‘“L’amour des livres est plus utile que vous ne croyez,” dit le capitaine, “car je trouve dans mes études un calme qui vous manque. Vous ne soupçonnez pas tout ce qu’une manie a de précieux, docteur! Elle occupe comme une passion, et n’a aucun de ses tourments. Croyez-moi, puisque la vie n’est après tout qu’une voiture mal suspendue qui nous conduit à la mort, les sages sont ceux qui baissent les stores, sans songer au but ni aux cahots.”’
Souvenirs d’un Bas Breton, par Émile Souvestre.
‘Few are the men who know what lives do hide,
Or dream what demons lurk, or fairies flit,
In places which to them seem dull and tame,
Even as a drop of water to the eye
Appears to it like naught; but take to it a glass,
And lo it is a sea with monsters filled,
Devouring, making love, or raging wild—
Full many a heart is like that water drop.’
The day had been grim and ill-tempered—flitting fitfully through all the phases of bad weather—promising at times, like a deceitful child, to be good, when it would clear a little into curling mists, through which there came a doubtful ray of light—when straight anon there fell a dismal fog, then wild rain, maddened by the roaring of the wind—for ’tis terrible mourning when any one cries aloud and weeps at the same time—laut aufweinend—as the Germans say.
Oh, I warrant you that the rusty weather-cocks, as they whirled round and round, and screamed as if crowing to the Wilde Jäger, in the old town of Nuremberg, and the wind low-waving like the deep baying of his hounds made a fine witches’-chorus that night—yea, the very gutters in their unwonted joy at becoming bounding brooks sang gurgling songs as they hurried along to leap into the Pegnitz….
‘’Tis a Sauwetter—yea, a Hundeswetter—a swine and dog weather,’ exclaimed the little old man to Flaxius, as the latter refuged himself just long enough to turn his umbrella, which had been reversed into a great goblet by a sudden squall, under an arch. This arch was over the projecting doorway of a shop; ’twas immensely massive from the old, bold time, and I warrant you that Albert Dürer and Willibald Pirckheimer and Hans Sachs and all of ’em had passed under it often.
‘I could make better weather,’ added the old man, ‘with only a rusty tea-kettle and a pint of——’
Flaxius looked up. There was a little, half-obliterated sign over the ancient door, which had once proclaimed to the world that here was a Buchhandlung or book-shop, but like an ancient warrior, with stress of time and battling with the elements, it had forgotten most of its letters.
‘You sell books?’ replied Flaxius.
‘How do you know that?’ asked the little man, with a quick, suspicious glance, as if a secret which he wished to keep hidden had been revealed.
‘And you have for sale a fine copy of the Emblemata of Iselburg in old German rhyme, published in Nuremberg in Fifteen Hundred and Seventeen … and a superbly bound exemplar of the Altdeutsche Wälder of Grimm.’
‘Not for sale—not for sale—oh, no!’ exclaimed the little old man eagerly. ‘They belong to my private library.’
‘Also the Mascarades Monastiques of Rabelli,’ pursued Flaxius pitilessly.
‘’Tis sold,’ cried the Bookseller, as if alarmed.
‘It isn’t; but never mind, I don’t want to buy them, yet I would like to see your collection.’
‘A—ch, so!’ responded the ancient, visibly relieved. ‘Komm herein, du lieber Gast, wenn du nichts im Beutel hast.
‘“Enter as a welcome guest,
If thou really nothing hast,
If thou’rt poor then sit thee down
If thou’st money, get thee gone!”’
And with this invitation, he led the way into a marvellous old German interior, which looked as if it had been painted by some artist who was, as I once heard a French artist say, ‘mad on the Middle Age and earlier time.’ For it was heavily arched, and looked like the crypt of a cathedral, or the Stube of the Giant Tavern in the Hof-Gasse of Innsbruck, which is, indeed, lovely to behold, and far away finer than the Auerbach Keller of Leipzig. All around were books: books of tarnished gold in old ivory-parchment bindings; books in tremendous plank covers of old oak, knobbed with bronze or iron, like castle doors; books in marvellous cut-vellum, with rich Gothic grotesques, and silver clasps of extravagant richness; books on shelves and heaped up in piles like rubbish; everywhere books—and such books! ’Twas a vision, a dream, an endless promise of a bibliomaniac’s paradise!
And there the two sat for hours turning over the black letter of the olden time, like two wizards evoking the spirits of the dead, which, indeed, the scholar always does when he reads reverently in such books, which were made, and once studied, by the departed. For it is in his thoughts that the writer lives in after ages, and he is ever with us as we read.
The dealer was enchanted also with his guest, hearing the wondrous words and ponderous stories, strange, which were uttered in calm, solemn tone; and a rapt shuddering stole over him as they turned some old and legend-leaved book, mysterious to behold, while he learned priceless secrets enhancing the value even of what he most esteemed.
Flaxius took up an old work—Das Schachzabel-spiel of Jacob Manuel of 1536.
‘There seems to be something in the binding,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some old paper. May I examine it?’
He bent back with care the thin parchment, and drew out a manuscript of perhaps twenty leaves, which had been put in to stiffen the binding, as waste-paper.
‘This is indeed a find,’ he solemnly remarked. ‘A great discovery.’
‘What is it?’
‘A manuscript play as yet unknown, by Hans Sachs, entitled Die Weisse Rabe, or, The White Raven, with the motto from the Renner of Trimberg:
‘“Selten wir gesehen haben
Swarze Swanen und weisse Raben.Seldom have we ever seen
Black swans or ravens white I ween.”
It bears the signature of the author: Hans Sachs.’
‘Blessed be the storm which drove thee to my gate; blessed be this day and hour, and the mother who bore thee, and all and everything dear unto thee!’ cried the Bookseller. ‘Lo, it has been the dream of my life to find that play—I have seen it in visions, I have prayed for it; I would have given a finger, an eye, yea, my choicest book to even behold it.’
‘And now it is thine,’ replied Flaxius gently. ‘And indeed it was—de facto—thine own discovery, since thou didst lead me here, and it was in thy possession.’
The old man clasped the manuscript to his heart, and kissed it reverently; there was silence, save for the pattering of the rain, and anon a thunder peal, which seemed like a joyous salvo fired off in honour of the event. The Bookseller rose with tottering steps.
‘I will return anon,’ he said.
He came back, bearing two ancient bottles covered with dust and cobwebs, and two tall, magnificent old glass goblets.
‘There is no better wine, and none so old in Nuremberg,’ he exclaimed. ‘I would not have offered it to the emperor; but, verily, we will carouse therewith—vinum bonum et suave lætificat.’
‘Gurgle, gluck, gluck!’ sang the Wine as it came forth again into the world after a century of slumber.
‘Hearest thou?’ cried the old man. ‘Gluck, gluck! They are words of good omen. This day I have had good luck.’
And he drank solemnly—feierlich—to his guest.
‘The wine,’ said Flaxius, as he touched his glass to his host’s—it was like the ringing of cow-bells heard afar on a mountain side in the Tyrol—‘is like a butterfly long imprisoned as a chrysalis under earth, which now comes forth to shine in light for a brief space—the butterfly gladdens the child, and wine gladdens man.’
‘And poetry like that gladdens everybody,’ cried the host; ‘albeit I confess that I love it best when it is printed in a rare old book.’
‘What is this?’ said Flaxius, taking up a little manuscript.
‘Truly a quaint thing, a fourteenth-century transcript, or translation of a far older work of earliest German times, the Vision of Baldemar, now lost. It is unique. I pray you accept it as a gift.’
Flaxius would have declined the offer, but the old man, who had inquired the name of his visitor, took a pen and wrote therein in a very ancient, but distinct, hand, which seemed to be uniform and contemporary with the writing of the manuscript itself:
To the Moſt Learned and Very Honourable
Domino FlaxioThis Work is preſented with humbleſt Regards as a trifling
Teſtimonial of inexpreſſible Gratitude from his
Moſt Devoted ServantBucherwurm Schmoker.
‘Hast mir geschassen großes Glück;
Doch wenig geb’ ich Dir zurück:
Giebst Du mir Was,
Schenk’ ich Dir Das.’‘Great pleasure hast thou made for me
But little I return thee.
Thou giv’st a lot,
I but a jot.’
‘What a thing,’ thought Flaxius, ‘it is for man in this life to set his mind on something, and when so setting to make a dead set, cooking all his victuals, as the gypsies say, “adré yeck Kekavi,” in one pot. For they hold by tradition—the Romany cook-book being as yet unpublished—that when all conceivable food is thus boiled it acquires, like Mississippi punch, an additional agreeable flavour with every new ingredient, eggs, carrots, ham, butter, chickens, bread, turnips, honey, hedgehogs, snails, oatcake, rice, herrings, a sucking-pig, mutton-chops, raisins, bacon, cold plum-pudding, cabbage and anything else edible being welcomed to the mixtum-compositum; which is declared to be so palatable that the author of Rookwood assures us that when Dick Turpin the highwayman first tasted it he actually shed tears of delight.
‘So hath it been with the venerable Bucherwurm Schmoker who hath cast into the one passion of antique literature all the emotions and feelings, hopes and affections of life. I have heard that among the Five Thousand Commandments which were appended by the devil and Society to those of Moses—the which I do propose some day to publish—there is one which says, “Put not all thy eggs into one basket.” But there is great pleasure in breaking commandments, especially when one desires, like the French lady, to make with them an omelette aux confitures; and there is also great delight in concentrating our feelings, as the devil observed when he saw that the mystics united the excess of piety with that of earthly pleasure. “Cela suffit”—quotha.
‘This venerable Schmoker seems to me like the thorn-bush of the poet, of which it would be hard to say how it could ever have been young, it looks so old and grey, like rock or stone all overgrown with lichens to the very top, or thoughts of some primeval time which fain would give it all the grime which they have gathered up. Yet underneath this aged thorn there is a lovely hill of moss, wherein are exquisite curling lines and scarlet-orange-tawny-sable-ivory flowers, which, seen with a glass, do to perfection resemble the enlacements and tracery and fancied flowers of an illuminated manuscript; and therein and therefore do the fairies love to dwell and sit love-making of a moon-lit night.
‘And if I think thereon I needs must laugh, remembering that all the world thinks that such an erudite old Dryasdust leads the most arid, infestive, humdrum, prosy life, given to old and long-forgotten things, buried in the rust of antiquity, palætiology, archæology, which all, like the Dismal Grove in Tieck’s wondrous tale, do but conceal a sunny elfin-land of quaint caprice and merry, wanton joy. As every antiquary and folk-lorist who is anything better than a mechanical maker of tables, and a clipper and collector of variants, well knows.
Serious, indeed! Now, an’ I had time, good people, I would tackle Calvin, Knox, and Chalmers, and Young of the Night Thoughts, and show you what Mephistopheli, what humbugs, what subtle deceivers of self or others, and what mad humorists they all were, and in what Hampton Court mazes they led their followers. For, meaning it or not, it came to that; and ye who cannot perceive it, think that the partition six feet high, over which ye cannot peep, is the top of heaven’s wall. Yea, I repeat: For, meaning it or not, it comes to that!
‘Vale, Corcule! Good-night, old Parable, for there is in thee a deeper meaning than men divine. Sleep well, O mirror of ten thousand books, whom I have made happy by adding unto them “one volume more!” as Dibdin sweetly sang.’
When Flaxius opened the door, it was a bright, full-moon-lit night; clear and fresh, and gently breezy, gauzy cloudlets flitting now and then before the stars, like transparent veils blowing away or waving before the eyes of Eastern girls. So he went to his dwelling, and the night being young, sat down to read the little book, which ran as follows:
Baldemar’s Troume
The Vision of Baldemar
As in slumber once I lay
In a wood one summer day,
All beneath an oaken tree,
With green leaf-curtain, fair to see;
Flowers peeped upward from below
To the sun as he did go,
And the drops fresh from the showers
Looked lovingly upon the flowers,
Like bright eyes as clear as glass,
Or diamonds glittering in the grass;
And all around from many a bloom
There came a pleasant, fresh perfume,
While in the forest all day long,
Dame Nightingale did tell her song.[12]By me ran a spring full clear,
And it sounded to my ear,
With its steady murmuring,
Like children who a lesson sing,
Or as one who reads alone
To himself in single tone;
While the wind in harmony
Rustled sweet in every tree.
Flies and bees the measure kept
All in chorus—so I slept.Now whether I from sleep awoke
To life again beneath the oak,
Or whether I did deeper sink,
In dreams, I know not what to think,
Yet this I know that I was there,
Where I had been, but in the air;
And all around there was a change,
Unto another life and strange,
As if one should sleep in spring
When all is green and burgeoning;
Then wake in autumn to behold
The trees all clad in red and gold;
For other sounds I seemed to hear,
Other scents were in the air,
Elfin light shone all around,
And new herbage on the ground,
There full silently had come,
As strangers move into a home.There I sat but had not known,
It was on the Wildè Stone[13]
That I had fallen into sleep,
Since there the elves their watches keep,
And he who sitteth there an hour
For all that week is in their power.
But this secret well I knew,
And now lived to find it true,
That the man who passes well
Into the spirit of the spell,
Meets with nothing to alarm,
Nor will come to any harm;
Many marvels he may learn,
Many wondrous things discern,
If he sleep an hour alone
In faith upon the Wildè Stone.As in silence still I sat,
Marvelling in amaze thereat,
I soon heard a sudden sound,
As of a footstep on the ground,
And looking up, there in the wood,
A vision fair before me stood:
When all at once the forest rang,
In chorus all the birdés sang,
And wondrous flowers in bright array,
Came shooting to the light of day,[14]
And in all her beauty’s sheen
Before me stood the fairy queen.Thus she spoke: ‘O minstrel dear!
Long have I longed to see thee here!
For it is in our destiny
That if not placed in poetry,
Although we live in lordly state,
With wealth and power and titles great,
We’ll pass unto oblivion’s shame
Unless some poet notes our name.
There is more life in one small song
Than in a century ‘mid the throng,
With all their work, and war and strife;
Song only is eternal life.
‘Mid all great deeds—too great to last—
Men seek the poems of the past,
And one sweet lay, as all may see,
May make an Immortality.
It may full long forgotten lie,
Yea sleep for many a century,
Hidden away in darkling nook,
Yet be revived in many a book:
For though states fade and tongues may die,
There is no death for poetry,
Since unto it we well may say:
“A thousand years are as a day,”
’Tis God’s own voice which, when it spoke,
In poetry the silence broke:
To inspiration doth belong,
And it alone, the power of song.Even we who are of fairy kind
Are least of all unto it blind,
Since all the life which we receive,
Legends or lays unto us give.
For all of our appointed time
Is measured by the poet’s rhyme,
Unless we’re sung we soon are not,
And even our name would be forgot:
Therefore to me, O Baldemere!
Thou art indeed of men most dear.
Long I have lived in hope to be
But mentioned in thy minstrelsy:
Even in one line be’t low or high,
For then I know I ne’er can die.’All had grown silent as she spoke,
No sound the forest stillness woke:
The nightingales had ceased to sing,
The brook had stopped its murmuring,
A sudden peace had come to pass
Over the wrangling flowers and grass,[15]
For well I noted all had been
Listening with joy unto their queen,
With some sweet hope that they might be
Included in the poetry:
And this I did with love recall,
That fairy life is in them all.Her voice again the silence broke,
And wavering with the sunshine spoke:
As it came flickering through the leaves:
As broideress her pattern weaves,
Singing meanwhile a melody
With her design in harmony,
And thus she said: ‘O come with me
And thou a wondrous sight shalt see
Fit for a song, my Baldemere,
If thou canst read its meaning clear,
For we must go.’ I naught could say,
So followed as she showed the way.Right wild and rugged was the road,
Through passes strange, which long we trode:
Great rocks above us darkly hung,
While peaks like towers o’er them sprung,
And grim and griesly was the way,
Scaping so oft the light of day,
We did not seem to climb a steep
But rather down in earth to creep,
Wherein we heard and time again
The sough of winds, the rush of rain,
Then wended from a passage cold
Into a forest grey and old
Where every tree seemed all alone,
For they had changed long since to stone;
Every leaf and twig was there,
As if they had been carven fair,
And all y-wrought in imagery
As men do work in ivory,
Making for brides their caskets rare:
Anon we came unto a stair;
Each step whereof was wondrous broad,
And strangely high. It was with awe
I asked its meaning, and was told,
’Twas made by giant hands of old.
Yet up we went, nor did we stop,
Till we had gained the mountain top,
Where in the twilight golden brown
Upon a bench we sate adown.Long it was ere I could speak,
For both my soul and tongue were weak
With all the wonderful surprise
At what was spread before my eyes;
For never yet in dream or scroll
Came such a picture to my soul,
Nor yet in visions told of eld,
Compared to what I there beheld.Straight from our feet like any wall,
An awful precipice did fall,
Ne’er had I thought of one so steep
It seemed ten thousand fathoms deep,
While down below a valleyed bay
Spread beyond vision far away,
And the wild waters of that sea
Showed all that in eternity,
Since earth hath been or Time began,
Was ever seen by living man.
Rising from darkness into light,
Then fading into sheen more bright,
A life which was a sparkling spring,
And then anon evanishing,
For there were forms of women fair,
Like ivory—then lost in air,
Or buried in the billow-caves,
As goblins vanish into graves,
Strong warriors with stretching arms
Pursuing still those wondrous forms,Or revelling as at glorious feasts:
With all were mingled fearful beasts,
Up-leaping, roaring, rioting,
Withal full many an idle thing,
As minstrels carolling their lays,
And forms of long-forgotten days,
And dwarfs who dwell in mossy stone,
And spectres flitting all alone,
And dead men floating in their shrouds,
With dragons breathing fiery clouds,
Blinding all round with ruddy light,
And then in darkness lost to sight:
There too were castles, halls, and bowers,
With wondrous battlements and towers,
Beyond them others rising high,
And others still unto the sky,
With gardens broad and forests fair,
Yet ever fading into air,
And fields with fountains interlaid,
Where troops of merry children played,
With gentle deer and snow-white lambs,
And nuns a-singing even-psalms;
Fading anon with all the rest,
Like sun-set clouds into the West:
On earth there is no thing I ween
Which in that sea could not be seen,
All that is common, all that’s rare,
All that is humble or is fair
With every known or unknown thing,
Coming to life and vanishing,
All blending, tending into one,
As vapours fade before the sun:
Chasing, embracing, or anon
In deadly strife, and then agone:
Therein I felt all that can be
In Life to all Eternity.Long at that wondrous sea I gazed,
As one half pleased but more amazed,
Till step by step upon my soul
There came the feeling of the whole,
And then a strange and boundless awe
As I conceivéd what I saw,
Until the thought which seized me there
Became too terrible to bear,
For what surpasses poetry,
I ween is far too much for me:
Life hath its limits, and this strife
Is far too great for mortal life:
A shudder seemed in me to rise,
And, over-borne, I closed my eyes
When a soft whisper in my ear
Said, ‘’Tis enough, O Baldemere!’
And as the fairy to me spoke,
I started at the word and woke.I lay upon the Wildè-Stone,
All in the forest and alone,
Deep-thinking on the things I’d seen,
And then I sang, ‘O Fairy Queen!
Thou shalt in deed recorded be
By Baldemere in poetry:
God grant that this my humble lay,
May live in truth for many a day.
Would I could give it grace divine!
Not for my honour, but for thine!’
‘Haec fabula docet,’ wrote the master, ‘firstly, that there is no earthly immortality like that of Song. Now it is to be noted that in their day and time men give little real heed to any save a very few of the greatest living poets, treating minor bards with a neglect which history clearly shows is most undeserved. For the vitality of even fourth-class poetry is marvellous. It is recovered and reprinted centuries after it has been forgotten by all. What scholar is there who when raking over piles of fifteenth-century, theological, legal, and even historical rubbish, which will only sell for waste-paper, has not been charmed at finding in it—O happy man!—a book of ballads, or even of poetry of any kind? ’Tis little thought upon, this life of song. There’s not one poet of the present day, however small his art and weak his lay, who hath not better chance to live for aye, and speak at times to some congenial soul than any other fancied famous man.
‘There is many a small being—ay, more than any dream—who will live like a fly in amber, merely because he has known, conversed with, and thereby identified himself with some poet, so small that even the fly did not know that the other had ever rhymed at all. It is little to the credit of any civilised country that it can excessively honour and envy and glorify an Upper Ten, or Twenty Thousand in Great Britain, or a Four Hundred in America, and not include in the number more than a dozen poets. If people cared more for poetry they would enlarge the number, for there are in very truth some hundreds cruelly ignored—all sneering critics to the contrary.
He is an evil being, to me, who would belittle, crush, or condemn almost any poetry whatever. For even in the very mediocre, where there has been inspiration and love, there is a gleam as of something divine, which I must needs reverence. Truly, indeed, the muse may have been only a very small fairy, elf, or goblin, or even a witch, but it has a spark of the supernatural or occult; treat it tenderly therefore, as something born with mystic powers!
And there is also a lesson in the Bookseller himself, which, rightly read and widely understood, would do good in the world. There are thousands of people who would fain travel into foreign lands and see strange people, when there are all around them in life men far more marvellous than Turks or Indians, or beings well-nigh as queer as goblins. They go about silently like shadows in a kind of twilight of society, living in a fourth dimension, enjoying senses all unknown to us, hearing sounds which never reach our ears, lit by a light which never cheered our eyes. Such are the collectors and readers, like this old man, who steep their very hearts of hearts in the feelings of the past, and give to every thought that chiaroscuro of the romance of age which is the final beauty of art. It is one of the sarcasms of truth that such a Dryasdust, who has become among fools the very type and symbol of common-place dulness, is in reality all the time in a fairyland too fine for the Philistine with his great horny eyes to even perceive; for he in a blackletter book feels with exquisite sympathy all that romance which was in all life in an earlier age, feels it directly and in itself, while another only gets a coarse burlesque or imitation of it from novels, plays, and Lord-Mayor-Shows of poems.
There are very few in this world who feel or even understand in reality this spirit in which the Bookseller has his being, more’s the pity!—for it brings a great deal of happiness to the possessor. Hand in hand with it, like a twin, goes the fairy of Collecting. This spirit too is far misunderstood. He who, having got together more money than he can spend, ridicules the collector of postage-stamps or buttons is like the lunatic in Hogarth’s picture, laughing at his like. They are all, one or the other, inspired by what the gambler-scholar Pascasius Justus called the insatiabilis habendi libido, similis ventriculi magnæ voracitatis, the unsatiable desire of possession, which is like a gnawing, ceaseless hunger, the which, as he adds, may do no harm if it be properly supplied with good food. The delight of the collector is in renewing certain pleasant feelings which he experienced before, which some think is nine-tenths of the pleasure of love, or of intoxication, or anything else; and that in very truth man is man because he has more memory and passion than any other animal, and more ganglion. Nay, there have been rakes and Don Juans who found their chief pleasure, not in pleasure, but in accumulating conquests, that is, by collecting, by adding to the list which some pitiful Leporello bears.
Now, as Collecting is a human-animal instinct (as is shown by the raven, magpie, and other creatures), and love and religion and art were nothing more in their beginnings, it may be that as we improve, it too may be developed to a holy thing or a great institution; for in it lies the secret of history and of folk-lore and of preservation of relics; which will be clear to ye all when ye read my great work on the science of collecting in all its branches.