Part 9 (1/2)
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' (p.r.o.nounced 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 cla.s.sics 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 c.u.mberland 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 authors.h.i.+p.
In the good old days authors were in fact a despised and neglected cla.s.s. 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 a.s.sailed 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 pa.s.sages in ancient works which bore a similarity to the blind poet's verses. Even Samuel Johnson's satire of ”London” was p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.serting 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, Sall.u.s.t, Caesar, Cicero, and Pliny take up and repeat the lugubrious tale in turn.
Upon earth there are three distinct cla.s.ses 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.
XV
A BOOK THAT BRINGS SOLACE AND CHEER
One of my friends had a mania for Bunyan once upon a time, and, although he has now abandoned that fad for the more fas.h.i.+onable pa.s.sion of Napoleonana, he still exhibits with evident pride the many editions of the ”Pilgrim's Progress” he gathered together years ago. I have frequently besought him to give me one of his copies, which has a curious frontispiece ill.u.s.trating the dangers besetting the traveller from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. This frontispiece, which is prettily illuminated, occurs in Virtue's edition of the ”Pilgrim's Progress”; the book itself is not rare, but it is hardly procurable in perfect condition, for the reason that the colored plate is so pleasing to the eye that few have been able to resist the temptation to make away with it.
For similar reasons it is seldom that we meet with a perfect edition of Quarles' ”Emblems”; indeed, an ”Emblems” of early publication that does not lack the t.i.tle-page is a great rarity. In the ”good old days,” when juvenile books were few, the works of Bunyan and of Quarles were vastly popular with the little folk, and little fingers wrought sad havoc with the t.i.tle-pages and the pictures that with their extravagant and vivid suggestions appealed so directly and powerfully to the youthful fancy.
Coleridge says of the ”Pilgrim's Progress” that it is the best summary of evangelical Christianity ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired. Froude declares that it has for two centuries affected the spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more powerfully than any other book, except the Bible. ”It is,” says Macaulay, ”perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.”
Whether or not Bunyan is, as D'Israeli has called him, the Spenser of the people, and whether or not his work is the poetry of Puritanism, the best evidence of the merit of the ”Pilgrim's Progress” appears, as Dr. Johnson has shrewdly pointed out, in the general and continued approbation of mankind. Southey has critically observed that to his natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general popularity, his language being everywhere level to the most ignorant reader and to the meanest capacity; ”there is a homely reality about it--a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child.”
Another cause of his popularity, says Southey, is that he taxes the imagination as little as the understanding. ”The vividness of his own, which, as history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the things of which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were, indeed, pa.s.sing before him in a dream.”