and introduction,
by the Rev. Alfred Ainger. Three volumes. London: 1883-5.
{218} See _Life of Emerson_, by O. W. Holmes.
{221} The institution referred to was the Eucharist.
{244} Yet in his essay _On Londoners and Country People_ we find Hazlitt
writing: 'London is the only place in which the child grows completely up
into the man. I have known characters of this kind, which, in the way of
childish ignorance and self-pleasing delusion, exceeded anything to be
met with in Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, or the Old Comedy.'
{255} This passage was written before Mr. Browning's 'Parleyings' had
appeared. Christopher is now 'a person of importance,' and needs no
apology.
{256} _The Prelude_, p. 55.