THE WOODEN HORSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 31, 29 April 1927, Page 10

THE WOODEN HORSE

AN OCCASIONAL COLUMN (Written for THE SUN.) And with great lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing and forgot his course. —J. E. Flecker. IfR. St. John Ervlne recently conx tributed to the “Manchester Guardian’ a “Discourse on Books.” It was inspired by his unpacking and arranging his library, which for a long time had been boxed up in storage somewhere. To be reunited with one’s books, as Mr. Ervine was, is a great happiness, and he expressed it; but he expressed also the feeling of surprise, even disgusted surprise, which

one is apt to feel then, on reviewing a collection of volumes representing tastes out-grown, foolish impulses, false economies, headlong enthusiams, literary snobbishness or highbrow vanities, and unfulfilled resolves, representing all this as well as one’s enduring loyalties, representing both what, one was and, in more shadowy fashion, what one is.

It appalled Mr. Ervine to see so many boofcs about him that he would never read, never even want to read. Why, for instance, had he bought Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital?” . . . One recovers one’s hoard of books, after separation, and expects to be wholeheartedly glad to have them. But to be confronted by one’s blunders in octavo, neatly bound and gilt-lettered, is a sharp disillusionment. Daily companionship obscures the defects in a library; suddenly reviewed, not as part of the famiilar context of a room where all things are friendly together, carpet, walls, and pictures, the shelves and their books, but as so many volumes lifted out of boxes and dumped on the floor, books reveal their shame —or rather, to be fair, thy reveal the shame of Lie silly fellow who bought them, thinking himself no end of a litterateur, no end of a bargain-hunter. It is easy to get the book-buying itch, and to make it worse by giving in to it. There grows up a foolish pride in seeing shelf after shelf filled up, not indeed with trash, but too often with books unwisely bought. There grows up, too, an absurd conviction that to live without books, hundreds of books, thousands of books, is impossible; that it is of vital importance to find room to-day for Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” in seven cheap little green volumes, to-morrow for Mary Mandoline’s “Tinklings and Other Verses,” next day for Mr. Michael Baalam’s “The Green Cat,” that vivacious masterpiece. It is stupid. But nothing teaches one more effectually how stupid it is than to be divorced from one’s groaning shelves, and, better still, at the same time to be debarred, by one imperative circumstance or another, from standing too often as a'buyer at the bookseller’s counter, where the publishers’

“prodigious rivers roll their everfattening seds.” One learns then how easy it is, and how profitable—l do not mean only inexpensive—to get on with a mere handful of books. And when one is set down again the midst of one’s former, abundance, fancied essential, one sees in it rather a sort of riotous profusion, disorderly and, for all its fine total of volumes, a poorer equipment to stay and comfort life than it should be. I shall not define or describe all the most ridiculous mistakes of the book-buyer gone crazy. For one thing, it would take too long; for another, no book-buyer who is crazy ever profits from a diagnosis of his case. The disease, as it runs its course, nearly always works its own cure, and the poor lunatic, with a strange delicious coolness about his head, views here and there and everywhere in his room the signs of his lunacy past. Books bought because they were rare, or because they were subject of spurious literary jabber; or because they were new, or because they were old, or because they were in Puffin’s list of the Hundred and One Best Books, or because they were to be read some day, or because any other reason than the right one commended itself to a mind bemused . . . But I should guess that the buying of good books in defective. bad, or unworthy editions causes in the end, more vexation than any other sort of mistake.

Is it realised how often cheap reprints are bad reprints? Some are complete but full of misprints: others ire incomplete and full of misprints. Some omit preface, introduction, appendixes. or notes. Some follow uncorrected and unrevised early editions. Some play old Harry with the text to keep the number of pages down. It i'j not long before many of them simply disgust by being unworthy in every material way of the work they present. Who, for instance, that has bought Jane Austen in Golly’s Dulltype Press series of reprints does not feel moved, when too late he finds the edition with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations or Mr. R. W. Chapman’s new Oxford edition, to sink his wretched little books in the nearest duck-pond? A little patience, a little inquiry, and he might have set Jane in proper and honourable form on his shelf —and for perhaps only 20 or 30 shillings more. Let us search again the Spiritual Diary of Dr. John Rutty. SEVENTH MONTH, 1757. 21. Books pour in, far more than I can read and apply. I will curtail. 22. Feafted with the faints, and to the Utmoft bounds. Very cholerick without caufe. 23. Feafted, at leaft to the utmoft bounds. 24. Mechanically fnappifh. A fudden tranfport on provocation. 25. O how improving, to rife early. 27. Mechanically, and perhaps a little diabolically, dogged this morning. A dead load of books lying by and UfelefS - J. H. E. S.