The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac Part 2

As for myself, I never go away from home that I do not take a trunkful of books with me, for experience has taught me that there is no companions.h.i.+p better than that of these friends, who, however much all things else may vary, always give the same response to my demand upon their solace and their cheer. My sister, Miss Susan, has often inveighed against this practice of mine, and it was only yesterday that she informed me that I was the most exasperating man in the world.

However, as Miss Susan's experience with men during the sixty-seven hot summers and sixty-eight hard winters of her life has been somewhat limited, I think I should bear her criticism without a murmur. Miss Susan is really one of the kindest creatures in all the world. It is her misfortune that she has had all her life an insane pa.s.sion for collecting crockery, old pewter, old bra.s.s, old gla.s.s, old furniture and other trumpery of that character; a pa.s.sion with which I have little sympathy. I do not know that Miss Susan is prouder of her collection of all this folderol than she is of the fact that she is a spinster.

This latter peculiarity a.s.serts itself upon every occasion possible.

I recall an unpleasant scene in the omnibus last winter, when the obsequious conductor, taking advantage of my sister's white hair and furrowed cheeks, addressed that estimable lady as "Madam." I'd have you know that my sister gave the fellow to understand very shortly and in very vigorous English (emphasized with her blue silk umbrella) that she was Miss Susan, and that she did not intend to be Madamed by anybody, under any condition.

IV

THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME

Captivity Waite never approved of my fondness for fairy literature.

She shared the enthusiasm which I expressed whenever "Robinson Crusoe"

was mentioned; there was just enough seriousness in De Foe's romance, just enough piety to appeal for sympathy to one of Captivity Waite's religious turn of mind. When it came to fiction involving witches, ogres, and flubdubs, that was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of the little Puritan revolted.

Yet I have the doc.u.mentary evidence to prove that Captivity's ancestors (both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as abject slaves to superst.i.tion as could well be imagined. The Waites of Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and Sinai Higginbotham (Captivity's great-great-grandfather on her mother's side of the family) was Cotton Mather's boon companion, and rode around the gallows with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little children with their d.a.m.nable arts of witchcraft. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

Within the compa.s.s of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.

I felt harshly toward Captivity Waite for a time, but I harbor her no ill-will now; on the contrary, I recall with very tender feelings the distant time when our sympathies were the same and when we journeyed the pathway of early youth in a companions.h.i.+p sanctified by the innocence and the loyalty and the truth of childhood. Indeed, I am not sure that that early friends.h.i.+p did not make a lasting impression upon my life; I have thought of Captivity Waite a great many times, and I have not unfrequently wondered what might have been but for that book of fairy tales which my Uncle Cephas sent me.

She was a very pretty child, and she lost none of her comeliness and none of her sweetness of character as she approached maturity. I was impressed with this upon my return from college. She, too, had pursued those studies deemed necessary to the acquirement of a good education; she had taken a four years' course at South Holyoke and had finished at Mrs. Willard's seminary at Troy. "You will now," said her father, and he voiced the New England sentiment regarding young womanhood; "you will now return to the quiet of your home and under the direction of your mother study the performance of those weightier duties which qualify your s.e.x for a realization of the solemn responsibilities of human life."

Three or four years ago a fine-looking young fellow walked in upon me with a letter of introduction from his mother. He was Captivity Waite's son! Captivity is a widow now, and she is still living in her native State, within twenty miles of the spot where she was born.

Colonel Parker, her husband, left her a good property when he died, and she is famous for her charities. She has founded a village library, and she has written me on several occasions for advice upon proposed purchases of books.

I don't mind telling you that I had a good deal of malicious pleasure in sending her not long ago a reminder of old times in these words: "My valued friend," I wrote, "I see by the catalogue recently published that your village library contains, among other volumes representing the modern school of fiction, eleven copies of 'Trilby' and six copies of 'The Heavenly Twins.' I also note an absence of certain works whose influence upon my earlier life was such that I make bold to send copies of the same to your care in the hope that you will kindly present them to the library with my most cordial compliments. These are a copy each of the 'New England Primer' and Grimm's 'Household Stories.'"

At the age of twenty-three, having been graduated from college and having read the poems of Villon, the confessions of Rousseau, and Boswell's life of Johnson, I was convinced that I had comprehended the sum of human wisdom and knew all there was worth knowing. If at the present time--for I am seventy-two--I knew as much as I thought I knew at twenty-three I should undoubtedly be a prodigy of learning and wisdom.

I started out to be a philosopher. My grandmother's death during my second year at college possessed me of a considerable sum of money and severed every tie and sentimental obligation which had previously held me to my grandmother's wish that I become a minister of the gospel.

When I became convinced that I knew everything I conceived a desire to see something, for I had traveled none and I had met but few people.

Upon the advice of my Uncle Cephas, I made a journey to Europe, and devoted two years to seeing sights and to acquainting myself with the people and the customs abroad. Nine months of this time I spent in Paris, which was then an irregular and unkempt city, but withal quite as evil as at present. I took apartments in the Latin Quarter, and, being of a generous nature, I devoted a large share of my income to the support of certain artists and students whose talents and time were expended almost exclusively in the pursuit of pleasure.

While thus serving as a visible means of support to this horde of parasites, I fell in with the man who has since then been my intimate friend. Judge Methuen was a visitor in Paris, and we became boon companions. It was he who rescued me from the parasites and revived the flames of honorable ambition, which had well-nigh been extinguished by the wretched influence of Villon and Rousseau. The Judge was a year my senior, and a wealthy father provided him with the means for gratifying his wholesome and refined tastes. We two went together to London, and it was during our sojourn in that capital that I began my career as a collector of books. It is simply justice to my benefactor to say that to my dear friend Methuen I am indebted for the inspiration which started me upon a course so full of sweet surprises and precious rewards.

There are very many kinds of book collectors, but I think all may be grouped in three cla.s.ses, viz.: Those who collect from vanity; those who collect for the benefits of learning; those who collect through a veneration and love for books. It is not unfrequent that men who begin to collect books merely to gratify their personal vanity find themselves presently so much in love with the pursuit that they become collectors in the better sense.

Just as a man who takes pleasure in the conquest of feminine hearts invariably finds himself at last ensnared by the very pa.s.sion which he has been using simply for the gratification of his vanity, I am inclined to think that the element of vanity enters, to a degree, into every phase of book collecting; vanity is, I take it, one of the essentials to a well-balanced character--not a prodigious vanity, but a prudent, well-governed one. But for vanity there would be no compet.i.tion in the world; without compet.i.tion there would be no progress.

In these later days I often hear this man or that sneered at because, forsooth, he collects books without knowing what the books are about.

But for my part, I say that that man bids fair to be all right; he has made a proper start in the right direction, and the likelihood is that, other things being equal, he will eventually become a lover, as well as a buyer, of books. Indeed, I care not what the beginning is, so long as it be a beginning. There are different ways of reaching the goal.

Some folk go horseback via the royal road, but very many others are compelled to adopt the more tedious processes, involving rocky pathways and torn shoon and sore feet.

So subtile and so infectious is this grand pa.s.sion that one is hardly aware of its presence before it has complete possession of him; and I have known instances of men who, after having a.s.sociated one evening with Judge Methuen and me, have waked up the next morning filled with the incurable enthusiasm of bibliomania. But the development of the pa.s.sion is not always marked by exhibitions of violence; sometimes, like the measles, it is slow and obstinate about "coming out," and in such cases applications should be resorted to for the purpose of diverting the malady from the vitals; otherwise serious results may ensue.

Indeed, my learned friend Dr. O'Rell has met with several cases (as he informs me) in which suppressed bibliomania has resulted fatally. Many of these cases have been reported in that excellent publication, the "Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation," which periodical, by the way, is edited by ex-Surgeon-General Hamilton, a famous collector of the literature of ornament and dress.

To make short of a long story, the medical faculty is nearly a unit upon the proposition that wherever suppressed bibliomania is suspected immediate steps should be taken to bring out the disease. It is true that an Ohio physician, named Woodbury, has written much in defence of the theory that bibliomania can be aborted; but a very large majority of his profession are of the opinion that the actual malady must needs run a regular course, and they insist that the cases quoted as cured by Woodbury were not genuine, but were b.a.s.t.a.r.d or false phases, of the same cla.s.s as the chickenpox and the German measles.

My mania exhibited itself first in an affectation for old books; it mattered not what the book itself was--so long as it bore an ancient date upon its t.i.tle-page or in its colophon I pined to possess it.

This was not only a vanity, but a very silly one. In a month's time I had got together a large number of these old tomes, many of them folios, and nearly all badly worm-eaten, and sadly shaken.

One day I entered a shop kept by a man named Stibbs, and asked if I could procure any volumes of sixteenth-century print.

"Yes," said Mr. Stibbs, "we have a cellarful of them, and we sell them by the ton or by the cord."

That very day I dispersed my h.o.a.rd of antiques, retaining only my Prynne's "Histrio-Mastix" and my Opera Quinti Horatii Flacci (8vo, Aldus, Venetiis, 1501). And then I became interested in British balladry--a n.o.ble subject, for which I have always had a veneration and love, as the well-kept and profusely annotated volumes in cases 3, 6, and 9 in the front room are ready to prove to you at any time you choose to visit my quiet, pleasant home.

V

BALDNESS AND INTELLECTUALITY

One of Judge Methuen's pet theories is that the soul in the human body lies near the center of gravity; this is, I believe, one of the tenets of the Buddhist faith, and for a long time I eschewed it as one might shun a vile thing, for I feared lest I should become identified even remotely with any faith or sect other than Congregationalism.

Yet I noticed that in moments of fear or of joy or of the sense of any other emotion I invariably experienced a feeling of goneness in the pit of my stomach, as if, forsooth, the center of my physical system were also the center of my nervous and intellectual system, the point at which were focused all those devious lines of communication by means of which sensation is instantaneously transmitted from one part of the body to another.

I mentioned this circ.u.mstance to Judge Methuen, and it seemed to please him. "My friend," said he, "you have a particularly sensitive soul; I beg of you to exercise the greatest prudence in your treatment of it.

It is the best type of the bibliomaniac soul, for the quickness of its apprehensions betokens that it is alert and keen and capable of instantaneous impressions and enthusiasms. What you have just told me convinces me that you are by nature qualified for rare exploits in the science and art of book-collecting. You will presently become bald--perhaps as bald as Thomas Hobbes was--for a vigilant and active soul invariably compels baldness, so close are the relations between the soul and the brain, and so destructive are the growth and operations of the soul to those vestigial features which humanity has inherited from those grosser animals, our prehistoric ancestors."

You see by this that Judge Methuen recognized baldness as prima-facie evidence of intellectuality and spirituality. He has collected much literature upon the subject, and has promised the Academy of Science to prepare and read for the instruction of that learned body an essay demonstrating that absence of hair from the cranium (particularly from the superior regions of the frontal and parietal divisions) proves a departure from the instincts and practices of brute humanity, and indicates surely the growth of the understanding.

It occurred to the Judge long ago to prepare a list of the names of the famous bald men in the history of human society, and this list has grown until it includes the names of thousands, representing every profession and vocation. Homer, Socrates, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Pliny, Maecenas, Julius Caesar, Horace, Shakespeare, Bacon, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dante, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Israel Putnam, John Quincy Adams, Patrick Henry--these geniuses all were bald.

But the baldest of all was the philosopher Hobbes, of whom the revered John Aubrey has recorded that "he was very bald, yet within dore he used to study and sitt bare-headed, and said he never took cold in his head, but that the greatest trouble was to keepe off the flies from pitching on the baldness."

In all the portraits and pictures of Bonaparte which I have seen, a conspicuous feature is that curl or lock of hair which depends upon the emperor's forehead, and gives to the face a pleasant degree of picturesque distinction. Yet this was a vanity, and really a laughable one; for early in life Bonaparte began to get bald, and this so troubled him that he sought to overcome the change it made in his appearance by growing a long strand of hair upon his occiput and bringing it forward a goodly distance in such artful wise that it right ingeniously served the purposes of that Hyperion curl which had been the pride of his youth, but which had fallen early before the ravages of time.

As for myself, I do not know that I ever shared that derisive opinion in which the unthinking are wont to hold baldness. Nay, on the contrary, I have always had especial reverence for this mark of intellectuality, and I agree with my friend Judge Methuen that the tragic episode recorded in the second chapter of II. Kings should serve the honorable purpose of indicating to humanity that bald heads are favored with the approval and the protection of Divinity.

In my own case I have imputed my early baldness to growth in intellectuality and spirituality induced by my fondness for and devotion to books. Miss Susan, my sister, lays it to other causes, first among which she declares to be my unnatural practice of reading in bed, and the second my habit of eating welsh-rarebits late of nights. Over my bed I have a gas-jet so properly shaded that the rays of light are concentrated and reflected downward upon the volume which I am reading.

Miss Susan insists that much of this light and its attendant heat falls upon my head, compelling there a dryness of the scalp whereby the follicles have been deprived of their natural nourishment and have consequently died. She furthermore maintains that the welsh-rarebits of which I partake invariably at the eleventh hour every night breed poisonous vapors and subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors, rising by their natural courses to my brain, do therein produce a fever that from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and exterior cranial integument.

Now, this very declaration of Miss Susan's gives me a potent argument in defence of my practices, for, being bald, would not a neglect of those means whereby warmth is engendered where it is needed result in colds, quinsies, asthmas, and a thousand other banes? The same benignant Providence which, according to Laurence Sterne, tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb provideth defence and protection for the bald.

Had I not loved books, the soul in my midriff had not done away with those capillary vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally flourished upon my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and profits of reading in bed might never have fallen to my lot.

And indeed baldness has its compensations; when I look about me and see the time, the energy, and the money that are continually expended upon the nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful that my lot is what it is. For now my money is applied to the buying of books, and my time and energy are devoted to the reading of them.

To thy vain employments, thou becurled and pomaded Absalom! Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of those old books of mine, which from the years and from the s.h.i.+p's hold and from constant companions.h.i.+p with sages and philosophers have acquired a fragrance that exalteth the soul and quickeneth the intellectuals! Let me paraphrase my dear Chaucer and tell thee, thou waster of substances, that

For me was lever han at my beddes hed A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes rich, or fidel, or sautrie; But all be that I ben a philosopher Yet have I but litel gold in cofre!

Books, books, books--give me ever more books, for they are the caskets wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity--words, the only things that live forever! I bow reverently to the bust in yonder corner whenever I recall what Sir John Herschel (G.o.d rest his dear soul!) said and wrote: "Were I to pay for a taste that should stand me in stead under every variety of circ.u.mstances and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a s.h.i.+eld against its ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. Give a man this taste and a means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history--with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him."