Owning A Library

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 387, 22 June 1928, Page 14

Owning A Library

[Written for The Sun.) NOTHING is more difficult than to advise people in a matter of taste. If the uninitiated seek assistance in the choice of a picture or the colour of a carpet the thing is comparatively simple, for pictures and carpets alike are furniture to most. But take a person whose reading experience has been of the usually desultory kind, whose judgment is unformed and who has never done the necessary work (for It is work) to acquire any taste. What to do? Is one to recommend them books which seek only to divert? It is the easiest course, but as often as not it is fatal. For the most unexpected people reveal likings for the meats, rather than the sweets of literature. A chance encounter with William McDougall’s “Social Psychology” turned one indifferent reader into an ardent psychologist and disciple of Mr John B. Watson. Strachey’s "Queen Victoria” metamorphosed a man who had read little save his school set books and some advertising literature into an ardent student of the two last centuries, and nowadays he quotes the “Creevy Papers” and retails anecdotes of Melbourne and Disraeli. These people had no desire to “dawdle their lives away over novels.” But there are others for and by whom books are divided into two classes, “dry” and amusing.” or "deep” and “light.” Their individual tastes extend all ways, it is impossible to prescribe for any of them. In the library one is removed from all this stress. Here are the friends of to-day and yesterday, unobtrusive, generous, unchanging. Their manners are above reproach, the grave courtesy of Sir Thomas Browne is the same, though we have not called upon him for three years, the chattering Pepys retains his charm though we have visited his shelf a score of times in the past three weeks. There are none of the fencings and subterfuges of daily life, reserved men show unwonted expansiveness, the talkative are shorn of Irrelevancies. The shelves are alive with personalities. It is pleasant to see how the great book-lovers have become books themselves: Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse. No lover of vintages, no golfer in the ardour of recapturing a temporarily lost shot is as enthusiastic as your true book lover. The bindings speak to him; he could find the books he loves in the dark. The very odour of his favourites is familiar to him. I have owned three copies of “Mddle. da Maupin” because kind friends relieved me of two of them, and two editions of "Dorian Gray” because the eopy which I purchased first offended mv youthful susceptibilities. The beginning was more mysterious. One magic morning, 15 years ago, I came home with copies of Spencer and Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” (thank Heaven. Homer was never taught me!) and the golden journey had begun. The rest seemed but a step. Providence led to Lamb, and to what does not Lamb lead —forward to Coleridge, Wordsworth, De Quircy, back to Richard Burton, Thomas Fuller, Drayton, Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan dramatists and heaven knows what be-

side. In literature, as in economics, one may enter the field at any point ahd wander almost to any other. There can be no system in the collecting unless one buys favourites of me’s favourites and then proceeds to fill the gaps. To this disease all of us are victims. It is due to Lamb’s enthusiasm that "The Cavalier in Exile, being the lives of the First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, written by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle” (“that princely woman”) is upon my biographical shelf, and that the writings of Sir William Temple, cool and fresh as one of his favourite peaches, are here in genteel leather. Edward Thomas was responsible for introducing Richard Jeffries's writings, just as Eleanor Gates's "Poor Little Rich Girl” was sponsored by Mr George Jean Nathan, and Verrall and Gilbert Norwood were proteges of Professor Gilbert Murray. Some books are here of necessity, bought in attempts at systematic study, as Hirst’s mighty edition of “Porter’s Progress of :he Nation,” the political theories of tho excellent and droning Dunning. Dr Knowles's "Industrial and Commercial Revolutions” (was ever a more brilliant book written by a woman?), and the grandiloquent works of Alfred Marshall, Nicholson, Taussig, and the surprising Seligman. Others are present out of wicked indulgence, as Sir William Ashley and Lord Acton. They were bought at “precious intervals” and st’ort noon the shelves of the private library In curious assortment. Yonder bookcase has many such strange companions in delight. Hera is a shelf ruled by size, and Nevinaou is on terms with C. M. Doughty, Stendhal (“De I’Amour”) rubs shoulders with Edward Thomr - and Philip Guedalla, Santayana is pilliotied by H. W. Massingham and Dame Ethel Smyth. Here are Rupert Brooke’s "Poems," saucer-ringed where an unforgotten Christchurch maid deposited an early cup of tea, Tomlinson’s “Tidemarks,” j the back worn with the rubbing of a door-catch on the Lumsden-Te Anau service-car, “The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple,” bearing ample evidence of immersion in the Wanganui.

Here is the copy of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary which put itself in my path in Dunedin, and not to buy, which would have been an insult to the shade of Boswell, the copy of "Fountains in the Sand,” which arrived to cheer a bookless boredom in Hawke’s Bay, the "Arabian Nights,” distressingly expurgated, shamelessly lacking in margins, but one of Sir John Lubbock’s "Hundred Best Books,” whatever they may have been, and bought because it is the brother to that which worked magic for me in childhood. Here Is the Mungo Park travels purchased for its beautifully tooled cover, a ship, an anchor, and sportive fish. Here is the grave Foulis "Compleat Angler," illustrated by Lee Hankey, which I adopted from compulsion. I already had a copy of Walton, but I found that gentlemanly book among a herd of ignoble quartos. It was a pleasure to rescue it from that crew and give it worthy companions. There is no library without its casualties. Aloft on that shelf is the gap which marks the loss of “An Outcast of the Islands,” a first edition which I found eight shelves high in Dannekirke, and which Included the patronising comments on Conrad’s first novel. Below, with dejected droop, the second volume of "Roderick Random” "mourns his ravished mate.” Long, long ago, that gap held "Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to Lord Huntingdon,” a well-bred fellow of beautiful appearance, a Medici Society book, now, for all I know, festering in China. Near by, the neat row of Pater’s books is broken by the “Renaissance,” sadly mauled by some cursed inccnoclast. The first volume of John Gay is rakish and drunken, following his fate in being at hand when a missile was sorely needed. And there, alas, rested the learned, witty and wise Sydney Smith. QUENTIN POPE. Wellington.