Creole Sketches/The Vendor of Wisdom
THE VENDOR OF WISDOM[1]
The Vendor of Wisdom selleth and also buyeth at a moderate price all the wisdom that hath been crystallized into the shape of books.
In his antiquated and darksome little shop, the thoughts of thirty centuries reside.
Every wave of civilization that has ebbed over the face of the earth, has drifted something into that little dusty bookstore.
Every great event in the history of the earth has contributed a something to those dusty shelves.
All nations and tongues are represented there; all the philosophers have riches there; and there all the poets have preserved their word-music.
As for the antiquarian, he thinketh much of these things; for he knoweth by heart the story of each book, and now rarely openeth any save new ones — works of this age of ours.
Then he saith —
"Pshaw! They call that new, and I have beheld the same in books that were written lo! three thousand years ago!
"The founders of the Semitic and Aryan religions knew these things; and forsooth these modern fools offer them to us as something novel! "The Egyptians were versed in the very profoundest philosophy of all these questions; — they were taught also in Rome and in Greece.
"Nevertheless, there are people in these days who imagine they can write something new upon the subject."
And saying these things he putteth the new book aside, and he taketh a duster and dusteth tenderly the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, and patteth the good old books on the back.
Never doth he lose patience — not even when bibliophilists steal his books —
Nor when cockroaches devour the backs of Aristophanes and Pliny, and of Diodorus Siculus, of Athenæus and Sophocles and Petronius —
Nor when bookworms bore holes through the Elzevir text of the Fathers of the Church —
Nor when, having bought a book for a good price, he afterward discovereth that the person who sold it to him had previously torn out the engravings —
Nor even when having been told to "lay books aside" the person for whom they are laid aside never cometh back — so that they lay there until all hope of selling them has departed.
He putteth works of godly piety in the waste-basket.
And books in the French language, robed in yellow like Roman courtesans — these he selleth for a good price.
"For such" he saith, "is the depravity of human nature."
Never have I been able to learn whether he saith this seriously or not — so much doth his eye twinkle when he saith it.
He is never absent from his post; — for twenty-five years he hath lived every day with his books from 7.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. And there will he remain, let us hope, for many years more.
Until they take him from his books and file him away, even as a roll of MS. in the marble pigeon holes which are never dusted and whose contents are never looked at.
- ↑ Item, September 15, 1880.