ii.
as wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding and many civil virtues be imported into our minds from foreign writings.—milton.
it is pleasant to take down one of the magicians of the shelf, to annihilate my neighbor and his evening parties, and to wander off through quiet country lanes into some sleepy hollow of the past.—cornhill magazine, rambles among books.
t was held by disraeli that literature is in no wise injured by the bibliophile, since though the worthless may be preserved, the good is necessarily protected, he no doubt having in mind the death of the collector and subsequent sale of his library. for though the bibliophile may stint his family and hoard his golden leaves and tooling, at least he abhors dog’s-ears and keeps his treasures clean. la bruyère, who gave us the delightful maxim, “we only write in order to be heard, but in writing we should only let beautiful things be heard,” 226referred to these accumulations as “tanneries,” condemning fine bindings, one of the few false dogmas uttered by the sprightly, entertaining author of les caractères. fine bindings not only preserve but beautify fine books; and to the sentiment of la bruyère i prefer that of jules janin: “il faut à l’homme sage et studieux un tome honorable et digne de sa louange.” (“the wise and studious man should have a volume worthy of his praise.”)
in edouard rouveyre’s instructive and beautifully-printed manual on bibliography, the question of bindings is summed up in a sentence, fine bindings naturally referring to books that are worthy of beautiful and permanent coverings: “binding is to typography what this is to the other arts; the one transmits to posterity the works of the scholar, the other preserves the typographical production for him.... the binding of the amateur,” he continues, “should be rich without ostentation, solid without heaviness, always in harmony with the work that it adorns, of great finish in its workmanship, of exact execution in the smallest details, with neat lines, and a strongly conceived design.”[17]
17. connaissances nécessaires à un bibliophile, par edouard rouveyre, troisième edition. paris, ed. rouveyre et g. blond, 1883, 2 vols.
227“the binding of a book,” the right honorable w. e. gladstone succinctly observes, “is the dress with which it walks out into the world. the paper, type, and ink are the body in which its soul is domiciled. and these three, soul, body, and habiliment, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense.” nor should the book-lover neglect to carry out the rules relative to binding laid down by octave uzanne in his caprices d’un bibliophile: “a book should be bound according to its spirit, according to the epoch in which it was published, according to the value you attach to it and the use you expect to make of it; it should announce itself by its exterior, by the gay, striking, lively, dull, somber, or variegated tone of its accoutrement.”
with regard to the book-cases themselves, their height should depend upon that of the ceilings, and on the number of one’s volumes. for classification and reference, it is more convenient to have numerous small cases of similar or nearly similar size and the same general style of construction than a few large cases in which everything is engulfed. with small or medium-sized receptacles, each one may contain volumes relating to certain departments or different languages, as the case may be; by 228this means a volume and its kindred may be readily found. thus one, or a portion of one, may be devoted to bibliography, another to the philosophers, another to poetical works, another to foreign literature, another to reference works, another to books relating to nature, art, etc.
the style and color of the bindings, also, may subserve a similar purpose; as, for instance, the poets in yellow or orange, books on nature in olive, the philosophers in blue, the french classics in red, etc. unless methodically arranged, even with a very small library, a volume is often difficult to turn to when desired for immediate consultation, requiring tedious search, especially if the volumes are arranged upon the shelves with respect to size and outward symmetry. this may be avoided by the use of small book-cases and a defined style of binding. i refer to the general style of binding; variety in bindings is always pleasing, and very many books one procures already bound and wishes to retain in the original covers. books, moreover, which are in constant or frequent use should not be placed in too tender colors. volumes become virtually lost and inaccessible in the vast walnut sarcophagi in which they are frequently entombed, and lose the attractive look they possess when more compactly enshrined. above all things, 229the book-case should be artistic, artistically plain, except for the richness of the carving. black walnut i should banish, unless employed exclusively for somber old folios, to accentuate their antiquity. neither the library nor the study should appear morose or exhale an atmosphere of gloom.
in a room ten and a half to eleven feet high, five feet is a desirable height for the book-cases. besides the drawers at the base, this will afford space for four rows of books, to include octavos, duodecimos, and smaller volumes. in some of the cases three shelves may be placed—the shelves, of course, should be shifting—to include folios, large quartos, and octavos. where the ceilings are twelve feet high, six feet is a better proportion, this height affording five or four shelves, according to the size of the volumes. by leaving the top of the book-case twelve to thirteen inches wide, ample space will be allowed for additional small books, porcelains, and bric-à-brac. it must be borne in mind that tall book-cases, in addition to the inaccessibility of the volumes on the upper shelves, leave little if any space for pictures on the walls above them; and that, though books assuredly furnish and lend an air of refinement to an apartment, they still require the relief and complement of other decorative objects.
230the cultured business man who may have the taste but lacks the time for extensive reading, the average man or woman who reads for recreation, may derive more benefit from a small library comprised of the best books carefully chosen than from the average large library. “quid prosunt innumerabiles libri quorum dominus vix totâ vitâ suâ indices perlegit?” (“of what use is an innumerable quantity of volumes whose owner may scarcely read the titles during his lifetime?”) seneca justly reasoned. it is not so much the dinner of innumerable courses as a few dishes well prepared. except to those who read quickly and assimilate readily, the large library is apt to consist for the most part of “uncut edges” in the layman’s sense of the term.
a good library is rarely suddenly formed. moreover, if it could be, it were not half as satisfactory as a library added to by degrees, the growth and gradual increase of years. again, some of the works that were considered a rare treat half a century since are no longer a treat to-day. they have become old-fashioned in the same sense as a garment. the critical eighteenth-century essay in its entirety, the old style metaphysical airing of some pet hobby, or didactic wool-drawing now seem rather ponderous productions. at present one does not even care to read all of the joint productions of 231addison and steele (particularly the latter’s essays), an averment that would have placed one under a ban twenty years ago. yet even in johnson’s day the rambler was more extolled than perused, the publisher complaining that the encouragement as to sale was not in proportion to the raptures expressed by those who read it.
with the increasing pyramids of books, selection must become proportionately more and more restricted. equally is this the case with poetry. many of the ancient bards still figure in the editions of the english poets—only to sun their gilded backs on the library shelves and seldom have their pages turned. it were absurd to assert that the spectator and numerous other productions of a former day will ever become closed volumes. curiosity, and their fame also, would always cause them to be read by futurity did not their merit preclude the possibility of their ever sinking into oblivion. it is very probable, however, that at no distant day many of the immortals will exist in abridged editions. some authors, like montaigne, on the other hand, can never be cut down; their redundancies and embroideries are their charm.
to our forefathers time was more lenient than it is to us. somehow the days and the nights were longer, and the old-time reader appeared to find more leisure 232and a brighter oil with which to pursue his literary browsings and point his antitheses. “there is a certain want of ease about the old writers,” alexander smith remarks (and i recall no one who has expressed it so musically before), “which has an irresistible charm. the language flows like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet recoil—the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to the surface and breaking the whole into babbling music.”
“when i looked into one of these old volumes,” thoreau characteristically says, “it affected me like looking into an inaccessible swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. those old books suggested a certain fertility, an ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. i heard the bellowing of bull-frogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when i had closed the book. decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”
in this age of hurry and concentration who has the time to wade through the hundred volumes of voltaire? it is even a task to go through his anthology, élite de poésies fugitives, in the pretty little two-volume 233cazin edition, there are so many more shells than pearls. but one’s time is well repaid after all, if only for the sake of finding and holding one such exquisite bit of airy verse as m. bernard’s le hameau. is it original, or a translation? the german poet gottfried bürger’s das doerfchen and this are one and the same, except that the latter is somewhat condensed, though equally beautiful. following m. bernard’s idyl is a panegyric in verse by voltaire addressed to m. berger, “who sent him the preceding stanzas,” voltaire’s tribute beginning:
de ton bernard
j’aime l’esprit.
c’est la peinture
de la nature.
bernard, berger, and bürger; or bürger, berger, and bernard would at first sight seem to be in a tangle. but in rendering to cæsar the things that are cæsar’s,
i praise my dear
sweet village here,
undoubtedly should be returned to the german poet.
in the case of nearly every prolific author some few volumes represent his finest thought. i grant every one has or should have a favorite author, one who stands to him on a higher pedestal than all others,—an author whom he reveres and loves, and 234who must be read in every line that was the emanation of his brain. but for one to read every page of thackeray, bulwer, goethe, dumas, and the host of celebrated romancists, poets, essayists, and philosophers, delightful and instructive though they be, is a simple impossibility.
to return to the change in literary taste, and to instance a marked example, consider wilson, or christopher north. “fusty christopher,” tennyson termed this pompous arbiter elegantiarum. the tables have been turned since the editor of blackwood reviled the poet-laureate, and the animus of the criticism on tennyson might now be applied to its stultified author. what magazine of the present could be induced to publish north’s rhapsodies? an installment would seriously damage the atlantic, scribner’s, or even maga itself. how tiresome his ceaseless alliteration, his deluge of adjectives, his stream of similes, his invective, his bathos!
many portions of the noctes, it is true, are marvels of imagination and erudition, and some of his angling conceits are worthy of norman macleod. others, especially his selections as collected and published by himself under the title of the recreations, are crusted over with algæ of self-conceit. it is the peacock who consciously struts. pepys’s reiterated “i” and quaint egotism 235are never tiresome; wilson’s pompous first person plural becomes a weariness. they used to give us baxter’s saints’ rest to parse, in the olden school days, and i could not help but think that if the saints had such a horrible time, how fortunate it was we lived in a more advanced period. no doubt the schoolmaster might have given us worse books to parse; and, unquestionably, we should be duly grateful that the recreations were not included. from the a priori to the a posteriori would have been so much harder sailing! has not even the long-spun panorama of the seasons lost something of its charm? or, rather, should it not be read in an old edition?
good editions of good books, though they may often be expensive, can not be too highly commended. one can turn to a page in inviting letterpress so much easier than to a page of an unattractive volume. the fine shades of meaning stand out more clearly, and the thought is revealed more intelligibly when clothed in fitting typographical garb. often it becomes a positive labor to follow many a pleasing author in the small or worn types and poor paper with which the publisher mercilessly thrusts him into the world. the reader has virtually to work his passage through the pages and take frequent rests by the way.
236poor illustrating is even worse. who may appreciate the beauties of the talking oak in the edition where olivia is portrayed in the act of kissing a giant bole whose girth scarcely equals her own? one must ever afterward associate an oak with a fat olivia. apparently the artist never read sir thomas wyatt:
a face that should content me wondrous well
should not be fair, but lovely to behold,
or william browne:
what best i lov’de was beauty of the mind,
and that lodgd in a temple truely faire.
how dreadful, too, are many of the works illustrated by cruikshank and crowquill, which some profess to set such store by because they are held at such a premium by the book dealers!
nearly as reprehensible as poor illustrating is pilloring the unfortunate author in the stocks of some atrocious color that must develop a cataract if gazed at long and fixedly. “i have been well-nigh ruined by the binder!” exclaimed one of the bright writers and literarians of the day; and before attempting to read one of his most entertaining volumes i stripped it of its frightful garb and clothed it in becoming attire. otherwise one might not follow the ideas, the glaring blue and hideous figure of the original cover asserted themselves so strongly.
237one should always endeavor to procure a good edition to start with; it is inconvenient to change editions. you come to associate certain favorite passages of a well-conned author with their place upon certain pages, so that you may instantly turn to them. the passages look strange to you in strange types, and you almost require to be introduced anew. with a change of page the mere thought itself remains the same, only it seems to have altered its expression. let those who will, prate about a thought being a thought wherever it may exist. some thoughts there are so airy and delicate they require to be read by one’s self—they lose a portion of their fragrance if repeated or obtained second hand. they should be savored by the eye and heard only by the inner ear. “the dark line” of the sun-dial “stealing imperceptibly on—for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by”—is more sharply defined upon the page of the old benchers of the inner temple, the page where i first saw it, than it can ever appear to me upon any other page. again, many flowers one enjoys most upon the uncut stalk. they may not be plucked and retain the full aroma they distill amid their natural surroundings. so that a quoted sentence from want of 238connection often loses much of the charm it presents upon the author’s page. and yet, on the other hand, quotation, when judiciously employed, not unfrequently places the author quoted in his most favorable light, while forming equally a pleasing complement to the page of the writer himself. montaigne’s fleurons of citation, woven from his scholastic and inexhaustible loom, what were the essays without them?—limpid brooks and springs ever pouring their sparkling waters into the meandering, smooth-flowing river of the text. merely by the change of type, quotation relieves the monotony of the page, while, with great writers, apt citation lends added emphasis and beauty to the thought, just as the art of damascening enriches a fine blade.
good editions are everything in reading. even the fragrant mint of lamb possesses a heightened pungency to me when gathered along the cool, broad margins of a london imprint. not only the mind through the personality or charm of the thought expressed, and the ear through the harmony and lucidness of the style with which it is uttered; but equally the eye, in the outward garb with which the thought is clothed, should be gratified in reading a beautiful book. the printer it is who contributes the finishing touches and heightens the reflective 239surface. elia’s buoyant, playful graces have, perhaps, received their most exquisite and appropriate setting in the two little volumes of the temple library, printed by the chiswick press, the smaller being preferable to the large-paper edition.
it is pleasant to have some authors both in an early and a late edition. if i desire the notes, the full-page illustrations, and an amplified text, i choose the edition of the complete angler illustrated by stothard and inskipp and annotated by sir harris nicholas. if i wish to get still nearer walton—to hear more plainly his birds contending with the echo, to pluck his culverkees and ladysmocks, to smell his primroses, and admire the very “shape and enameled color of the trout it joyed him so to look upon,” i read him in the old spelling and old font of the fac-simile reprint of the first edition. moreover, for the sake of making comparisons, it is often desirable to have an early as well as a late edition of a favorite author. so subtle, indeed, are the niceties of reading they may scarcely be defined. how delightful the mere cutting of the edges of the book one longs to read, and the occasional dip into the pages as you turn the leaves!
of a few favorite authors it is desirable to possess two copies, one in an inexpensive form to take when traveling. a trunk-maker 240is yet to appear who will contrive an apartment that will enable one to pack books so they may receive no possible injury—the one thing addison’s trunk-maker of the upper gallery neglected. besides, apart from the friction in its receptacle, a valuable book is liable to other injuries, or loss while traveling. the traveling volume should be small, securely bound, light in the hand, and not too bulky for the pocket.
but an old book of all books for true delight! the pleasure of reading chaucer or spenser is doubled by the types and the associations of the past. the foxed and faded pages are like the rust on antique bronzes, the lichens on an old wall.
in the preface to wheatley’s the dedication of books reference is made to this fascination which is conferred by an ancient font upon an ancient page. “there is,” remarks the author, “a delicate flavor of antiquity and a certain quaint charm in the old print of the books from which many of the dedications have been drawn that seems to depart when the same sentences are printed in modern type, and we are apt sometimes to wonder what it was that we originally admired. the bouquet has fled while we were in the act of removing the cork from the bottle.” present, too, with the charm of the olden page itself is the thought of who may have first turned the 241pages when the book you are reading was in its fresh and spotless leaf, and whose hand it was that traced the annotations which embroider its margins.
to revert in parentheses to the sun-dial, mrs. gatty’s monograph, recently republished and extended,[18] contains thousands of mottoes and references to the clock of nature taken from numerous languages, but none equal to lamb’s apostrophe. so far as references to the passage of time are concerned, there can be none more expressive than ronsard’s lines:
18. the book of sun-dials. collected by mrs. alfred gatty. new and enlarged edition. london: george bell and sons, 1889. pp. viii, 502.
le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame!
las! le temps non: mais nous nous en allons.[19]
19.
time goes, you say? ah, no!
alas, time stays, we go!
(austin dobson’s translation.)
singularly, the beautiful sonnet in which these lines occur was one which had been cast aside by ronsard from the later editions of his works, and was only reprinted in buon’s edition of 1609. still more singular it seems that the “prince of poets” should have remained comparatively unappreciated for two centuries until reintroduced by st. beuve. am i mistaken in thinking there is a pronounced resemblance 242between this sonnet and shakespeare’s “when i do count the clock that tells the time”?
chaucer’s—
for tho’ we sleep, or wake, or rome, or ride,
ay fleeth the time, it will no man abide,
and spenser’s—
make hast, therefore, sweet love, whilst it is prime,
for none can call again the passèd time,
are as fine as any of the allusions by the classic poets who have festooned and intertwined the passing hour with rosebuds and asphodels.
i find the book of sun-dials a delightful volume to take up when in a meditative mood. it needs, withal, a still room and a still hour to be read in, an environing quietness like the whisper of the gnomon itself. then rambling through the pages, the present becomes absorbed by the past as you muse over the icons of the dials and moralize upon the quaint inscriptions. transcribed in large italic type, the mottoes stand out with the vividness of an epitaph graven upon a tomb, voices from posterity preaching from the perennial text:
as time and houres passeth awaye
so doeth the life of man decaye.
often as you contemplate the time-posts and their intaglios do they absorb the attention 243afresh, casting new shades of meaning from the sentient styles. they transport you into gardens where old-fashioned flowers and historic yew-trees grow, they conduct you through old churchyards among neglected graves, they deliver their homilies from weather-beaten walls, and their pathos appeals from many an ancient sanctuary and moss-grown lintel. how noiselessly, how serenely they mark the flight of time! it is time itself inaudibly counting the hours; the day suavely balancing its silent periods. they mirror primitive time, removed from the present turmoil, when the sun was the pendulum and the shadow the index-hand. associated with nature by ties the most endearing, by the golden sunshine, the murmuring breeze, and the songs of birds, the dial becomes, as it were, a reflective facet of external nature in her gracious moods, its very shadow representing sunlight, the sunlight absent where the shadow is not. the sun-dial has molded itself to grace, and with rare exceptions its mottoes are happily chosen, attesting hours of meditation in forming an epigram or shaping a poetic fancy to blend with the shifting shadow. certainly many of the sentiments collated in the monograph referred to are of more than passing interest. their pathos and their quaintness set one dreaming.
244among the many inscriptions which arrested me while first turning the leaves, a few may be appended without, i trust, fatiguing the reader. let her or him moralize a moment, and consider life from the standpoint of the dial, now grave, now gay; now lively, now severe. though time hurries mankind it has apparently not hurried the dials in choosing their inscriptions. it is rather a case of festina lente than hora fugit. some are as terse as an epigram of martial or a proverb from job; others sweet as a hymn of watts or a stanza from the temple. thus, light and shadow are felicitously blended in the tale a dial tells on a house at wadsley, near sheffield, the moralist preaching from a niche in the wall:
of shade and sunshine for each hour
see here a measure made:
then wonder not if life consist
of sunshine and of shade.
i mark the moments trod for
good or ill
has been the burden of the vertical dial at the priory, warwick, since 1556.
lifes but a shadow
mans but dust
this dyall sayes
dy all we must
says the dial on the church of all saints, winkleigh, devon.
245i am a shadow, so art thou
i mark time, dost thou?
is inscribed on an old horologium in the grey friars’ churchyard, sterling.
sweetly fragrant are the lines incised on the four sides of a stone dial in a flower-garden at south windleham:
i stand amid ye summere flowers
to tell ye passage of ye houres.
when winter steals ye flowers awaye
i tell ye passinge of their daye.
o man whose flesh is but as grasse
like summere floweres thy life shall passe.
whiles tyme is thine laye up in store
and thou shalt live for ever more.
pretty, also, are the lines by james montgomery beneath a vertical dial in burneston, yorkshire:
time from the church tower cries to you and me,
upon this moment hangs eternity:
the dial’s index and the belfry’s chime
to eye and ear confirm this truth of time.
prepare to meet it; death will not delay;
take then thy saviour’s warning—watch and pray!
one of the mottoes has an echo of sidney:
time as he passes us has a dove’s wing
unsoiled and swift, and of a silken sound.
“the night cometh” is neatly amplified upon a plate that supports a cross sun-dial on a stone pedestal upon the terrace of the hospital of st. cross, rugby:
246the passing shadows which the sunbeams throw
athwart this cross, time’s hastening foot-steps show;
warned by their teaching work ere day be o’er,
soon comes the night when man can work no more.
one motto reads unam time (fear one hour); another, unam timeo (one hour i fear). two others read, heu quærimus umbram, heu patimus umbram (alas! we pursue a shadow), (alas! we endure the shadow). eheu fugaces is marked upon a yorkshire plate, and labuntur anni on burnham church, somerset. the shortest mottoes are redeme, j’avance, remember, irrevocabile. a beautiful stone sun-dial still casts its shadow in the old garden of gilbert white, and is figured in macmillan’s edition of the natural history of selborne. this is not mentioned in mrs. gatty’s comprehensive work, and i can not determine from the illustration whether it bears a motto. each to his task, taken from white’s invitation would be an appropriate inscription.
one of the quaintest inscriptions mentioned in the book of sun-dials is that which looks from the wall of a church at argentière, near vallouse. it was scarcely composed in an hour, and loses much in the translation:
cette montre par son ombre montre
que comme l’ombre passent nos jours.
247(this marker marks by its shadow that our days pass away like a shadow).
there is much of moral coloring in these two lines:
haste traveller, the sun is sinking low
he shall return again, but never thou.
and is this not altogether lovely?
give god thy heart, thy hopes, thy gifts, thy gold,
the day wears on, the times are waxing old.
and so one might go on quoting the old moral, shadowed by different texts. perhaps sterne expresses it as pithily as any epigrammatist, “life” being but another term for time: “what is the life of man! is it not to shift from side to side? from sorrow to sorrow? to button up one cause of vexation, and unbutton another?” but sterne deals with the shadow only, while the gnomon of the dial presents its side of sunshine equally with its side of shade, however somber the tone of the inscription. doubtless nature preaches more truly than man. life is not all composed of shadow, nor all of sunshine; and if we but cultivate the spirit of contentment, possibly we have solved its sternest problem.
but may contentment, after all, be had for the striving? “whatever it be that falleth into our knowledge and jouissance,” reasons montaigne in the fifty-third chapter of the first book, “we finde it doth not 248satisfie us, and we still follow and gape after future, uncertaine, and unknowne things, because the present and knowne please us not, and doe not satisfie us. not (as i thinke) because they have not sufficiently wherewith to satiate and please us, but the reason is, that we apprehend and seize on them with an unruly, disordered, and a diseased taste and hold-fast.” and, again, in the twelfth chapter of the second book: “all of the philosophers of all the sects that ever were doe generally agree on this point, that the chiefest felicitie, or summum bonum, consisteth in the peace and tranquillitie of the soul and bodie:—but where shall we find it?”
somewhere, slumbering upon the shelves, there exists a golden book of a former century, written by a learned french philosopher-pantologist, entitled l’art de se rendre heureux par les songes (the art of rendering one’s self happy by dreams). a unique volume and the labor of a lifetime, its present owner and the fortunate possessor of the secret has never been discovered; and, alas! a reprint does not exist. contentment—is this but another name for illusion?—is a bird of passage who, soaring high in the empyrean, must be secured on the wing. numberless those who would ensnare him, and innumerable the lures set to turn his evasive pinion. but he flies not 249in flocks; and, dimly outlined against the distant sky, he is ever flitting onward, far out of range. some one, farther on, who seeks him not, perchance looks serenely upward, and unconsciously charms him down....
my fair and gracious reader, is it you?
