The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac Part 10

Judge Methuen tells me that one of the most pleasing delusions he has experienced in his long and active career as a bibliomaniac is that which is born of the catalogue habit. Presuming that there are among my readers many laymen,--for I preach salvation to the heathen,--I will explain for their information that the catalogue habit, so called, is a practice to which the confirmed lover of books is likely to become addicted. It is a custom of many publishers and dealers to publish and to disseminate at certain periods lists of their wares, in the hope of thereby enticing readers to buy those wares.

By what means these crafty tradesmen secure the names of their prospective victims I cannot say, but this I know full well--that there seems not to be a book-lover on the face of the earth, I care not how remote or how secret his habitation may be, that these dealers do not presently find him out and overwhelm him with their delightful temptations.

I have been told that among booksellers there exists a secret league which provides for the interchange of confidences; so that when a new customer enters a shop in the Fulham road or in Oxford street or along the quays of Paris, or it matters not where (so long as the object of his inquiry be a book), within the s.p.a.ce of a month that man's name and place of residence are reported to and entered in the address list of every other bookseller in Christendom, and forthwith and forever after the catalogues and price-lists and bulletins of publishers and dealers in every part of the world are pelted at him through the unerring processes of the mails.

Judge Methuen has been a victim (a pleasant victim) to the catalogue habit for the last forty years, and he has declared that if all the catalogues sent to and read by him in that s.p.a.ce of time were gathered together in a heap they would make a pile bigger than Pike's Peak, and a thousandfold more interesting. I myself have been a famous reader of catalogues, and I can testify that the habit has possessed me of remarkable delusions, the most conspicuous of which is that which produces within me the conviction that a book is as good as mine as soon as I have met with its t.i.tle in a catalogue, and set an X over against it in pencil.

I recall that on one occasion I was discussing with Judge Methuen and Dr. O'Rell the attempted escapes of Charles I. from Carisbrooke Castle; a point of difference having arisen, I said: "Gentlemen, I will refer to Hillier's 'Narrative,' and I doubt not that my argument will be sustained by that authority."

It was vastly easier, however, to cite Hillier than it was to find him.

For three days I searched in my library, and tumbled my books about in that confusion which results from undue eagerness; 't was all in vain; neither hide nor hair of the desired volume could I discover. It finally occurred to me that I must have lent the book to somebody, and then again I felt sure that it had been stolen.

No tidings of the missing volume came to me, and I had almost forgotten the incident when one evening (it was fully two years after my discussion with my cronies) I came upon, in one of the drawers of my oak chest, a Sotheran catalogue of May, 1871. By the merest chance I opened it, and as luck would have it, I opened it at the very page upon which appeared this item:

"Hillier (G.) 'Narrative of the Attempted Escapes of Charles the First from Carisbrooke Castle'; cr. 8vo, 1852, cloth, 3/6."

Against this item appeared a cross in my chirography, and I saw at a glance that this was my long-lost Hillier! I had meant to buy it, and had marked it for purchase; but with the determination and that pencilled cross the transaction had ended. Yet, having resolved to buy it had served me almost as effectively as though I had actually bought it; I thought--aye, I could have sworn--I HAD bought it, simply because I MEANT to buy it.

"The experience is not unique," said Judge Methuen, when I narrated it to him at our next meeting. "Speaking for myself, I can say that it is a confirmed habit with me to mark certain items in catalogues which I read, and then to go my way in the pleasing conviction that they are actually mine."

"I meet with cases of this character continually," said Dr. O'Rell.

"The hallucination is one that is recognized as a specific one by pathologists; its cure is quickest effected by means of hypnotism.

Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in serious distress. She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears that her husband was upon the verge of insanity. Her testimony was to the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was limited to three hundred or thereabouts.

"Upon inquiry I learned that N. M. (for so I will call the victim of this delusion) made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers'

catalogues; further investigation developed that N. M.'s great-uncle on his mother's side had invented a flying-machine that would not fly, and that a half-brother of his was the author of a pamphlet ent.i.tled '16 to 1; or the Poor Man's Vade-Mec.u.m.'

"'Madam,' said I, 'it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted with catalogitis.'

"At this the poor woman went into hysterics, bewailing that she should have lived to see the object of her affection the victim of a malady so grievous as to require a Greek name. When she became calmer I explained to her that the malady was by no means fatal, and that it yielded readily to treatment."

"What, in plain terms," asked Judge Methuen, "is catalogitis?"

"I will explain briefly," answered the doctor. "You must know first that every perfect human being is provided with two sets of bowels; he has physical bowels and intellectual bowels, the brain being the latter. Hippocrates (since whose time the science of medicine has not advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon)--Hippocrates, I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those very same diseases to which the other and inferior bowels are liable.

"Galen confirmed this discovery and he records a case (Lib. xi., p.

318) wherein there were exhibited in the intellectual bowels symptoms similar to those we find in appendicitis. The brain is wrought into certain convolutions, just as the alimentary ca.n.a.l is; the fourth layer, so called, contains elongated groups of small cells or nuclei, radiating at right angles to its plane, which groups present a distinctly fanlike structure. Catalogitis is a stoppage of this fourth layer, whereby the functions of the fanlike structure are suffered no longer to cool the brain, and whereby also continuity of thought is interrupted, just as continuity of digestion is prevented by stoppage of the vermiform appendix.

"The learned Professor Biersteintrinken," continued Dr. O'Rell, "has advanced in his scholarly work on 'Raderinderkopf' the interesting theory that catalogitis is produced by the presence in the brain of a germ which has its origin in the cheap paper used by booksellers for catalogue purposes, and this theory seems to have the approval of M.

Marie-Tonsard, the most famous of authorities on inebriety, in his celebrated cla.s.sic ent.i.tled 'Un Trait sur Jacques-Jacques.'"

"Did you effect a cure in the case of N. M.?" I asked.

"With the greatest of ease," answered the doctor. "By means of hypnotism I purged his intellectuals of their hallucination, relieving them of their perception of objects which have no reality and ridding them of sensations which have no corresponding external cause. The patient made a rapid recovery, and, although three months have elapsed since his discharge, he has had no return of the disease."

As a cla.s.s booksellers do not encourage the reading of other booksellers' catalogues; this is, presumably, because they do not care to encourage buyers to buy of other sellers. My bookseller, who in all virtues of head and heart excels all other booksellers I ever met with, makes a scrupulous practice of destroying the catalogues that come to his shop, lest some stray copy may fall into the hands of a mousing book-lover and divert his attention to other hunting-grounds. It is indeed remarkable to what excess the catalogue habit will carry its victim; the author of "Will Shakespeare, a Comedy," has frequently confessed to me that it mattered not to him whether a catalogue was twenty years old--so long as it was a catalogue of books he found the keenest delight in its perusal; I have often heard Mr. Hamlin, the theatre manager, say that he preferred old catalogues to new, for the reason that the bargains to be met with in old catalogues expired long ago under the statute of limitations.

Judge Methuen, who is a married man and has therefore had an excellent opportunity to study the s.e.x, tells me that the wives of bibliomaniacs regard catalogues as the most mischievous temptations that can be thrown in the way of their husbands. I once committed the imprudence of mentioning the subject in Mrs. Methuen's presence: that estimable lady gave it as her opinion that there were plenty of ways of spending money foolishly without having recourse to a book-catalogue for suggestion. I wonder whether Captivity would have had this opinion, had Providence ordained that we should walk together the quiet pathway of New England life; would Yseult always have retained the exuberance and sweetness of her youth, had she and I realized what might have been? Would Fanchonette always have sympathized with the whims and vagaries of the restless yet loyal soul that hung enraptured on her singing in the Quartier Latin so long ago that the memory of that song is like the memory of a ghostly echo now?

Away with such reflections! Bring in the candles, good servitor, and range them at my bed's head; sweet avocation awaits me, for here I have a goodly parcel of catalogues with which to commune. They are messages from Methuen, Sotheran, Libbie, Irvine, Hutt, Davey, Baer, Crawford, Bangs, McClurg, Matthews, Francis, Bouton, Scribner, Benjamin, and a score of other friends in every part of Christendom; they deserve and they shall have my respectful--nay, my enthusiastic attention. Once more I shall seem to be in the old familiar shops where treasures abound and where patient delving bringeth rich rewards. Egad, what a spendthrift I shall be this night; pence, s.h.i.+llings, thalers, marks, francs, dollars, sovereigns--they are the same to me!

Then, after I have comprehended all the treasures within reach, how sweet shall be my dreams of shelves overflowing with the wealth of which my fancy has possessed me!

Then shall my library be devote To the magic of Niddy-Noddy, Including the volumes which n.o.body wrote And the works of Everybody.

XVII

THE NAPOLEONIC RENAISSANCE

If I had begun collecting Napoleonana in my youth I should now have on hand a priceless collection. This reminds me that when I first came to Chicago suburban property along the North Sh.o.r.e could be bought for five hundred dollars an acre which now sells for two hundred dollars a front foot; if I had purchased real estate in that locality when I had the opportunity forty years ago I should be a millionnaire at the present time.

I think I am more regretful of having neglected the Napoleonana than of having missed the real-estate chances, for since my library contains fewer than two hundred volumes relating to Bonaparte and his times I feel that I have been strangely remiss in the pursuit of one of the most interesting and most instructive of bibliomaniac fads. When I behold the remarkable collections of Napoleonana made by certain friends of mine I am filled with conflicting emotions of delight and envy, and Judge Methuen and I are wont to contemplate with regret the opportunities we once had of throwing all these modern collections in the shade.

When I speak of Napoleonana I refer exclusively to literature relating to Napoleon; the term, however, is generally used in a broader sense, and includes every variety of object, from the snuff-boxes used by the emperor at Malmaison to the slippers he wore at St. Helena. My friend, Mr. Redding, of California, has a silver knife and fork that once belonged to Bonaparte, and Mr. Mills, another friend of mine, has the neckerchief which Napoleon wore on the field of Waterloo. In Le Blanc's little treatise upon the art of tying the cravat it is recorded that Napoleon generally wore a black silk cravat, as was remarked at Wagram, Lodi, Marengo and Austerlitz. "But at Waterloo," says Le Blanc, "it was observed that, contrary to his usual custom, he wore a white handkerchief with a flowing bow, although the day previous he appeared in his black cravat."

I remember to have seen in the collection of Mr. Melville E. Stone a finger-ring, which, having been brought by an old French soldier to New Orleans, ultimately found its way to a p.a.w.n-shop. This bauble was of gold, and at two opposite points upon its outer surface appeared a Napoleonic "N," done in black enamel: by pressing upon one of these Ns a secret spring was operated, the top of the ring flew back, and a tiny gold figure of the Little Corporal stood up, to the astonishment and admiration of the beholder.

Another curious Napoleonic souvenir in Mr. Stone's motley collection is a cotton print handkerchief, upon which are recorded scenes from the career of the emperor; the thing must have been of English manufacture, for only an Englishman (inspired by that fear and that hatred of Bonaparte which only Englishmen had) could have devised this atrocious libel. One has to read the literature current in the earlier part of this century in order to get a correct idea of the terror with which Bonaparte filled his enemies, and this literature is so extensive that it seems an impossibility that anything like a complete collection should be got together; to say nothing of the histories, the biographies, the volumes of reminiscence and the books of criticism which the career of the Corsican inspired, there are Napoleon dream-books, Napoleon song-books, Napoleon chap-books, etc., etc., beyond the capability of enumeration.

The English were particularly active in disseminating libels upon Napoleon; they charged him in their books and pamphlets with murder, arson, incest, treason, treachery, cowardice, seduction, hypocrisy, avarice, robbery, ingrat.i.tude, and jealousy; they said that he poisoned his sick soldiers, that he was the father of Hortense's child, that he committed the most atrocious cruelties in Egypt and Italy, that he married Barras' discarded mistress, that he was afflicted with a loathsome disease, that he murdered the Duc d'Enghien and officers in his own army of whom he was jealous, that he was criminally intimate with his own sisters--in short, there was no crime, however revolting, with which these calumniators were not hasty to charge the emperor.

This same vindictive hatred was visited also upon all a.s.sociated with Bonaparte in the conduct of affairs at that time. Murat was "a brute and a thief"; Josephine, Hortense, Pauline, and Mme. Let.i.tia were courtesans; Berthier was a shuffling, time-serving lackey and tool; Augereau was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, a spy, a robber, and a murderer; Fouche was the incarnation of every vice; Lucien Bonaparte was a roue and a marplot; Cambaceres was a debauchee; Lannes was a thief, brigand, and a poisoner; Talleyrand and Barras were--well, what evil was told of them has yet to be disproved. But you would gather from contemporaneous English publications that Bonaparte and his a.s.sociates were veritable fiends from h.e.l.l sent to scourge civilization. These books are so strangely curious that we find it hard to cla.s.sify them: we cannot call them history, and they are too truculent to pa.s.s for humor; yet they occupy a distinct and important place among Napoleonana.

Until William Hazlitt's life of Bonaparte appeared we had no English treatment of Bonaparte that was in any sense fair, and, by the way, Hazlitt's work is the only one in English I know of which gives the will of Bonaparte, an exceedingly interesting doc.u.ment.

For a good many years I held the character of Napoleon in light esteem, for the reason that he had but small regard for books. Recent revelations, however, made to me by Dr. O'Rell (grandnephew of "Tom Burke of Ours"), have served to dissipate that prejudice, and I question not that I shall duly become as ardent a wors.h.i.+pper of the Corsican as my doctor himself is. Dr. O'Rell tells me--and his declarations are corroborated by Frederic Ma.s.son and other authorities--that Bonaparte was a lover and a collector of books, and that he contributed largely to the dignity and the glorification of literature by publis.h.i.+ng a large number of volumes in the highest style of the art.

The one department of literature for which he seems to have had no liking was fiction. Novels of all kinds he was in the habit of tossing into the fire. He was a prodigious buyer of books, and those which he read were invariably stamped on the outer cover with the imperial arms; at St. Helena his library stamp was merely a seal upon which ink was smeared.

Napoleon cared little for fine bindings, yet he knew their value, and whenever a presentation copy was to be bound he required that it be bound handsomely. The books in his own library were invariably bound "in calf of indifferent quality," and he was wont, while reading a book, to fill the margin with comments in pencil. Wherever he went he took a library of books with him, and these volumes he had deprived of all superfluous margin, so as to save weight and s.p.a.ce. Not infrequently when hampered by the rapid growth of this travelling library he would toss the "overflow" of books out of his carriage window, and it was his custom (I shudder to record it!) to separate the leaves of pamphlets, magazines, and volumes by running his finger between them, thereby invariably tearing the pages in shocking wise.

In the arrangement of his library Napoleon observed that exacting method which was characteristic of him in other employments and avocations. Each book had its particular place in a special case, and Napoleon knew his library so well that he could at any moment place his hand upon any volume he desired. The libraries at his palaces he had arranged exactly as the library at Malmaison was, and never was one book borrowed from one to serve in another. It is narrated of him that if ever a volume was missing Napoleon would describe its size and the color of its binding to the librarian, and would point out the place where it might have been wrongly put and the case where it properly belonged.

If any one question the greatness of this man let him explain if he can why civilization's interest in Napoleon increases as time rolls on.

Why is it that we are curious to know all about him--that we have gratification in hearing tell of his minutest habits, his moods, his whims, his practices, his prejudices? Why is it that even those who hated him and who denied his genius have felt called upon to record in ponderous tomes their reminiscences of him and his deeds? Princes, generals, lords, courtiers, poets, painters, priests, plebeians--all have vied with one another in answering humanity's demand for more and more and ever more about Napoleon Bonaparte.

I think that the supply will, like the demand, never be exhausted. The women of the court have supplied us with their memoirs; so have the diplomats of that period; so have the wives of his generals; so have the Tom-d.i.c.k-and-Harry spectators of those kaleidoscopic scenes; so have his keepers in exile; so has his barber. The chambermaids will be heard from in good time, and the hostlers, and the scullions. Already there are rumors that we are soon to be regaled with Memoirs of the Emperor Napoleon by the Lady who knew the Tailor who Once Sewed a b.u.t.ton on the Emperor's Coat, edited by her loving grandson, the Duc de Bunco.

Without doubt many of those who read these lines will live to see the time when memoirs of Napoleon will be offered by "a gentleman who purchased a collection of Napoleon spoons in 1899"; doubtless, too, the book will be hailed with satisfaction, for this Napoleonic enthusiasm increases as time wears on.

Curious, is it not, that no calm, judicial study of this man's character and exploits is received with favor? He who treats of the subject must be either a hater or an adorer of Napoleon; his blood must be hot with the enthusiasm of rage or of love.

To the human eye there appears in s.p.a.ce a luminous sphere that in its appointed path goes on unceasingly. The wise men are not agreed whether this apparition is merely of gaseous composition or is a solid body supplied extraneously with heat and luminosity, inexhaustibly; some argue that its existence will be limited to the period of one thousand, or five hundred thousand, or one million years; others declare that it will roll on until the end of time. Perhaps the nature of that luminous sphere will never be truly known to mankind; yet with calm dignity it moves in its appointed path among the planets and the stars of the universe, its fires unabated, its luminosity undimmed.

Even so the great Corsican, scrutinized of all human eyes, pa.s.ses along the aisle of Time enveloped in the impenetrable mystery of enthusiasm, genius, and splendor.