Pagan Papers | Page 8

in an enchanted world: till the ruthless
shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely back to the bitter
reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers. ``My brother!'' or ``My
sister!'' I would cry inwardly, feeling the link that bound us together.
They possessed, for the hour, the two gifts most precious to the student
-- light and solitude: the true solitude of the roaring street.
Somehow this vision rarely greets me now. Probably the Free Libraries
have supplanted the flickering shop lights; and every lad and lass can
enter and call for Miss Braddon and batten thereon ``in luxury's
sofa-lap of leather''; and of course this boon is appreciated and profited
by, and we shall see the divine results in a year or two. And yet
sometimes, like the dear old Baron in the ``Red Lamp,'' ``I wonder?''
For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely wastes
and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the feeling of
restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these other readers,
``all silent and all damned,'' combine to set up a nervous irritation fatal
to quiet study. Had I to choose, I would prefer the windy street. And
possibly others have found that the removal of checks and obstacles
makes the path which leads to the divine mountain-tops less tempting,
now that it is less rugged. So full of human nature are we all -- still --
despite the Radical missionaries that labour in the vineyard. Before the

National Gallery was extended and rearranged, there was a little ``St
Catherine'' by Pinturicchio that possessed my undivided affections. In
those days she hung near the floor, so that those who would worship
must grovel; and little I grudged it. Whenever I found myself near
Trafalgar Square with five minutes to spare I used to turn in and sit on
the floor before the object of my love, till gently but firmly replaced on
my legs by the attendant. She hangs on the line now, in the grand new
room; but I never go to see her. Somehow she is not my ``St Catherine''
of old. Doubtless Free Libraries affect many students in the same way:
on the same principle as that now generally accepted -- that it is the
restrictions placed on vice by our social code which make its pursuit so
peculiarly agreeable.
But even when the element of human nature has been fully allowed for,
it remains a question whether the type of mind that a generation or two
of Free Libraries will evolve is or is not the one that the world most
desiderates; and whether the spare reading and consequent fertile
thinking necessitated by the old, or gas-lamp, style is not productive of
sounder results. The cloyed and congested mind resulting from the free
run of these grocers' shops to omnivorous appetites (and all young
readers are omnivorous) bids fair to produce a race of literary
resurrection-men: a result from which we may well pray to be spared.
Of all forms of lettered effusiveness that which exploits the original
work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions
thereanent is the least wanted. And whether he take to literary
expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grocer's boy of
letters is sure to prove a prodigious bore. The Free Library, if it be
fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by
scores.
But after all there is balm in Gilead; and much joy and consolation may
be drawn from the sorrowful official reports, by which it would appear
that the patrons of these libraries are confining their reading, with a
charming unanimity, exclusively to novels. And indeed they cannot do
better; there is no more blessed thing on earth than a good novel, not
the least merit of which is that it induces a state of passive, unconscious
enjoyment, and never frenzies the reader to go out and put the world
right. Next to fairy tales -- the original world-fiction -- our modern
novels may be ranked as our most precious possessions; and so it has

come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or ten
shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the Free
Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in training
exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the objectivity of that,
nor in developing fresh imitators of dead discredited styles, but is
righteously devoted to the support of wholesome, honest, unpretending
novel-reading.
The Rural Pan
An April Essay
Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the
restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little hoarse
from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic