You are here

قراءة كتاب Books and Bookmen

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
Books and Bookmen

Books and Bookmen

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
المؤلف:
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 1


BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

BY
IAN MACLAREN

London
JAMES NISBET & CO. LIMITED
22 BERNERS STREET, W.
1912

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

They cannot be separated any more than sheep and a shepherd, but I am minded to speak of the bookman rather than of his books, and so it will be best at the outset to define the tribe.

It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many books, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which a gentleman’s library is not complete.  And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books, since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them.  It is the foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpenny edition.  The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos.  As he was to preside at a lecture I was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the rôle that night of a man who had been successful in business, but yet allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he desired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain imposing air that we should visit what he called “my library.”  Across the magnificence of the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner.  “There,” he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, “what do you think of that?” And that was without question a very large and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors.  Before I saw the doors I had no doubt about my host, but they were a seal upon my faith, for although a bookman is obliged to have one bit of glass in his garden for certain rare plants from Russia and Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white vellum lily upon which the air must not be allowed to blow, especially when charged with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates this conservatory, just as much as he loves its contents.  His contentment is to have the flowers laid out in open beds, where he can pluck a blossom at will.  As often as one sees the books behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked, then he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with them in the evening hours when the work of the day is done, but their jailer, who has bought them in the market-place for gold, and holds them in this foreign place by force.  It has seemed to me as if certain old friends looked out from their prison with appealing glance, and one has been tempted to break the glass and let, for instance, Elia go free.  It would be like the emancipation of a slave.  Elia was not, good luck for him, within this particular prison, and I was brought back from every temptation to break the laws of property by my chairman, who was still pursuing his catechism.  “What,” was question two, “do you think I paid for that?”  It was a hopeless catechism, for I had never possessed anything like that, and none of my friends had in their homes anything like that, and in my wildest moments I had never asked the price of such a thing as that.  As it loomed up before me in its speckless respectability and insolence of solid wealth my English sense of reverence for money awoke, and I confessed that this matter was too high for me; but even then, casting a glance of deprecation in its direction, I noticed that was almost filled by a single work, and I wondered what it could be.  “Cost £80 if it cost a penny, and I bought it second-hand in perfect condition for £17, 5s., with the books thrown in—All the Year Round from the beginning in half calf;” and then we returned in procession to the drawing-room, where my patron apologised for our absence, and explained that when two bookmen got together over books it was difficult to tear them away.  He was an admirable chairman, for he occupied no time with a review of literature in his address, and he slept without being noticed through mine (which is all I ask of a chairman), and so it may seem ungrateful, but in spite of “that” and any books, even Spenser and Chaucer, which that might have contained, this Mæcenas of an evening was not a bookman.

It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a pleasant anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having made his pile and bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to an old friend to send him out some chests of books, as many as he thought fit, and the best that he could find.  His friend was so touched by this sign of grace that he spent a month of love over the commission, and was vastly pleased when he sent off, in the best editions and in pleasant binding, the very essence of English literature.  It was a disappointment that the only acknowledgment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say that the consignment had arrived in good condition.  A year afterwards, so runs the story, he received a letter which was brief and to the point.  “Have been working over the books, and if anything new has been written by William Shakespeare or John Milton, please send it out.”  I believe this is mentioned as an instance of barbarism.  It cannot be denied that it showed a certain ignorance of the history of literature, which might be excused in a bushman, but it is also proved, which is much more important, that he had the smack of letters in him, for being turned loose without the guide of any training in this wide field, he fixed as by instinct on the two classics of the English tongue.  With the help of all our education, and all our reviews, could you and I have done better, and are we not every day, in our approval of unworthy books, doing very much worse?  Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time, some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity of some fantastic critic.

There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the commonwealth of bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the sign of the free-born is, that without critics to aid him, or the training of a University, he knows the difference between books which are so much printed stuff and a good book which is “the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit.”  The bookman will of course upon occasion trifle with various kinds of reading, and there is one member of the brotherhood who has a devouring thirst for detective stories, and has always been very grateful to the creator of Sherlock Holmes.  It is the merest pedantry for a man to defend himself with a shamed face for his light reading: it is enough that he should be able to distinguish between the books which come and go and those which remain.  So far as I remember, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and John Inglesant came out somewhat about the same time, and there were those of us who read them both; but while we thought the Hansom Cab a very ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves.  Certainly it is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Mayor of Casterbridge.  But some of us venture to think that in that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot through both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of

Pages