The Book-Hunter by John Hill Burton (top 10 non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

again is called a palimpsest, and the man who can restore and read it a paleographist. The great erect stone on the moor, which has hitherto defied all learning to find the faintest trace of the age in which it was erected, its purpose, or the people who placed it there, seems as it were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished when the import of the term was fully explained to him. Should there be any remains of sculpture on such a stone, it becomes a lithoglyph or a hieroglyph; and if the nature and end of this sculpture be quite incomprehensible to the adepts, they may term it a cryptoglyph, and thus dignify, by a sort of title of honour, the absoluteness of their ignorance. It were a pity if any more ingenious man should afterwards find a key to the mystery, and destroy the significance of the established nomenclature.

The vendors of quack medicines and cosmetics are aware of the power of Greek nomenclature, and apparently subsidise scholars of some kind or other to supply them with the article. A sort of shaving soap used frequently to be advertised under a title which was as complexly adjusted a piece of mosaic work as the geologists or the conchologists ever turned out. But perhaps the confidence in the protective power of Greek designations lately reached its climax, in an attempt to save thieves from punishment by calling them kleptomaniacs.

It is possible that, were I to attempt to dignify the class of men to whom the following sketches are devoted by an appropriate scientific title, a difficulty would start up at the very beginning. As the reader will perhaps see, from the tenor of my discourse, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad—to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic. On the whole, I am content with my first idea, and continue to stick to the title of "The Book-Hunter," with all the more assurance that it has been tolerated, and even liked, by readers of the kind I am most ambitious of pleasing.[23]

Few wiser things have ever been said than that remark of Byron's, that "man is an unfortunate fellow, and ever will be." Perhaps the originality of the fundamental idea it expresses may be questioned, on the ground that the same warning has been enounced in far more solemn language, and from a far more august authority. But there is originality in the vulgar everyday-world way of putting the idea, and this makes it suit the present purpose, in which, a human frailty having to be dealt with, there is no intention to be either devout or philosophical about it, but to treat it in a thoroughly worldly and practical tone, and in this temper to judge of its place among the defects and ills to which flesh is heir. It were better, perhaps, if we human creatures sometimes did this, and discussed our common frailties as each himself partaking of them, than that we should mount, as we are so apt to do, into the clouds of theology or of ethics, according as our temperament and training are of the serious or of the intellectual order. True, there are many of our brethren violently ready to proclaim themselves frail mortals, miserable sinners, and no better, in theological phraseology, than the greatest of criminals. But such has been my own unfortunate experience in life, that whenever I find a man coming forward with these self-denunciations on his lips, I am prepared for an exhibition of intolerance, spiritual pride, and envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, towards any poor fellow-creature who has floundered a little out of the straight path, and being all too conscious of his errors, is not prepared to proclaim them in those broad emphatic terms which come so readily to the lips of the censors, who at heart believe themselves spotless,—just as complaints about poverty, and inability to buy this and that, come from the fat lips of the millionaire, when he shows you his gallery of pictures, his stud, and his forcing-frames.

No; it is hard to choose between the two. The man who has no defect or crack in his character—no tinge of even the minor immoralities—no fantastic humour carrying him sometimes off his feet—no preposterous hobby—such a man, walking straight along the surface of this world in the arc of a circle, is a very dangerous character, no doubt; of such all children, dogs, simpletons, and other creatures that have the instinct of the odious in their nature, feel an innate loathing. And yet it is questionable if your perfectionised Sir Charles Grandison is quite so dangerous a character as your "miserable sinner," vociferously conscious that he is the frailest of the frail, and that he can do no good thing of himself. And indeed, in practice, the external symptoms of these two characteristics have been known so to alternate in one disposition as to render it evident that each is but the same moral nature under a different external aspect,—the mask, cowl, varnish, crust, or whatever you like to call it, having been adapted to the external conditions of the man—that is, to the society he mixes in, the set he belongs to, the habits of the age, and the way in which he proposes to get on in life. It is when the occasion arises for the mask being thrown aside, or when the internal passions burst like a volcano through the crust, that terrible events take place, and the world throbs with the excitement of some wonderful criminal trial.[24]

The present, however, is not an inquiry into the first principles either of ethics or of physiology. The object of this rambling preamble is to win from the reader a morsel of genial fellow-feeling towards the human frailty which I propose to examine and lay bare before him, trusting that he will treat it neither with the haughty disdain of the immaculate, nor the grim charity of the "miserable sinner:" that he may even, when sighing over it as a failing, yet kindly remember that, in comparison with many others, it is a failing that leans to virtue's side. It will not demand that breadth of charity which even rather rigid fathers are permitted to exercise by the licence of the existing school of French fiction.[25] Neither will it exact such extensive toleration as that of the old Aberdeen laird's wife, who, when her sister lairdesses were enriching the tea-table conversation with broad descriptions of the abominable vices of their several spouses, said her own "was just a gueed, weel-tempered, couthy, queat, innocent, daedlin, drucken body—wi' nae ill practices aboot him ava!" But all things in their own time and place. To understand the due weight and bearing of this feeling of optimism, it is necessary to remember that its happy owner had probably spent her youth in that golden age when it was deemed churlish to bottle the claret, and each guest filled his stoup at the fountain of the flowing hogshead; and if the darker days of dear claret came upon her times, there was still to fall back upon the silver age of smuggled usquebaugh, when the types of a really hospitable country-house were an anker of whisky always on the spigot, a caldron ever on the bubble with boiling water, and a cask of sugar with a spade in it,—all for the manufacture of toddy.

The habits of that age have passed away, and with them the drunken laird and the widely tolerant wife. The advancing civilisation which has nearly extinguished this class of frailties among those who have the amplest means of indulgence in them, is, no doubt, doing for other frailties, and will come at last to the one in hand, leaving it an object of admiring and compassionate retrospect to an enlightened posterity. There are people, however, too impatient to wait for such results from the mellowing influence of progressive civilisation. Such a consideration suggests to me that I may be treading on dangerous ground—dangerous, I mean, to the frail but amiable class to whom my exposition is devoted. Natural misgivings arise in one who professes to call attention to a special type of human frailty, since the world is full of people who will be prepared to deal with and cure it, provided only that they are to have their own way with the disease and the patient, and that they shall enjoy the simple privilege of locking him up, dieting him, and taking possession of his worldly goods and interests, as one who, by his irrational habits, or his outrages on the laws of physiology, or the fitness of things, or some other neology, has satisfactorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his own affairs. No! This is not a cruel age; the rack, the wheel, the boot, the thumbikins, even the pillory and the stocks, have disappeared; death-punishment is dwindling away; and if convicts have not their full rations of cooked meat, or get damaged coffee or sour milk, or are inadequately supplied with flannels and clean linen, there will be an outcry and an inquiry, and a Secretary of State will lose a percentage of his influence, and learn to look better after the administration of patronage. But, at the same time, the area of punishment—or of "treatment," as it is mildly termed—becomes alarmingly widened, and people require to look sharply into themselves lest they should be tainted with any little frailty or peculiarity which may transfer them from the class of free self-regulators to that of persons under "treatment." In Owen's parallelograms there were to be no prisons: he admitted no power in one man to inflict punishment upon another for merely obeying the dictates of natural propensities which could not be resisted. But, at the same time, there were to be "hospitals" in which not only the physically diseased, but also the mentally and morally diseased, were to be detained until they were cured; and when we reflect that the laws of the parallelogram were very stringent and minute, and required to be absolutely enforced to the letter, otherwise the whole machinery of society would come to pieces, like a watch with a broken spring,—it is clear that these hospitals would have contained a very large proportion of the unrationalised population.

There is rather an alarming amount of this sort of communism now among us, and it is therefore with some little misgiving that one sets down anything that may betray a brother's weakness, and lay bare the diagnosis of a human frailty. Indeed, the bad name that proverbially hangs the dog has already been given to the one under consideration, for bibliomania is older in the technology of this kind of nosology than dipsomania, which is now understood to be an almost established ground for seclusion, and deprivation of the management of one's own affairs. There is one ground of consolation, however,—the people who, being all right themselves, have undertaken the duty of keeping in order the rest of the world, have far too serious a task in hand to afford time for idle reading. There is a good chance,