Books and Bookmen | Page 5

letter which was brief and to the point. "Have been working over the books, and if anything new has been written by William Shakespeare or John Milton, please send it out." I believe this is mentioned as an instance of barbarism. It cannot be denied that it showed a certain ignorance of the history of literature, which might be excused in a bushman, but it is also proved, which is much more important, that he had the smack of letters in him, for being turned loose without the guide of any training in this wide field, he fixed as by instinct on the two classics of the English tongue. With the help of all our education, and all our reviews, could you and I have done better, and are we not every day, in our approval of unworthy books, doing very much worse? Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time, some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity of some fantastic critic.
There are those who buy their right to citizenship in the commonwealth of bookmen, but this bushman was free-born, and the sign of the free-born is, that without critics to aid him, or the training of a University, he knows the difference between books which are so much printed stuff and a good book which is "the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit." The bookman will of course upon occasion trifle with various kinds of reading, and there is one member of the brotherhood who has a devouring thirst for detective stories, and has always been very grateful to the creator of Sherlock Holmes. It is the merest pedantry for a man to defend himself with a shamed face for his light reading: it is enough that he should be able to distinguish between the books which come and go and those which remain. So far as I remember, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and John Inglesant came out somewhat about the same time, and there were those of us who read them both; but while we thought the Hansom Cab a very ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves. Certainly it is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Mayor of Casterbridge. But some of us venture to think that in that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot through both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of the seventeenth century, Mr. Shorthouse won a certain place in English literature.
When people are raving between the soup and fish about some popular novel which to-morrow will be forgotten, but which doubtless, like the moths which make beautiful the summer-time, has its purpose in the world of speech, it gives one bookman whom I know the keenest pleasure to ask his fair companion whether she has read Mark Rutherford. He is proudly conscious at the time that he is a witness to perfection in a gay world which is content with excitement, and he would be more than human if he had not in him a touch of the literary Pharisee. She has NOT read Mark Rutherford, and he does not advise her to seek it at the circulating library, because it will not be there, and if she got it she would never read more than ten pages. Twenty thousand people will greedily read Twice Murdered and Once Hung and no doubt they have their reward, while only twenty people read Mark Rutherford; but then the multitude do not return to Twice Murdered, while the twenty turn again and again to Mark Rutherford for its strong thinking and its pure sinewy English style. And the children of the twenty thousand will not know Twice Murdered, but the children of the twenty, with others added to them, will know and love Mark Rutherford. Mr. Augustine Birrell makes it, I think, a point of friendship that a man should love George Borrow, whom I think to appreciate is an excellent but an acquired taste; there are others who would propose Mark Rutherford and the Revelation in Tanner's Lane as a sound test for a bookman's palate. But . . . de gustibus . . . !
It is the chief office of the critic, while encouraging all honest work which either can instruct or amuse, to distinguish between the books which must be content to pass and the books which must remain because they have an immortality of necessity.
According to the