Obiter Dicta Part 11

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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 compet.i.tion, 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 'mult.i.tudinous 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 Halicarna.s.sensis 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sage 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.