118

LETTERS TO X

Crucifixion in centres (4to Saec: XV)." I dare to hold this Bower of Acrisia, this pictured Avalon, this monkish El Dorado, this Temptation of St. Anthony, this Bird of Paradise, this Phoenix from the ashes of the past, this Beatitude-in the palm of my hand. The Commonplace Book of the angels !

Of course one's ambitions invariably vault over one's philosophy and means. One of the achievements which make me feel crudely bombastic is the fact that my books are still self-supporting—that I have not spent on them one penny over and beyond receipts from selling books, that, in fact, I am still some fourteen pounds to the good. But that process is on its last legs. I am becoming finikin, exclusive and aristocratic. I have become the very specialist whom my last letter's airy catholicity disdained. It was inevitable, unless one is to degenerate into a smatterer in oddments of a thousand different kinds of books. The sprawling, heterogeneous, multitudinous collection of our grandfathers, for instance, has been whittled down to the more correct and formal completeness of their children. But this economy, this habit of choiceness, is not necessarily a loss; it is sentimental to lament a collection of books because of its loss of fat. We do not disdain Blake's "The Lily" because it is only four lines long. The personality of a library, too, must be cut to the small one of its owner. Thus he will embrace and absorb it, so that it is almost as much a

120

LETTERS TO X

portion of his living spirit as his hand that takes a particle of it from the shelf and his eye that voyages its pages. Besides, there is a limit to shelf-room, and the best modern books both in equipment and subject one can get must obviously have plenty of elbow room.

There is too the quantitative element. A book-lover is not a newspaper proprietor, feeding the furnace of war with young lives. For the former, the thin flame rising from the antique, sacrificial altar is enough. I think, I say I think I should be permanently without appetite, had I one thousand five hundred books; I should have said two thousand, if I had not realized that humans living in the teens of the twentieth century have little chance of crossing the frontiers of the fifties. Would that I might grow old to read good books and still be young enough to enjoy them. Even when I indulge myself with reflections upon a library of a sifted and discriminated quality, the savage comes sometimes climbing out of my kidneys (where the amenities of books should always keep him prisoned), cries "of the making of books there is no end," and dances in barbaric exultation among the smouldering ashes of all my books. Normally, my books, ranged round the room like the wall of the enclosed garden of the Romant de la Rose, are a shield against a pitchy, clamorous outside, filled with the heart-agonizing cries of the paper-boys-the tin trumpets of the Doom. Thus-fidei defensores-they keep their vigilant watch, like a handful of Christian knights against the hosts of the Paynim.

So it is that selection, as in art, plays the tyrant. Anyway there are limits to placing one's neck beneath its heels.

Have you catalogues among the Intelligences, my dear X? They are awful revelations of the eccentricities of the book-collector. I took up a catalogue by hazard the other day and this "item" was written upon the third page I turned: " Swinburne (Algernon C.). Unpublished Verses: As the refluent sea-weed moves in the languid exuberant stream 9 2 11. ! Privately Printed 1866." Conjure to yourself the notion of collecting treatises on shorthand (which fetch skiey prices); fancy the "rare blank leaf" of the first edition of Donne's poems (1633) adding three pounds to its price; imagine paying five pounds for a dollish little landscape painted on the "fore-edge" of a book's leaves-such collectors no doubt follow the precedent of a famous Dean of Canterbury, who placed all the books of his library with their foreedges outwards; conceive my getting the fourth folio edition of North's "Plutarch" (1612) for eight-andsixpence at a sale, because the leaf of the "errata" was missing.

I acknowledge there is a good deal to be said for the pedantry of perfection. Though I plume myself upon not being a victim to it, I confess to the pleasure which little technicalities give me. I like an old book to be clean and well-knit, to have its binding the original one and well preserved, and the impression of its portrait or engraved title, if there be one, to be strong, firm, and black. And, if a book must be defective, I prefer it to be in the middle, rather than in the end or beginning— partly because it is easier to "make-up" subsequently in that state and partly because it is less ragged, pinchbeck, and beggarly thus. I would go further. I like to see the pages of an old book well margined. It gives a

66

frame to the type. That does not commit me to fine tall copies," "uncut copies," or "large paper copies" and fantastic inaccessibilities of that kind. I am sure I should agree with Dr. Johnson's remark about Garrick's library, that his books were “dandified.”

Autographs too, qua autographs, catch me neither warmed nor dispursed. I possess only a few and they are accidents. One of them is Stephen Duck's in Casubon's translation of Marcus Aurelius (1686). Hardly a web-foot on the sands of time! Another is John Selden's in Drayton's "Polyolbion" (1612), that noble book of England's country-side, with its allegorical maps of expansive Amazons bearing steeples on their heads, torsos of maidens addressing the reader with gestures of selfadmiration from the coils of rivers, and rustic-coated shepherds perched on little mounds; with its delicate portrait of Prince Henry balancing a spear and its engraved title, depicting a plump, matronly impersonation of England, her mantle embroidered with trees, mountainranges, towns, and sheaves of corn. But Selden annotated the "Polyolbion" anonymously, and I am convinced that a pious reader notified the fact by writing the signature himself. What matter? A third is Lionel Johnson's in a third edition of the witty Bishop Corbet's "Poems" (1672), and a fourth, Robert Bridges' and Andrew Lang's in the 1627 edition of Drayton's "Poems." They are only to be remarked as an example that three at least of our modern men-of-letters have left a testimony of their feeling for the old poets.

To my mind, the fact that a book with Ben Jonson's inscription recently fetched four hundred pounds at a