The Book-Hunter, John Hill Burton [essential reading TXT] 📗

Du Cange, Mabillon's Antiquities, the Benedictine historians, the Bollandists' Lives of the Saints, Grævius and Gronovius, and heavy books of that order, are in their old original morocco, without a scratch or abrasure, gilt-edged, vellum-jointed, with their backs blazing in tooled gold. Your own dingy well-thumbed Bayle or Moreri possibly cost you two or three pounds; his cost forty or fifty. Further, in these affluent shelves may be found those great costly works which cross the border of "three figures," and of which only one or two of the public libraries can boast, such as the Celebri Famiglie Italiane of Litta, Denon's Egypt, the great French work on the arts of the middle ages, and the like; and many is the scholar who, unable to gratify his cravings elsewhere, has owed it to Lucullus that he has seen something he was in search after in one of these great books, and has been able to put it to public use.

Throughout the establishment there is an appearance of care and order, but not of restraint. Some inordinately richly-bound volumes have special grooves or niches for themselves lined with soft cloth, as if they had delicate lungs, and must be kept from catching cold. But even these are not guarded from the hand of the guest. Lucullus says his books are at the service of his friends; and, as a hint in the same direction, he recommends to your notice a few volumes from the collection of the celebrated Grollier, the most princely and liberal of collectors, on whose classic book-stamp you find the genial motto, "Joannis Grollierii et amicorum." Having conferred on you the freedom of his library, he will not concern himself by observing how you use it. He would as soon watch you after dinner to note whether you eschew common sherry and show an expensive partiality for that madeira at twelve pounds a-dozen, which other men would probably only place on the table when it could be well invested in company worthy of the sacrifice. Who shall penetrate the human heart, and say whether a hidden pang or gust of wrath has vibrated behind that placid countenance, if you have been seen to drop an ink-spot on the creamy margin of the Mentelin Virgil, or to tumble that heavy Aquinas from the ladder and dislocate his joints? As all the world now knows, however, men assimilate to the conditions by which they are surrounded, and we civilise our city savages by substituting cleanness and purity for the putrescence which naturally accumulates in great cities. So, in a noble library, the visitor is enchained to reverence and courtesy by the genius of the place. You cannot toss about its treasures as you would your own rough calfs and obdurate hogskins; as soon would you be tempted to pull out your meerschaum and punk-box in a cathedral. It is hard to say, but I would fain believe that even Papaverius himself might have felt some sympathetic touch from the spotless perfection around him and the noble reliance of the owner; and that he might perhaps have restrained himself from tearing out the most petted rarities, as a wolf would tear a fat lamb from the fold.

Such, then, are some "cases" discussed in a sort of clinical lecture. It will be seen that they have differing symptoms—some mild and genial, others ferocious and dangerous. Before passing to another and the last case, I propose to say a word or two on some of the minor specialties which characterise the pursuit in its less amiable or dignified form. It is, for instance, liable to be accompanied by an affection, known also to the agricultural world as affecting the wheat crop, and called "the smut." Fortunately this is less prevalent among us than the French, who have a name for the class of books affected by this school of collectors in the Bibliothèque bleue. There is a sad story connected with this peculiar frailty. A great and high-minded scholar of the seventeenth century had a savage trick played on him by some mad wags, who collected a quantity of the brutalities of which Latin literature affords an endless supply, and published them in his name. He is said not long to have survived this practical joke; and one does not wonder at his sinking before such a prospect, if he anticipated an age and a race of book-buyers among whom his great critical works are forgotten, and his name is known solely for the spurious volume, sacred to infamy, which may be found side by side with the works of the author of Trimalcion's Feast—"par nobile fratrum."

There is another failing, without a leaning to virtue's side, to which some collectors have been, by reputation at least, addicted—a propensity to obtain articles without value given for them—a tendency to be larcenish. It is the culmination, indeed, of a sort of lax morality apt to grow out of the habits and traditions of the class. Your true collector—not the man who follows the occupation as a mere expensive taste, and does not cater for himself—considers himself a finder or discoverer rather than a purchaser. He is an industrious prowler in unlikely regions, and is entitled to some reward for his diligence and his skill. Moreover, it is the essence of that very skill to find value in those things which, in the eye of the ordinary possessor, are really worthless. From estimating them at little value, and paying little for them, the steps are rather too short to estimating them at nothing, and paying nothing for them. What matters it, a few dirty black-letter leaves picked out of that volume of miscellaneous trash—leaves which the owner never knew he had, and cannot miss—which he would not know the value of, had you told him of them? What use of putting notions into the greedy barbarian's head, as if one were to find treasures for him? And the little pasquinade is so curious, and will fill a gap in that fine collection so nicely! The notions of the collector about such spoil are indeed the converse of those which Cassio professed to hold about his good name, for the scrap furtively removed is supposed in no way to impoverish the loser, while it makes the recipient rich indeed.

Those habits of the prowler which may gradually lead a mind not strengthened by strong principle into this downward career, are hit with his usual vivacity and wonderful truth by Scott. The speaker is our delightful friend Oldenbuck of Monkbarns, the Antiquary, and what he says has just enough of confession in it to show a consciousness that the narrator has gone over dangerous ground, and, if we did not see that the narrative is tinged with some exaggeration, has trodden a little beyond the limits of what is gentlemanly and just.

"'See this bundle of ballads, not one of them later than 1700, and some of them a hundred years older. I wheedled an old woman out of these, who loved them better than her psalm-book. Tobacco, sir, snuff, and the Complete Syren, were the equivalent! For that mutilated copy of the Complaynt of Scotland I sat out the drinking of two dozen bottles of strong ale with the late learned proprietor, who in gratitude bequeathed it to me by his last will. These little Elzevirs are the memoranda and trophies of many a walk by night and morning through the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Bow, St Mary's Wynd—wherever, in fine, there were to be found brokers and trokers, those miscellaneous dealers in things rare and curious. How often have I stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer's first price, he should be led to suspect the value I set upon the article!—how have I trembled lest some passing stranger should chop in between me and the prize, and regarded each poor student of divinity that stopped to turn over the books at the stall as a rival amateur or prowling bookseller in disguise!—And then, Mr Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure!—Then to dazzle the eyes of our wealthier and emulous rivals by showing them such a treasure as this' (displaying a little black smoked book about the size of a primer)—'to enjoy their surprise and envy, shrouding meanwhile, under a veil of mysterious consciousness, our own superior knowledge and dexterity;—these, my young friend, these are the white moments of life, that repay the toil and pains and sedulous attention which our profession, above all others, so peculiarly demands!'"

There is a nice subtle meaning in the worthy man calling his weakness his "profession," but it is in complete keeping with the mellow Teniers-like tone of the whole picture. Ere we have done I shall endeavour to show that the grubber among book-stalls has, with other grubs or grubbers, his useful place in the general dispensation of the world. But his is a pursuit exposing him to moral perils, which call for peculiar efforts of self-restraint to save him from them; and the moral Scott holds forth—for a sound moral he always has—is, If you go as far as Jonathan Oldenbuck did—and I don't advise you to go so far, but hint that you should stop earlier—say to yourself, Thus far, and no farther.

So much for one of the debased symptoms which in very bad cases sometimes characterise an otherwise genial failing. There is another peculiar, and, it may be said, vicious propensity, exhibited occasionally in conjunction with the pursuit. This propensity is, like the other, antagonistic in spirit to the tenth commandment, and consists in a desperate coveting of the neighbour's goods, and a satisfaction, not so much in possessing for one's self, as in dispossessing him. This spirit is said to burn with still fiercer flame in the breasts of those whose pursuit would externally seem to be the most innocent in the world, and the least excitive of the bad passions—namely, among flower-fanciers. From some mysterious cause, it has been known to develop itself most flagrantly among tulip-collectors, insomuch that there are legends of Dutch devotees of this pursuit who have paid their thousands of dollars for a duplicate tuber, that they might have the satisfaction of crushing it under the heel.[28] This line of practice is not entirely alien to the book-hunter. Peignot tells us that it is of rare occurrence among his countrymen, and yet, as we have seen, he thought it necessary to correct the technical term applied to this kind of practitioner, by calling him a Bibliothapte when he conceals books—a Bibliolyte when he destroys them. Dibdin warmed his convivial guests at a comfortable fire, fed by the woodcuts from which had been printed the impression of the Bibliographical Decameron. It was a quaint fancy, and deemed to be a pretty and appropriate form of hospitality, while it effectually assured the subscribers to his costly volumes that the vulgar world who buy cheap books was definitively cut off from participating in their privileges.

Let us, however, summon a more potent spirit of this order. He is a different being altogether from those gentle shadows who have flitted past us already. He was known in the body by many hard names, such as the Vampire, the Dragon, &c. He was an Irish absentee, or, more accurately, a refugee, since he had made himself so odious on his ample estate that he could not live there. How on earth he should have set about collecting books is one of the inscrutable mysteries which ever surround the diagnosis of this peculiar malady. Setting aside his using his books by reading them as out of the question, he yet was never known to