BOOKISHNESS AND STATESMANSHIP.
IN the current number of the North American Review Lord Rosebery has a short paper on " Bookishness and States- manship," the substance of which was delivered as an address in Edinburgh some time ago. We note, by the way, Lord Rosebery's announcement in the Westminster Gazette that the republication of this paper was not authorised by him. The editor of the North American Review says that he received the article from an agency; and we are sure that he acted in good faith. "Bookishness and statesmanship,"- says Lord Rosebery, "are, one would think, scarcely compatible." Yet he proves that though the combination is rare, it is possible. He finds that it existed in a supreme degree in Mr. Gladstone, and that the statesman who had most nearly the same love of books in the same way as Mr. Gladstone was Charles James Fox. The word "bookishness," then, is used by Lord Rosebery in the particular sense which describes a man who has not reached the superlative and morbid state of the bookworm, but has a general love of books,—not merely the love of reading them, but of buying, handling, and hunting for them.
To he " bookish " is clearly not the same thing as to be "literary." A man might have a love of great literature, and even have produced a great piece of literature himself, and yet not be bookish. We cannot think of Cervantes or Defoe as bookish, yet Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne probably were. Bookishness is a quality which is not necessarily good or bad, but which distinguishes the possessor of it. And it extends downwards into classes which have not even a firm apprecia- tion of literature ; the man who habitually rummages among the boxes of books in Charing Cross Road is bookish, though he may never have been able to illuminate his labours in life by means of his liking for literature. He may have only a dull, vague feeling that there is a romance in books, and a satisfaction in being among them ; and he would not be able to produce a colourable imitation of good writing as easily as some plausible fellow who opens a book only once in a blue moon, but has within him the taste and feel and sound of harmonious prose. This class includes, too, those whose interest in books is merely external. We believe that there are people who love the appearance of well-arranged book- shelves, but who do not feel called upon to examine the contents of the books. Their love of books extends only to their decorative use, or they derive a kind of spiritual gratifica- tion from having all that learning formally in their possession. But bookishness may imply a profound knowledge which is cognate to literary knowledge, and yet is something quite different, There are, for example, the experts in ancient editions, and, indeed, in all editions. There is the man who knows all about them in the spirit of the collector, but who has no more appreciation of the quality of the writing than most stamp-collectors have of the relative artistic value of different stamps, • He can tell. you that .the fourth edition contains a passage which is omitted in the third, but perhaps be has no opinion whether the passage is worthy of inclusion at all. So far as the bookishness is that of the inveterate eollector, it may be as artificial as the tastes of the print-collector. A friend of the present writer sent some mezzotints to an auction, some of them being portraits of men and some of women. The portraits of the women were sold for -over a hundred pawls each, but no offer higher than ten pounds was made for any one portrait of a man. The pictures were all early and good impressions by famous mezzotinters, and technically and artistically there was nothing to choose between the portraits of the men and the women ; but it happened that pictures of women with large " G-ainsborough " bats were in fashion. Similarly there are bookinen who have carried their rivalry into fields where there is no real sense in preferring one edition to another. They are bibliomaniacs. Some first editions are about as valuable as the first editions of evening newspapers.
But we must not explore bookishness as a frame of mind farther; for Lord Rosebery's purpose it is only necessary to imagine a man who finds that his greatest pleasure in life is to be in a library, and then to admit that that man is not generally best suited for the stresses and collisions of public life. Yet Mr. Gladstone bad a genius for public life combined with his bookishness. His political principles were not rendered visionary and unpractical by meditations indulged in seclusion ; he was the most practical sort of politician ; he was a great financier. One could not say of him what the Duke of York says in Shakespeare's Henry VI. of the King :—
"And, force perforce, I'll make him yield the crown,
Whose bookish rule Lath pull'd fair England down."
For his rule was not bookish. " Bookishness," none the less, is the very word for Mr. Gladstone in his other aspect. "He had," says Lord Rosebery, "none of what'is technically called bibliomania ; to first editions, or broad margins, or vellum copies he was indifferent." But he loved buying books, and handling them,—have we not all beard of his habit of making "the usual discount" a condition of his purchases from second- hand booksellers ? It is not necessary to agreement with Lord Rosebery's thesis that one should believe Mr. Gladstone's knowledge of books to have been profound. It is a thread- bare criticism of him that he was held to be a theologian by the Homeric scholars and an Homeric scholar by the theo- logians, and an authority on Dante by those who were not Italian scholars. It is enough to admit that he had the heart of bookishness in him, and that with encouragement and fostering circumstance—bad he been feeble in health, for instance, and unfit for public life—he might easily have been, as Lord Rosebery says, "a bookworm, immersed in folios."
In Mr. Gladstone bookishness and statesmanship acted and reacted upon each other. He was a great man of affairs because he had quite exceptional resources of historical and literary experience and illustration at his command. But is the age past in which it was possible for a Gladstone to add bookishness to statesmanship with so much renown ? "Literature," says Lord Rosebery, "is constantly becoming less and less necessary for the politician." We are all agreed that the period of rhetoric and of Latin quotations is done with; the ambition of Parliament to-day is to be intensely businesslike (the only rule for success is a close copy of the injunction, "Say what you have got to say, don't quote Latin, and sit down") ; and yet we are happily able to disagree with Lord Rosebery if he means us to infer that literature is now neither a material help nor an ornament to be used in a political career. We might cite Mr. Balfour and Mr. Morley and Lord Crewe (who, if he has written little, has literary learning and a notice- ably sound English style) and Mr. Birrell and others to the contrary, but first and foremost we should cite Lord Rosebery himself. Lord Rosebery was no doubt restrained by modesty from including himself among the bookish Prime Ministers, but we take leave to place him, instead of Fox, after Mr. Gladstone. We do not forget Lord Beaconsfield, whose prose at its best was splendidly vivid and eloquent—its merely grandiose qualities are too often allowed to eclipse its merits—and whose political and social scenes will certainly last as long as the language. But Lord Beaconsfield was not bookish in any of the senses in which we have employed the word. His father, Isaac Disraeli, on the other hand, was distinctly bookish, and that almost defines the whole differ- ence between them. It is related of a modern statesman that on being shown round Lord Acton's library he exclaimed : " Call that a library Why, there isn't a single work of reference!" He may stand for a growing type, but for our- selves we should not easily be persuaded to trust the judgment of one who seldom explores the treasury of written experi- ence. Of course,• we should misunderstand the whole of Lord Rosebery's paper if we called even a deep and reverent use of books bookishness, and so we come back to the explanation we gave at the beginning, that to have literary tastes is not necessarily to be bookish. To put it practi- cally, bookishness implies a leisurely method—a certain affectionate dalliance that is natural to one who feels that the soul of a book is somehow mystically expressed in its paper and binding—and a public life to-day requires haste and high pressure. It is only in a singularly constituted nature that the two characters can live alongside one another. We might expect to find bookishness more frequently in poets than in statesmen. Mrs. Browning in "Aurora Leigh" describes such an original impulse as will surely grow into bookishness if leisure and, say, a certain aloofness be guaranteed :—
" Books, books, books !
I found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large—where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first."
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