Books and Bookmen | Page 4

which
a gentleman's library is not complete. And in the present imperfect
arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few
books, since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them. It is the
foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress,
and his fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence- halfpenny
edition. The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is
born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of
the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is
apropos. As he was to preside at a lecture I was delivering he had in his
courtesy invited me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he proposed
to take the role that night of a man who had been successful in business,
but yet allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he
desired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain
imposing air that we should visit what he called "my library." Across
the magnificence of the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with
that kind of walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once
assessed his income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe,
following in the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean
liner. "There," he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat,
"what do you think of that?" And THAT was without question a very
large and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors.
Before I saw the doors I had no doubt about my host, but they were a
seal upon my faith, for although a bookman is obliged to have one bit
of glass in his garden for certain rare plants from Russia and Morocco,
to say nothing of the gold and white vellum lily upon which the air
must not be allowed to blow, especially when charged with gas and
rich in dust, yet he hates this conservatory, just as much as he loves its
contents. His contentment is to have the flowers laid out in open beds,

where he can pluck a blossom at will. As often as one sees the books
behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked, then he knows
that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with them in the
evening hours when the work of the day is done, but their jailer, who
has bought them in the market-place for gold, and holds them in this
foreign place by force. It has seemed to me as if certain old friends
looked out from their prison with appealing glance, and one has been
tempted to break the glass and let, for instance, Elia go free. It would be
like the emancipation of a slave. Elia was not, good luck for him,
within this particular prison, and I was brought back from every
temptation to break the laws of property by my chairman, who was still
pursuing his catechism. "What," was question two, "do you think I paid
for THAT?" It was a hopeless catechism, for I had never possessed
anything like THAT, and none of my friends had in their homes
anything like THAT, and in my wildest moments I had never asked the
price of such a thing as THAT. As it loomed up before me in its
speckless respectability and insolence of solid wealth my English sense
of reverence for money awoke, and I confessed that this matter was too
high for me; but even then, casting a glance of deprecation in its
direction, I noticed THAT was almost filled by a single work, and I
wondered what it could be. "Cost 80 pounds if it cost a penny, and I
bought it second-hand in perfect condition for 17 pounds, 5s., with the
books thrown in-- All the Year Round from the beginning in half calf;"
and then we returned in procession to the drawing-room, where my
patron apologised for our absence, and explained that when two
bookmen got together over books it was difficult to tear them away. He
was an admirable chairman, for he occupied no time with a review of
literature in his address, and he slept without being noticed through
mine (which is all I ask of a chairman), and so it may seem ungrateful,
but in spite of "THAT" and any books, even Spenser and Chaucer,
which THAT might have contained, this Maecenas of an evening was
not a bookman.
It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a pleasant
anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having made his pile
and bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to an old friend