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Confessions of a book-lover

Chapter 2: INTRODUCTION
By E. Walter Walters
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Essays, Letters & Speeches

About This Book

A series of personal essays by a devoted bibliophile exploring the pleasures, foibles, and habits of readers. The pieces range from autobiographical confessions and reflections on gardens and nature to meditations on books that tempt or captivate and sketches of literary personalities. Several essays celebrate second-hand book hunting, the aesthetics of bookplates, bedside reading, and the comfort of long-standing favourites treated as old friends. Other chapters examine how sentiment can colour perception, recount a reading pilgrimage, and offer farewell reflections on the relationship between books and life. Woven with anecdote, literary comment, and quiet humour, the essays portray bibliophilia as an intimate, everyday devotion.

INTRODUCTION

BY COULSON KERNAHAN

I

PART of the present volume appeared in Great Thoughts. Yet here am I, whose name is associated—if at all—in the memory of readers with ‘little thoughts,’ and with booklets impudent in the slenderness of their matter, presumptuously standing forth to bow the public into the writer’s presence, and essaying to introduce the one to the other.

The necessary explanation shall be brief. I must have been a young man, and Mr. E. Walter Walters a boy, when he and I last met; indeed I am not sure that I altogether remember him. But his father, who bore an honoured name, I well remember.

The Rev. W. D. Walters and my own dear and honoured father were personal friends; and when the former’s son sent me a manuscript of a book, with the request that I should write an introduction, how could I do otherwise than accede, and express myself honoured by the invitation?

That I share all Mr. Walters’s whole-hearted bookish enthusiasm, I may not pretend, for, as R. L. Stevenson says, in An Apology for Idlers, ‘Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.’ So long, however, as the reading of it be not allowed to deprive either man or woman of drinking deep at the wells of life, there are few greater joys, for young or old, than are to be found within the covers of a noble book; and to the enthusiastic book-lover, Mr. Walters’s volume should prove treasure trove indeed.

He drags (to use a phrase of Stevenson’s) with a wide net, but his castings are made, for the most part, in the same waters. Of the literature of the time of Elizabeth, or even of Anne, he tells us little, and it is not until we come to Goldsmith, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and, later, to Jefferies, Thoreau, and Stevenson, that Mr. Walters may be said to let himself go. What my friend Mr. Le Gallienne calls The Lilliput of Literary London, he wisely leaves severely alone.

That Mr. Walters has a pretty sense of humour is clear from the following passage:

‘Here is a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “hooked” in the deep waters of a “penny tub.” It is calf-bound, mark you, and in fairish condition, though much stained with the passing of years. My heart leaps; it is very old—a first edition possibly! But no, it is anything but that.... Many of the pages are entirely missing, and others partially so. Judged by the books that surround me it is dear at a penny ... Paradise Lost!’

The word-play is not unworthy of Mr. Zangwill; but when Mr. Walters writes, ‘I have frequently trodden snow-covered ground with my nose a few inches from an open book,’ I wish him, for the time being, ‘Good afternoon’ and seek other company, preferably that of some lover of the Emerson who wrote:

See thou bring not to field or stone
The fancies found in books,
Leave authors’ eyes, and fetch your own
To brave the landscape’s looks.

Or, better still:

Canst thou copy in verse one chime
Of the woodbell’s peal and cry?
Write in a book the morning’s prime?
Or match with words that tender sky?

II

‘I KNOW a pretty little edition of the Religio Medici,’ writes Mr. Le Gallienne in his Retrospective Reviews, ‘which has been quite spoiled for me by the astounding remark of its editor upon Browne’s beautiful description of his life as “a miracle of thirty years”—yet its actual incidents justify no such description!’

Mr. Walters will not thus spoil for his readers the work of the writers he loves. He strikes no jarring note. On the contrary, he is capable, when writing of books, book-making, and book-buying, of an enthusiasm which I envy as much as I admire.

‘I have confessed,’ he says in his chapter on ‘Second-hand Books,’ ‘that I am of the company of book-lovers who delight in dipping into the “lucky tubs” to be found outside booksellers’ windows. I know of no pleasanter way of spending a spare half-hour. Give me a few “loose” coppers, place my feet upon a likely road, and I am content. I am now, let me say, of the happy company of book-fishermen. And this, mark you, is fishing in real earnest, this effort to “hook” good food for the mind, to place in one’s basket a “book that delighteth and giveth perennial satisfaction.”’

The comparison of a book-seeker to an angler is as happy as it is original, and the phrase—though phrase-making must not be confused, as Leslie Stephen points out, with thought-finding—‘a book-fisherman’ has something of Charles Lamb’s own ‘self-pleasing quaintness.’

Lamb would, indeed, appear to be Mr. Walters’s favourite author. That he knows his Elia intimately and can interpret him aright to others is clear from the chapter on ‘Books and Gardens.’

‘We are told,’ says Mr. Walters, ‘that Lamb was a lover of towns and crowded streets. Would it not be truer to say that he was a lover of the conditions in which he chanced to be placed? London claimed him—for the sanest reasons, no doubt—and, lo! under his pen, London became a garden.’

This is truly and finely said. Of such acute and illuminative comment, there is no lack in Mr. Walters’s delightful book, which should assuredly find a place in the library of book-loving women and men.