Books and Bookmen | Page 6

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 weightiest of French critics of our time the author of
such a book is one "who has enriched the human mind, who has really
added to its treasures, who has got it to take a step further . . . who has

spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself the
style of everybody, in a style that is at once new and antique, and is the
contemporary of all the ages." Without doubt Sainte-Beuve has here
touched the classical quality in literature as with a needle, for that book
is a classic to be placed beside Homer and Virgil and Dante and
Shakespeare--among the immortals--which has wisdom which we
cannot find elsewhere, and whose form has risen above the limitation
of any single age. While ordinary books are houses which serve for a
generation or two at most, this kind of book is the Cathedral which
towers above the building at its base and can be seen from afar, in
which many generations shall find their peace and inspiration. While
other books are like the humble craft which ply from place to place
along the coast, this book is as a stately merchantman which compasses
the great waters and returns with a golden argosy.
The subject of the book does not enter into the matter, and on subjects
the bookman is very catholic, and has an orthodox horror of all sects.
He does not require Mr. Froude's delightful apology to win the
Pilgrim's Progress a place on his shelf, because, although the bookman
may be far removed from Puritanism, yet he knows that Bunyan had
the secret of English style, and although he may be as far from
Romanism, yet he must needs have his A'Kempis (especially in
Pickering's edition of 1828), and when he places the two books side by
side in the department of religion, he has a standing regret that there is
no Pilgrim's Progress also in Pickering.
Without a complete Milton he could not be content. He would like to
have Masson's Life too in 6 vols. (with index), and he is apt to consider
the great Puritan's prose still finer than his poetry, and will often take
down the Areopagitica that he may breathe the air of high latitudes; but
he has a corner in his heart for that evil living and mendacious bravo,
but most perfect artist, Benvenuto Cellini. While he counts Gibbon's
Rome, I mean the Smith and Milman edition in 8 vols., blue cloth, the
very model of histories, yet he revels in those books which are the
material for historians, the scattered stones out of which he builds his
house, such as the diaries of John Evelyn and our gossip Pepys, and
that scandalous book, Grammont's Memoirs, and that most credulous
but interesting of Scots annalists, Robert Wodrow.
According to the bookman, but not, I am sorry to say, in popular

judgment, the most toothsome kind of literature is the Essay, and you
will find close to his hand a dainty volume of Lamb open perhaps at
that charming paper on "Imperfect Sympathies," and though the
bookman be a Scot yet his palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's
description of his national character--Lamb and the Scots did not agree
through an incompatibility of humour--and near by he keeps his Hazlitt,
whom he sometimes considers the most virile writer of the century: nor
would he be quite happy unless he could find in the dark The Autocrat
of the Breakfast Table. He is much indebted to a London publisher for
a very careful edition of the Spectator, and still more to that good
bookman, Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction. As the
bookman's father was also a bookman, for the blessing descendeth unto
the third and fourth generation, he was early taught to love De Quincey,
and although, being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has read every
page in all the fifteen volumes--roxburghe calf--yet he knows his way
about in that whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will
write on anything, or any person, always with freshness and in good
English, from the character of Judas Iscariot and "Murder as a Fine