Here is one of the oddest of the odd inventions which man has sought out, this conveying to one another by marks scratched on paper thoughts privately conceived in the mind. It shows, as all the arts show, the infinite publicism of humankind, the sociability, the interdependence, which cannot endure to have a thought, to conceive a tale, a tune, a picture, an arrangement of words, or anything else, but all must forthwith be informed of it. And how avidly we run to be informed; we have already consumed many thousands of tales, poems, essays, and what not, but we are never satiate, we are greedy always for more. We begin the day by running our eyes over those multi-paged printed rags which furnish us with potted selections of events which have occurred during the last twenty-four hours. What excitement! Here are countries plunging into war, politicians making speeches, governments, aeroplanes and motor-cars crashing right and left, murders, thefts and revolutions, Britons flung into foreign goals, Etonians bowled by other Etonians in 1887 (they have remembered it ever since, amid all the uproar and confusion of life), outbreaks of healthy-Aryan-national-sentiment in Germany, of sacred egoism in Italy, of foot-and-mouth disease in Berkshire.
It has all occurred many times before, it will all occur many times again, but still I devour the pages with eager appetite, stimulated and mildly stunned. My newspaper makes me realise, in the improbable event of my ever forgetting it, on to what an exciting, what a tumultuous world, the sun and I matutinally rise.
Having risen, I endeavour for a time to bound my reading by what I regard as my proper studies, that is, by the requirements of such labours as I am at the moment committed to. These requirements, generously interpreted, may take me almost anywhere. They may take me, for example, to my dictionary; and, having heaved one of the somewhat ponderous volumes of this mighty work from its shelf (this is one of the main ways in which I keep in good athletic training) I continue to read in it at random, since it would be waste to heave it back at once. I need not expatiate on the inexhaustible pleasure to be extracted from the perusal of this dictionary, from the tasting of this various feast of language, etymology, and elegant extracts from all the periods of English literature. In this enticing pastime a whole morning may fleet itself idly away.
Or, on some slight pretext, the other works that beckon from my shelves like sirens from enchanted seas may win me to them, and, soon oblivious of the reason for my plunge, I am swimming in those deep voluminous seas, among poetry, masques, plays, history, lives, diaries, letters, zoology, navigations and explorations. These, last, above the rest, have the siren's power to drug and to detain. For they are, I suppose, what the
psychologists call, in their uncouth tongue, wish-fulfilment, or dream-sublimation. They take you travelling over the globe, and with no further trouble than the lazy flick of a page. Why, as Samuel Purchas introducing his collection of travellers' tales, so plausibly asked, travel, when you can get all the benefits of doing so and suffer none of its damages, by reading of the travels of others? Why should gentlemen adventure themselves to see the fashions of other countries, where their souls and bodies find temptations to a twofold whoredom, and bring home a few smattering terms, flattering garbs, apish cringes, foppish fancies, foolish guises and disguises, the vanities of neighbour nations (I name not Naples) without furthering their knowledge of God, the world or themselves? For his part, for the benefit both of those who cannot travel far and those who cannot travel virtuously, he offers “a world of travellers to their domestic entertainment.”
In brief, he recommends to us his travelogue, in which “both elephants may swim in deep voluminous seas, and such as want either lust or leisure may single out what author or voyage shall best fit to his profit or his pleasure.” He would have us arm-chair travellers, and well he knew how to play on our indolence.
Here, then, we sit, as he suggests, at home and in peace under the shadow of our own vine and fig, and from the shore behold with safety and delight the dangerous navigations and expeditions of explorers, viewing their war-like fights in the watery plain as from a fortified tower, enjoying the sweet contemplation
of their laborious actions. Most commodiously we peregrinate with Marco Polo over Persia, Thibet, Turkestan, and to the court of Khublai Khan; with Spanish Conquistadores and English pirate merchants to Mexico, the Indies, and the New World; with Portugal friars about Abyssinia; with the Hollanders to the Java seas; with King Solomon's navy to Ophir; with Captain William Hawkins, hindered all the way by proud injurious Portugals and wily Jesuits, to the court of the Great Mogul; with Sir John Hawkins in the
Jesus
to take five hundred negroes on the New Guinea coast and make vent of them to Spaniards in the Indies; with the good ship
Dog
to the Mexique Bay; with Captain Knox to the wild Highlands of Ceylon; with Thomas Gage, the disgruntled Jesuit, over Guatemala; with John Chilton over all New Spain, among Indians who dared not eat him for fear he might have the pox; with Anthony Knivet plundering chests of silver from the cells of Portugal friars in Brazil, eating the bark of cinnamon-trees at Port Famine, encountering cannibals, a crocodile, and a great dead whale lying on the shore like a ship grown with moss. We may visit the island of Ferro and see that tree which rains continually; or chase after those flitting isles near Teneriffe which, when men approach them, they vanish; or behold the islands off Scotland swimming after the manner of the ancient Cyclades and flitting up and down in the water, the sport of tempests; on these same islands you may see (and still without moving a step nearer the Scotch express) trees from whose fruit falling into running
water ducks and geese do grow. “Whoever took possession of the huge oceans, made procession round about the vast earth? Whoever discovered new constellations, saluted the frozen poles, subjected the burning zones?” Whoever may have done so, I am as good as they, and far more at ease, sitting in my arm-chair and following them about the world with my eyes, doped and lulled with their enchanting lies. Without putting out a hand but to turn a page, I break off a sugar cane and suck it, drop into my mouth pears dripping honey, pluck store of oysters from the boughs of trees (but these have a flash taste), gather barnacle geese from the barnacle-trees, smell the sweetness of great lemon woods, watch Sierra Leonians slithering up high palm-trees to fill gourds with palmito wine, eat wood fruits called beninganions and beguills, as big as apples and tasting like strawberries, taste cooked friar, but reject it as unwholesome, visit the Castle at Agra, where in a fair court every noon the Rajah sees elephants, lions and buffles fight, and so on to Lahore, the way set on both sides with mulberry-trees; watch a Christian ape at the court of King Jahanjar pick out the name of Christ from those of twelve prophets shuffled in a bag, tearing up the eleven others with distaste; sail up the river Quame for gold, elephants' teeth, ambergris and slaves; find turtles' eggs with Roger Barlow in the Indies, unicorns' horns with Sir John Hawkins in Florida; watch from the Florida beach the sea-fowl chase the flying fish; sail among these huge icy mountains which make such a dashing and crashing one
against another in green Arctic seas; voyage, in brief, all oceans, peregrinate all lands, taste all foods, meet all people, enjoy all pleasures.
Meet all people. Yes; my humble dwelling-room becomes a salon, where I receive, without even troubling to rise or bow, an extraordinary miscellaneous crowd or rabble of persons, chattering in all tongues on all topics, in verse, in stately prose, in strolling, colloquial late-Stuart slang, in round and booming Johnsonian, in demure and ladylike Austenian, in sly and delicate Proustian, in gay modern English and French. Many are pompous, foolish, absurd, many have wit, many have ideas, many have neither. Some are wicked above the ordinary, some of a virtue only found among the angels and among earthly citizens of bygone centuries; of these my flat is not worthy, they shine oddly in it. Among them move people “so beastly that they put themself to no manner of labour, but study only how to take their neighbours for to eat them.” Theological controversialists too I entertain; I hear the schoolmen thunder against one another on subtle points of doctrine, Jesuits and Jansenists furiously raging together, Puritan and Anglican at it hammer and tongs, non-Jurors smitten by the See of Bangor, the higher mathematics by that of Cloyne. Yet I do not greatly encourage these religious thunderings; I welcome more often blander and gayer guests, finding them apter for a salon. I prefer the urbane smile, the elegant jest, the fit phrase, the lovely line, the strange adventure, the subtle thought, or the sounding period of the historian.
At times, too, I like my salon to become a zoo, a bestiary, a setting for the infinitely strange habits of animals, of unicorns, elephants, dragons, manticoras, remoras, sea-serpents, dolphins, turtles, sparrow-camels, panthers, cockatrices, chameleons, and others of their curious kind.
Another and still more indolent salon I hold in my bed at night, in the hour before sleep. The guests here are of a different kind, less disturbing and exciting, for it does not do to be disturbed and excited before sleep. Poetry will not do at this hour, nor prose of a past and more splendid age. It is an hour reserved for the narrative fiction or biography of the present moment. As I drift in this agreeable ship towards sleep, I marvel drowsily at its good craftsmanship. How charmingly A writes, I think; how ingenious is B, how C's quick wit makes me smile, how D holds the attention nailed fast, so that if one slips a word one loses a sense. How sharp an irony sparkles from E's pages, how amiable a jester is F, how sound a workman G. How well they, for the most part, write. (Those who do not, do not detain me for more than a few pages.) Surely, I sleepily reflect, the standard of writing has climbed up and up through the past two decades. When I was young, we did not, I am sure, write as well as we nearly all write now. The standard has risen. There are, I believe, floods of tosh; fortunately, unless one is a publisher or a reviewer, one need not see it. But there is enough that interests, pleases or entertains to fill the ante-somnial hour night by night with company good enough for
the occasion, which is all that one should demand of current literature.
So much for the home salon. One attends, also, the salons of others. There are within my reach two great places of entertainment. One is in a pleasant square; here one roams at will about gridded galleries, reading what one chooses, removing books by armfuls and leaving them scattered on tables to find their own ways back, or taking them away, either after being entered in ledgers if one is a person of probity, or concealed in despatch-cases if one is a thief; for this library is a notable hunting-ground for thieves; frail human nature has signally failed under the strain of seeing so many books at once, and the biblioklept, one of the lowest of God's creatures, may be prowling next you along those quiet corridors, his stealthy hand plucking the desired fruit from the bough and stowing it furtively away.
This is less possible in the other great London resort of readers, where they know better than to trust us. Here we are fed liberally, afforded every kindness, but we are marked men and women, we cannot easily steal away with pockets full of volumes. Unless, indeed, we chanced to be newcomers, gave false names, and were careful not to return. Something in this sort might, I suppose, be managed. But for most of us the strait and narrow way of rectitude is indicated.
We can, however, lick our fingers to turn the pages. I have been told that some readers even lick the pages direct with the tongue, but this habit is, I believe, confined
to those who have been allowed special access to books not generally accessible, and denotes some peculiar pleasure.
For my part, I find it enough to sit drowsily in a great circular room, my wants supplied (in God's good time) by attendant elves, a great bank climbing volume by volume about me, shutting me off from the inky little student writing a research thesis on my right, and from the patriarch from the far deserts of Arabia on my left, leaving me dreamily alone, transcribing from crabbed texts in a crabbed hand, languishing agreeably in that hot-house clime, all the books in the world (or as near as makes no matter to me) within the call of a written order.
What is the extraordinary pleasure that we derive from this pastime? Why do we forget everything for it, feel by it transported, enlarged, enslaved, freed, impassioned, enlivened, soothed, drugged, delighted, distressed, entertained, sharpened in wits, ennobled in soul, winged in imagination, gratified in humour, stirred to pity, rage, love, rapture, enthusiasm, creation, zeal for learning, infinite zest and curiosity for life? I do not know, nor anyone.
And, in the end, it wears down our eyes, never intended for this strange and crabbed use, so that we have to read through discs of magnifying glass. As to our healthâ“the man whom about midnight, when others take their rest, thou seest come out of his study meagre-looking ⦠squalid, and spauling, dost thou
think that plodding on his books he doth seek how he shall become an honester man.â¦? There is no such matter.”
How strange it is, this passion that assaults the breast when the foot treads foreign earth; this lust to acquire, to carry away, to convey home in suitcases wretched pelting trifles which in our native land we should be the first (or so we hope) to disdain! With how fond pleasure have I purchased bronze models (green with
antichitÃ
) of the Temple of Vesta in the shape of an inkpot, and of the extant fragments of the various structures that were reared, regardless of expense, to honour the triumphing monarchs and gods of Imperial Rome. With what delight have I bought in Taormina tiny painted mule-carts; in Palermo sections of a similar but larger cart, that would be of use, so one hoped, for a bed-head, for a wardrobe door, for a screen; in Naples coral charms against the evil eye and mother-of-pearl spoons; in Pisa the leaning tower in marble; in Athens the Erictheum in alabaster; (the seventh Lord Elgin, stirred by this passion on a grander scale, bore away, as we know, the Parthenon frieze); in Mexico painted pots, and walnut shells containing, preserved behind glass, tiny Mexicans; in New Mexico rugs and silver brooches made by Hopes; in Monterey huge abalone shells; in Florida twigs of worthless branch coral; in Spain fans illustrated with bull-fights;
in Canada moccasins with fringes, and little canoes with Indians; in Quimper crockery; and I have known those who did worse than this in Brittany, and returned laden with giant oak dressers, cupboards and beds.