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

pass through the straits of Bartolus and Baldus, on to Zuichemus, Sanchez, Brissonius, Ritterhusius, and Gothofridus. If all these say the same thing, each of the others copying it from the first who uttered it, so much the more valuable to the literary world is deemed the idea that has been so amply backed—it is like a vote by a great majority, or a strongly-signed petition. There is only one quarter in which this practice appears to be followed at the present day—the composition, or the compilation, as it may better be termed, of English law-books. Having selected a department to be expounded, the first point is to set down all that Coke said about it two centuries and a half ago, and all that Blackstone said about it a century ago, with passages in due subordination from inferior authorities. To these are added the rubrics of some later cases, and a title-page and index, and so a new "authority" is added to the array on the shelves of the practitioner.

Whoever is well up to such repetitions has many short cuts through literature to enable him to find the scattered originalities of which he may be in search. Whether he be the enthusiastic investigator resolved on exhausting any great question, or be a mere wayward potterer, picking up curiosities by the way for his own private intellectual museum, the larger the collection at his disposal the better—it cannot be too great.[38] No one, therefore, can be an ardent follower of such a pursuit without having his own library. And yet it is probably among those whose stock is the largest that we shall find the most frequent visitors to the British Museum and the State Paper Office; perhaps, for what cannot be found even there, to the Imperial Library at Paris, or the collections of some of the German universities.

To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength, there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings, the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to the life of man.

That the night cometh when no man can work, haunts those who have gone so far in their investigations, and draws their entire energies into their pursuit with an exclusiveness which astonishes the rest of the world. But the energies might be more unfitly directed. Look back, for instance—no great distance back—on the great high-priest of our national school of logic and metaphysics,—he who gathered up its divers rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must have sought it elsewhere. You see in him the nature that must follow up all inquiries, not by languid solicitation but hot pursuit. His conquests as he goes are rapid but complete. Summing up the thousands upon thousands of volumes, upon all matters of human study and in many languages, which he has passed through his hands, you think he has merely dipped into them or skimmed them, or in some other shape put them to superficial use. You are wrong: he has found his way at once to the very heart of the living matter of each one; between it and him there are henceforth no secrets.[39]

Descending, however, from so high a sphere, we shall find that the collector and the scholar are so closely connected with each other that it is difficult to draw the line of separation between them. As dynamic philosophers say, they act and react on each other. The possession of certain books has made men acquainted with certain pieces of knowledge which they would not otherwise have acquired. It is, in fact, one of the amiable weaknesses of the set, to take a luxurious glance at a new acquisition. It is an outcropping of what remains in the man, of the affection towards a new toy that flourished in the heart of the boy. Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his new-bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under observation in the course of my own clinical inquiries into the malady; but I am not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far on in the night. In this incidental manner is a general notion sometimes formed of the true object and tenor of a book, which is retained in the mind, stored for use, and capable of being refreshed and strengthened whenever it is wanted. In the skirmish for the Caxtons, which began the serious work in the great conflict of the Roxburghe sale, it was satisfactory to find, as I have already stated, on the authority of the great historian of the war, that Earl Spencer, the victor, "put each volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of victory and consciousness of triumph."[40] Ere next morning he would know a good deal more about the contents of the volumes than he did before.

The Gleaner and his Harvest.

There are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disappointing surprises in encountering the interiors of books. The title-page is not always a distinct intimation of what is to follow. Whoever dips into the Novellæ of Leo, or the Extravagantes, as edited by Gothofridus, will not find either of them to contain matter of a light, airy, and amusing kind. Dire have been the disappointments incurred by The Diversions of Purley—one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade over one of our best story-books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the late Mrs Johnston. The great scholar, Leo Allatius, who broke his heart when he lost the special pen with which he wrote during forty years, published a work called Apes Urbanæ—Urban Bees. It is a biographical work, devoted to the great men who flourished during the Pontificate of Urban VIII., whose family carried bees on their coat-armorial. The History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, has sorely perplexed certain strong-minded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search of the absolutely correct and improving; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders. There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called MacEwen on the Types—a theological book, in fact, treating of the types of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might have it and be d——d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means rams: but the other competitor also declined the lot; he was a compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr Ruskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of sheepfolds." I have been informed that this work had a considerable run among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. I think I could also point to a public library in England, the keeper of which justified his high character for classification and arrangement by binding up this production between "suggestions as to eating off turnips with stock" and "an inquiry concerning the best materials for smeering." Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a department in Bibliography, "Titres de livres qui ont induit en erreur des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits." After mentioning a treatise De Missis Dominicis, which was not a religious book, as it might seem, but an inquiry into the functions of certain officers sent into the provinces by the emperors and the early kings of France, he comes nearer to our own door in telling how "un ignorant avait placé le Traité des Fluxions de Maclaurin avec les livres de pathologie, prenant pour une maladie les fluxions mathématiques."[41]

Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a title-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and constitute an infallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of all literature it may be said that man has been continually struggling after this achievement, and struggling in vain; and it is a humiliating fact, that the greatest adepts, abandoning the effort in despair, have taken refuge in some fortuitous word, which has served their purpose better than the best results of their logical analysis. The book which has been the supreme ruler of the intellect in this kind of work, stands forth as an illustrious example of failure. To those writings of Aristotle which dealt with mind, his editing pupils could give no name,—therefore they called them the things after the physics—the metaphysics; and that fortuitous title the great arena of thought to which they refer still bears, despite of efforts to supply an apter designation in such words as Psychology, Pneumatology, and Transcendentalism.

Writhing under this nightmare kind of difficulty, men in later times tried to achieve completeness by lengthening the title-page; but they found that the longer they made it, the more it wriggled itself into devious tracks, and the farther did it depart from a comprehensive name. Some title-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.[42] One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy titles—they afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their malignity towards each other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the face of the adversary. It will thus often happen that the controversialist states his case first in the title-page; he then gives it at greater length in the introduction; again, perhaps, in a preface; a third time in an analytical form, through means of a table of contents; after all this skirmishing, he brings