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

fabulous qualifications for the duty, his correspondent said, "I will bring the very man to you;" and Baillet, a poor, frail, attenuated, diseased scholar, was produced. His kind patron fed him up, so far as a man who could not tear himself from his books, unless when nature became entirely exhausted, could be fed up. The statesman and his librarian were the closest of friends; and on the elder Lamoignon's death, the son, still more distinguished, looked up to Baillet as a father and instructor.

Men of this stamp are generally endowed with deep and solid learning. For any one, indeed, to take the command of a great public library, without large accomplishments, especially in the languages, is to put himself in precisely the position where ignorance, superficiality, and quackery are subjected to the most potent test, and are certain of detection. The number of librarians who have united great learning to a love of books, is the best practical answer to all sneers about the two being incompatible. Nor, while we count among us such names as Panizzi, Birch, Halkett, Naudet, Laing, Cogswell, Jones, Pertz, and Todd, is the race of learned librarians likely to decay.

It will be worth while for the patrons of public libraries, even in appointments to small offices, to have an eye on bookish men for filling them. One librarian differs greatly from another, and on this difference will often depend the entire utility of an institution, and the question whether it is worth keeping it open or closing its door. Of this class of workman it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, that he is born, not made. The usual testimonies to qualification—steadiness, sobriety, civility, intelligence, &c.—may all be up to the mark that will constitute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of books. Such a person ought to go to his task with something totally different from the impulses which induce a man to sort dry goods or make up invoices with eminent success. In short, your librarian would need to be in some way touched with the malady which has been the object of these desultory remarks.

Bibliographies.

A passing remark is due to the place and function in literature of those books which act the part of gentleman-usher towards other books, by introducing them to the notice of strangers. The talk about librarians, in fact, brings these naturally before us by the law of association, since the duties of the librarian are congenial to this special department of the literary world, the work of which has indeed been chiefly performed by eminent librarians.

The best general name for the class of books which I refer to, is that of Bibliographies, given to them by the French. Like most other products of human ingenuity, they are varied in their objects and their merits. At the one end of the scale is the Leipsic Bibliotheca Horatiana, ambitious only of commemorating the several editions of Horace, or Kuster's Bibliotheca Historica Brandenburgica, sacred to the histories of that duchy; while the other extremity aims at universality, an object which has not yet been accomplished, and seems every day fleeing farther off from those who are daring enough to pursue it. In 1545, when the world of literature was rather smaller than it now is, Conrade Gesner, in his Bibliotheca, made the first attempt at a universal bibliography. The incompleteness of the result is confessed in the Epitome of the Bibliotheca, printed five years afterwards, which professes only to record nearly all the books written since the world began, and yet boasts of adding more than two thousand names of authors to the number mentioned in the original Bibliotheca.[63]

Of what any list of all the books that have appeared in the world might be, one may form some conception by the effort of Dr Watt, accomplished nearly fifty years ago. The work is said to have killed him; and no one who turns over the densely printed leaves of his four quartos, can feel surprised at such a result. It is by no means perfect or complete, even as a guide to books in the compiler's native tongue, yet stands in honourable contrast with the failure of several efforts to continue this portion of it down to later days. The voluminous France Littéraire of Quérard confesses its imperfections even to accomplish its limited object, by professing to devote its special attention to books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As to bibliographies of the present century aiming at universality, the Allgemeines Gelehrten Lexicon of Jöcher—when accompanied by Adelung's supplement, which is its better-half—for scholarship and completeness casts into shade anything produced either in France or here. It is a guide which few people consult without passing a compliment either internally or aloud on the satisfactory result. That it contains an account of every, or nearly every, book is at once contradicted by its bulk, yet it is often remarked that no one appeals to it in vain—a specialty which seems to have arisen from the peculiar capacity of its editors to dive, as it were, into the hearts of those likely to seek their aid.

Naturally, the most satisfactory of bibliographies are those limited to books of a special class. These are frequent in law and divinity, but are most numerous in history. Hence have we such valued guides as Lelong, Dupin, Dufresnoy, and our own dynasty of historical bibliographers, which, including Leland, Bale, Pitts, and Tanner, reached its climax in Bishop Nicholson, whose introduction to the sources of British history, hitherto so valuable, will be superseded for most practical purposes on the completion of Mr Duffus Hardy's Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland. Science, though it can boast of the great compilations of Haller, and of other sources of reference to its literature, takes less aid from such guides than other departments of intellectual labour, for the obvious reason that, except to the few who are pursuing its history through its dawn and progress, the latest books on any department generally supersede their predecessors. They are, in fact, themselves the guides which show the scientific inquirer his work, not lying like that of the historian and divine in old books, but in existing things and practical experiments. Of books intended to show what is to be found in others, an extremely curious history attaches to one, the Bibliotheca of Photius. It is known of course to all divines, but not necessarily, perhaps, to every other person, that this turbulent and ambitious patriarch, during what he calls his embassy to Syria, occupied himself in taking down notes of the contents of theological treatises by his predecessors and contemporaries, with his judgments on their merits. Being a man of controversial propensities, he selected for criticism the works of the authors with whom he was at war. Ranking himself among the orthodox, he thus collected notes of the works of heterodox writers, and, among these, of several eminent Arians; and the rather startling result of his labours is, that a considerable quantity of Arian literature has thus been preserved, which, but for the exertions of the man who intended to exterminate it by his censure, would have been entirely lost to the world.

There are among bibliographers many highly meritorious leaders through the mysteries of occult literature—as, for instance, those who, like Placcius, Mylius, Barbière, and Melzi, have devoted themselves to the discovery and publication of the authorship of anonymous works. Their function is, on the whole, a rather cruel one, and suggests that those who betake themselves to it are men of austere character. Sometimes, to be sure, it falls to their lot to place the laurel wreath of fame on the deserving brow, but very seldom before the grave has closed over it. The resuscitation of books which have passed unnoticed because they were beyond their age, or failed to touch its sympathies, has been the class of instances in which honour has been thus conferred; and it has seldom fallen to the lot of the living, for the reason that it is the nature of the human being not very resolutely to conceal from an inquiring public those of his actions which receive the approval of his own conscience and taste. In dealing with the living, and often the recently departed, it is the function of this class of investigators to expose the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the wise and great. It is they who have told the world about the youthful Jacobitism of the eminent pillar of the constitution; of the early Radicalism of the distinguished Conservative; of the more than questionable escapades of the popular, yet sedate divine, whose works are the supreme model of decorous piety. In this wise, indeed, the function of the bibliographer of the anonymous much resembles the detective's. Like that functionary, he must not let feelings of delicacy or humanity interfere with the relentless execution of his duty, for of those who have achieved eminence as public teachers, all that they have ever told the world is the world's property. Whatever mercy may be shown to the history of their private life, cannot be claimed for the sayings which they have made or tried to make public. If they have at other times uttered opinions different from those which have achieved for them fame and eminence, those early utterances are an effective test of the value and sincerity of the later, and were it for this object only, the world is entitled to look at them. This is one of the penalties which can only be escaped by turning aside from the path to eminence.[64]

Passing from this class of interesting though rather unamiable elucidations, I come to another class of bibliographies, of which it is difficult to speak with patience—those which either profess to tell you how to find the best books to consult on every department of learning, or undertake to point out to you the books which you should select for your library, or for your miscellaneous reading. As to those which profess to be universal mentors, at hand to help you with the best tools for your work, in whichever department of intellectual labour it may happen to be, they break down at once. Whoever has set himself to any special line of investigation, cannot open one of those books without discovering its utter worthlessness and incapacity to aid him in his own specialty. As to the other class of bibliographers, who profess to act the guide, philosopher, and friend to the collector and the reader, I cannot imagine anything more offensively audacious than the function they assume. It is an attempt of the pedagogue to assert a jurisdiction over grown intellects, and hence such books naturally develop in flagrant exaggeration the pragmatical priggism which is the pedagogue's characteristic defect. I would except from this condemnation a few bibliographers, who, instead of sitting in the schoolmaster's chair and dictating to you what it is proper that you should read, rather give you a sly hint that they are going a-vagabondising through the byways of literature, and will take you with them if you like. Among these I would chiefly be inclined to affect the company of Peignot, whose wild and wayward course of reading provides for you something like to a ramble over the mountains with an Alpine hunter, the only kind of guide to whom the thorough pedestrian wanderer should give up his freedom. One of Peignot's books, called Predicatoriana, ou Révélations Singulières et Amusantes sur les Prédicateurs, brings one into scenes apt to shock a mind not tolerably hardened by eclectic reading. It is