PITFALLS IN BOOKLAND.
EVERY bookman knows that the taste for buying books inevitably outruns the capacity for reading them. At first a man buys a book only when he wants it vehemently— when he is so anxious to enjoy it that he despatches the preface while he is waiting for his 'bus, and runs through the first three chapters in the suburban train. Then he begins to buy books because he will want them some day in the future; and he puts them on his shelves and forgets about them, and goes out to buy more. After this he becomes rapidly shame- less and buys for all sorts of reasons. He buys hooks because they are standard works, because he does not know what he has done with his other copy (the first duplicate marks the acute stage of the disease), because he has not bought one for a long time, because he was never in that particular shop before and did not like to leave without getting something, because he wanted it to complete a series, because it was such a handsome edition, and even because it was such a bargain. He buys for the sheer joy of acquisition; that delight in making things grow by one's own effort which terns respectable dentists into stamp-collectors, and induces elderly Civil Serranta to take np gardening. It is not until he is compelled to change his residence and finds that the number of volumes to be moved has swollen in some incom- prehensible fashion from hundreds to thousands that ho realizes how firmly the habit has him in its clutch. There was once a Methodist minister, now deceased, who suffered many things from the conflict between his bookish proclivities and the nomadic habits of life necessary in his calling. He dragged at each remove a lengthening chain of packing-cases from circuit to circuit, until at last the burden became too great, and his family were compelled to jettison them secretly and in detail by the wayside. When be retired from the ministry and sat down to an honoured old age, he established his library about him, and then the discarded volumes began to return to him like bread upon the waters. Obscure manses in the Midlands yielded up rich freights of dogmatic theology; soap-boxes, full to bursting of historical treatises, were identified by his initiate in the cloak-rooms of provincial railway stations; sackfuls of his property were reported from lonely parishes on the shores of the Atlantic, and washed up by goods delivery on his doorstep. He was probably the only human being who owned nine different sets of answers to Essays and Reviews without ever reading one of them; and when he died they descended intact to his family, who were unable either to read them, sell them, or give them away.
On the economical side it is, of course, impossible to put forward a convincing defence for so hardened a criminal; the book-lover alone will understand and sympathize. But there is a danger in the habit much more subtle than the expense, and quite as deadly. If you begin by buying more books than you can read, there is great likelihood you will end by reading more books than you can digest. Every one knows the story of the lady who, after listening to the stunning catalogue of Southey's daily activities, interjected the question: "But pray, Mr. Southey, when do you think ?" The question arises naturally to our lips when we happen to meet that alarming portent, the well-read man. His aim in life has been to get through as much printed matter as he possibly can without regard either to its fitness for him or his fitness for it. He has exercised his eyes at the expense of his brains. He prefers heavy works in many volumes, covering long periods with vast detail. He is a perfect arsenal of titles. His idea of rational conversation is to pin you in a corner and compare the number of books he has read with the
number you have read, in the eager hope of making yon ashamed of yourself. Deprive him of the printed page and you leave his mind a blank ; it is a mere safe-deposit of other men's opinions, and never reacts upon its contents. Where the oracles are diimb, he is mute. Instead of a thought he can only offer you a quotation.
It is a strong proof of the inherent goodness of human nature that a man of this kind often commands the respect of people less lettered than himself. They have an admirable humble-mindedness which leads them to think that one who has read so much must have learned a great deal. Despite the evidence of their senses, they believe devoutly that the man cannot be quite devoid of intelligence who knows off-hand that Messinger and Ford have nothing in common with the motor industry. And yet with all his knowledge, his mental state may be worse than his who followed the plough and was busied with the goad and whose talk was of bullocks; for books, like edged tools, should be used wisely or not at all. They are not outside remote things, only to be bought and sold, read and forgotten, set upon shelves and counted np in thousands. If they are not personal and vital to us, they are whited sepulchres fit for nothing but destruction; they turn us into literary gramophones, mechanically repeating the words of wiser men than ourselves; and this is not the character proper for a student of letters. He should have something of himself to add to what he has received from others. It is not enough for him to transmit whatever knowledge he may have acquired; to justify his standing in the world he must pay his own tribute to the common store. His thoughts may be moulded from the gold of other minds, but to be made 'individual and valuable they must be stamped with the seal of his own character.
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