Books and Bookmen | Page 5

to send
him out some chests of books, as many as he thought fit, and the best
that he could find. His friend was so touched by this sign of grace that

he spent a month of love over the commission, and was vastly pleased
when he sent off, in the best editions and in pleasant binding, the very
essence of English literature. It was a disappointment that the only
acknowledgment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say that the
consignment had arrived in good condition. A year afterwards, so runs
the story, he received a 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