Ian Maclaren

“ Showell Rogers, whose dream has been fulfilled, that Heaven, having a place for each true man, may be “a bookman’s paradise, where early black-lettered tomes, rare and stately, first folios of Shakespeare, tall copies of the right editions of the Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, uncropped, uncut, and unfoxed in all their verdant pureness, fresh as when they left the presses of the Aldi, are to be had for the asking.” ”

“ Just as a tired man throws off his dress coat and slips on an old study jacket, so one lays down the latest thoughtful, or intense, or something worse pseudo work of fiction, and is at ease with an old gossip who is ever wise and cheery, who never preaches and yet gives one a fillip of goodness. Among the masters one must give a foremost place to Balzac, who strikes one as the master of the art in French literature. ”

“ As the bookman grows old and many of his pleasures cease, he thanks God for one which grows the richer for the years and never fades. He pities those who have not this retreat from the weariness of life, nor this quiet place in which to sit when the sun is setting. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you. ‘Non omnis moriar’—if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me. ”

“ He will be all his life rearranging, and so comes to understand how it is that women spend forenoons of delight in box rooms or store closets, and are happiest when everything is turned upside down. It is a slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound after the taste of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of small ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a moment over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler without tasting again some favourite passage. ”

“ There we long to remain, where on account of the greatness of our love the days ever appear to us to be few. There are delightful libraries in cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses of all sorts of volumes, there academic meads, trembling with the earthquake of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the promontory of Parnassus and the Porticoes of the Stoics. ”

“ It is in fact a time of reminiscences, when the two of you, the other being Sir Thomas Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thackeray, go over passages together which contain the sweetest recollections of the past. When the bookman reads the various suggestions for a holiday which are encouraged in the daily newspapers for commercial purposes about the month of July, he is vastly amused by their futility, and often thinks of pointing out the only holiday which is perfectly satisfying. ”

“ Quiet men coming home from business and reading, for the sixth time, some noble English classic, would smile in their modesty if any one should call them bookmen, but in so doing they have a sounder judgment in literature than coteries of clever people who go crazy for a brief time over the tweetling of a minor poet, or the preciosity of some fantastic critic. ”

“ It does not follow that one is a bookman because he has many books, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which a gentleman’s library is not complete. And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books, since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them. It is the foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his fastidiousness to ignore a friend in a fourpence-halfpenny edition. ”

“ I can help the appreciation of them while I last and love them till I die, and perhaps if fortune turns her face once more in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my overbeating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy. ”

“ The bookman has a series of love affairs before he is captured and settles down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged married man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are perilous to his inflammable heart.
In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the sweetness of literature in two of the best novels ever written, as well as two of the best pieces of good English. ”

“ Mr. Augustine Birrell makes it, I think, a 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. ”

“ If he does not wish their company they are silent, and then when he turns to them again there is no difference in the welcome, for they maintain an equal mind and are ever in good humour. As he comes in tired and possibly upset by smaller people they receive him in a kindly fashion, and in the firelight their familiar faces make his heart glad. ”

“ 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 Art” to the Lake Poets—there never was a Lake school—and the Essenes. ”

“ That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, “Bringing your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you.” And this again, as Esmond thinks of her, is surely beaten gold. “Gracious God, who was he, weak and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured out upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a treasure be given him? What is ambition compared to that but selfish vanity? ”

“ Two books from the shelf of fiction are taken down and read once a year by a certain bookman from beginning to end, and in this matter he is now in the position of a Mohammedan converted to Christianity, who is advised by the missionary to choose one of his two wives to have and to hold as a lawful spouse. When one has given his heart to Henry Esmond and the Heart of Midlothian he is in a strait, and begins to doubt the expediency of literary monogamy. ”

“ One thing is certain, the rascal loves a good book and likes to have it when he can, and perhaps it will make him a better man to show that he has been remembered and that one person at least believes in him, and so the bookman orders that delightful treasure to be sent to his own address in order that next day he may present it—as a birthday present—to himself. ”

“ Concerning tastes in pleasure there can be no final judgment, but for the bookman it may be said, beyond any other sportsman, he has the most constant satisfaction, for to him there is no close season, except the spring cleaning which he furiously resents, and only allows once in five years, and his autumn holiday, when he takes some six handy volumes with him. ”

“ The bookman, like the poet, and a good many other people, is born and not made, and my grateful memory retains an illustration of the difference between a bookowner and a bookman which I think is apropos. ”

“ One, of course, does not mean that the Indian and trapper stories had the same claim to be literature as the Pilgrim’s Progress, for, be it said with reverence, there was not much distinction in the style, or art in the narrative, but they were romances, and their subjects suited boys, who are barbarians, and there are moments when we are barbarians again, and above all things these tales bring back the days of long ago. ”

“ The bookman, in fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare not claim that he searches for accurate information in his books as for fine gold, and he has been known to say that that department of books of various kinds which come under the head of “what’s what,” and “why’s why,” and “where’s where,” are not literature. ”

“ The bookman is indeed perpetually engaged in his form of spring cleaning, which is rearranging his books, and is always hoping to square the circle, in both collecting the books of one department together, and also having his books in equal sizes. ”

“ He has also anodynes for his conscience when he seems to be wronging his afflicted family, for is he not gathering the best of legacies for his sons, something which will make their houses rich for ever, or if things come to the worst cannot his collection be sold and all he has expended be restored with usury, which in passing I may say is a vain dream? But at any rate, if other men spend money on dinners and on sport, on carved furniture and gay clothing, may he not also have one luxury in life? ”

“ When a boy grows up beside his father and his father is in the last stages of the book disease, there is hardly any power which can save that son, unless the mother be robustly illiterate, in which case the crossing of the blood may make him impervious. ”

“ As often as one sees the books behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked, then he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with them in the evening hours when the work of the day is done, but their jailer, who has bought them in the market-place for gold, and holds them in this foreign place by force. ”

“ It would be something to sit in a corner and hear Monkbarns and Charles Lamb comparing notes, and to watch for the moment when Lamb would withdraw all he had said against the Scots people, or Earl Spencer describing with delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle of Sale. But I will guarantee that the whole company of bookworms would end in paying tribute to that intelligent and very fascinating young woman from Holyrood, who still turns men’s heads across the stretch of centuries. For even a bookman has got a heart. ”

“ It is the wife who in both cases is usually the sufferer and good angel, and under her happy influence the bookman will sometimes take the pledge, and for him, it is needless to say, there is only one cure. He cannot be a moderate drinker, for there is no possibility of moderation, and if he is to be saved he must become a total abstainer. ”

“ He that hath such friends, grave or gay, needeth not to care whether he be rich or poor, whether he know great folk or they pass him by, for he is independent of society and all its whims, and almost independent of circumstances. ”

“ Between this man at least and his books there will be no separation this side the grave, but his gratitude to them and his devotion will ever grow and their ministries to him be ever dearer, especially that Book of books which has been the surest guide of the human soul. “While I live,” says one who both wrote and loved books and was numbered among our finest critics, “while I live and think, nothing can deprive me of my value for such treasures. ”

“ To-morrow will be the birthday of a man whom he has known all his days and more intimately than any other person, and although he has not so high an idea of the man as the world is good enough to hold, and although he has often quarrelled with him and called him shocking names—which tomcats would be ashamed of—yet he has at the bottom a sneaking fondness for the fellow, and sometimes hopes he is not quite so bad after all. ”

“ He is proudly conscious at the time that he is a witness to perfection in a gay world which is content with excitement, and he would be more than human if he had not in him a touch of the literary Pharisee. ”

“ During the hours of the day when he is visiting patients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about corn, or composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and eighty minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a man can work or hope to get. He will spend the time in the good company of people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with them. ”

“ When the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body—and seldom may it visit your ladyship—and when the hour of death that comes to high and low—lang and late may it be yours—oh, my lady, then it is na’ what we hae dune for oursels but what we hae dune for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly. ”

“ When the bookman is a family man, and I have sometimes doubts whether he ought not to be a celibate like missionaries of religion and other persons called to special devotion, he has of course to battle against his temptation, and his struggles are very pathetic. ”

“ It is only a question of time when that lad, being now on an allowance of his own, will be going about in a suit of disgracefully shabby tweeds, that he may purchase a Theophrastus of fine print and binding upon which he has long had his eye, and will be taking milk and bread for his lunch in the city, because he has a foolish ambition to acquire by a year’s saving the Kelmscott edition of the Golden Legend. ”

“ When one had lost his bashfulness and could associate with grown-up books, then he was admitted to the company of Scott, and Thackeray, and Dickens, who were and are, as far as one can see, to be the leaders of society. ”