MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON TWICE upon this page have I vented my spleen against collectors. Except for the occasion when I ventured to suggest the taxation of football pools, nothing that I have ever said or written has exposed me to so much obloquy or so varied a correspondence. A letter was published in The Spectator in which an angry philatelist expressed the wish that I were dead. And one of my oldest friends, who has spent much time and money upon collecting first editions which he never reads, looks at me coldly now—not with the hot anger with which he would confront some Borgian outrage, but with the small contempt that one manifests for mean little cheats. It is no use explaining to such people that I have no objection to collectors as a class, but only to collectors who collect ugly or unimportant things. To them the objects of their own obsession are of immense importance and bathed in such beauty as the morning sun gives to the precipices of Cithaeron. Nor, I find, is much pleasure caused if I suggest that I like wealthy collectors and only disagree with the collectors who fall within the lower income-groups. Such remarks arouse class hatred and are not, when I come to think of it, strictly true. Since, although I have nothing but admiration for Charles I, who, in spite of the fixity of his mind, did certainly possess a most discriminating taste in art ; and although the picture of Mr. Pierpont Morgan croon- ing with love over an ivory Madonna remains with me as an attractive picture, there are few rages so seething as those aroused by the spectacle of a rich man who buys lavishly and badly or who does not even begin to understand the meaning of the things he buys. Even a mild person should become angry when he sees a millionaire using a Kubah as a hearth-rug in front of a log fire. Those are the sort of events which ought to force one to become rude.
Having written harsh things about those who collect first editions, it is fitting that I should modify this statement and make amenRs. I am grateful to those who collect first editions of very important books. I can go further. I admit that it is not easy to foretell which books will eventually become important ; and I must therefore include within the orbit of my praise and my apology those people who collect a number of books in first editions, some of which may eventually prove to be books of permanent value. It is not that I ever desire to possess first editions myself ; I prefer subsequent editions, which are often better printed, which frequently are so shaped as to slide readily into the pocket, and upon which I can scribble annotations and refer- ences without feeling that I have acted with the philistinism of those who scratch their names upon the temple of Sunium or engrave initials on the columns of Persepolis. But I confess that to see the works of mighty poets in the form in which they first broke upon an indifferent world does fill me with a curious sense of exaltation. What is the nature of that exaltation? It is something far more than anti- quarian interest or literary curiosity, although it is stimulating to observe the boards, the paper and the type in and on which great words first saw the light of day. It is something more even than the sympathetic reflection : " It was in that form that Shakespeare, young and excited, received from Richard Field his author's copy of Lucrece " ; or " It was in that shape that Tennyson first handled In Memoriam." It is the solemn consciousness that great poetry is a rare and precious possession ; that of all the millions of poems that have been published, only a very few survive the centuries ; and that this triumph of survival exalts us as a proof and symbol of the immortality of human genius.
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This recantation, this song of praise, has been imposed upon me by a visit to the exhibition now being held at the National Book League's premises at No. 7, Albemarle Street. In those agreeable rooms one can examine the first and early editions of the works of all our greater poets from Chaucer to the present day. How awed must be those of our living poets who have qualified for admission to this company to find their works propped up in show-cases a few yards only from
those of Chaucer or Wordsworth. It must provide them with what Byron called " that posthumous feel." It is indeed a stirring experi- ence to gaze down upon Lord Fitzwilliam's splendid copy of the Caxton Chaucer and to read the words, " Whan that Apprill with his shouris sote." Diti the fifteenth-century reader, as his eyes first' fell upon that very page, have any intimation that he was reading the first line of the first great poem in the English language, the precursor of the richest poetic achievement that the world has seen since Greece and Rome? I agree with the writer of a recent article in The Times that to gaze down upon that volume does awake within one feelings of mystery and awe. One moves onwards to the next case and looks down upon the clear, clean printing of the first edition of The Rape of Lucrece : - " Time's glory is to calm contending Kings
To unmaske falsehood, and bring truth to light . . . To plucke the quils from ancient ravens' wings ..."
The promise of 1594 melts into the anxieties of x947. And here in an adjoining case is a volume containing Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King ; one scans the line "The willows and the hasil- copses green," and suddenly the whole of Lycidas swims into one's ken. With what love and delicacy were these books produced! We are unable today, with all our scientific and technical improvements, to equal a title-page such as that of Mr. Richard Jennings' fine copy of Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. And then come the fat fine folios of the eighteenth century. We gaze with amazement at the wide spacing and lavish margins of Pope's Essay on Man: assuredly there was no paper shortage in those dayt.
However much we may admire these typographical excellencies, it is always the human interest which rekindles our flame of wonder. It is a moving thing to see the 1821 edition of Adonais, the edition which was printed for Shelley at Pisa. "And that unrest," we read, " which men miscall delight." Strange that the second greatest elegy in the English language should have been printed in an Italian town. And fitting indeed that it should find.its place again in London, with Lycidas on one side and on the other In Memoriam. The smug and garrulous face of Coleridge looks down from the walls, in strange contrast to the tortured life-mask of Blake. We turn to exhibit No. 207. We read a passage of prose : " . . . as a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease." Upon the opposite page the fragment is printed, and the great opening line rings out: " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan." Did the reader who first opened this book, fresh from the establishment of John Murray, start with surprise at this astounding overture? Or did he turn the page idly, indifferent to Tsinan-Fu, knowing nothing about the person from Porlock? Here is another little volume which stirs wonder within us. A small drab volume published in 1827 by J. and J. Jackson of Louth and entitled : Poems by Two Brothers. How little can either of the three Tennyson brothers, on that November afternoon in 1826 when the books were first delivered by the carrier, have foreseen that young Alfred would outstrip them all and that this small Lincolnshire volume would figure among the rarest possessions in the Royal Library?
Surely, as Dr. Masefield said, " much scholarship, much piety, much generosity " have gone to the collection of these precious editions. And it is not bibliophils only who will visit and revisit No. 7, Albe- marle Street, and scan the admirable catalogue which Mr. John Hayward has compiled. The whole pageant of English literature is here assembled ; the vast lineage of our poetry is displayed ; the difficult world which now encompasses us has destroyed, and will destroy, much that is of elegance and beauty. It cannot take our poetry from us. And we must pay tribute to those collectors who have acquired and preserved these precious things.
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