Littell's Living Age/Volume 139/Issue 1795/Bookworms

From The Saturday Review.

BOOKWORMS.

In the long and bitter struggle for supremacy which has gone and is still going on between the bookish few and the unread many, we must reckon to the score of the latter two signal advantages, when, in times past, they invented the terms "bookworm" and "blue-stocking." These were immense achievements, such as their opponents could scarcely match, and all the more noticeable because the party from which they have proceeded is, as a rule, the inarticulate one. Such an instance of the force of expression whereby it has once upon a time delivered itself is a measure of the feeling which lies smouldering in the breasts of all its members, the "great silent souls" — to borrow a phrase of Mr. Carlyle — who belong to what we may call the unintellectual class. It should serve as a wholesome caution to the literary minority, who are too apt to forget — because, forsooth, they can make their side of the dispute sound the loudest — that there is this balanced conflict going on, and to imagine that the fighting is all on one side, that they have now nothing more to do than to inflict the proper chastisement upon their opponents. Nothing can exceed the depth of their error upon this and kindred questions; a natural error, perhaps, because they are here concerned with the subject of their own influence and importance in the world. What the literary man is pleased to call (euphemistically) fame or reputation arising from his successes is by this very term bookworm exposed at its true valuation in the eyes of the laity. When expanded into its full meaning — for the utterances of the silent class are as concise and pregnant as those of an oracle — the word seems to express some such sentence as this addressed to the man of letters: You are a poor creature, who, from the unkindness either of nature or fortune, have failed past all hope of success in the real efforts of life; you have never been an athlete, a maker of scores at cricket, or a rower in university eights; you have shown no skill as a sportsman; and, as you grew in years, you did not grow in your knowledge of horseflesh or in your discrimination of vintages. You are letting the years pass over you without having learnt or done one of the things which it is the common desire of mankind to learn and do. You never won a Derby or a shooting-match, or made a great "bag" or a good "book;" you have not got so much as a single cup or a single brush to show that your life has not been lived in vain. But, to avoid the stings of conscience, and a too crushing sense of defeat, you bury yourself in the frivolous and fanciful pursuits of literature or science, and surround yourself with a clique of unhappy wretches of the same mould — lepers and outcasts in reality — who agree in pretending that their unhealthy hues are the natural complexion of man in his highest development.

This is the real opinion of the world — the vast majority in any country — concerning fame and literary reputation. Balzac said that critics were les impuissants qui manquent à leur début; most men would go further and apply the phrase to everybody who wields a pen. By sedulously shutting his eyes to the truth and courting the society of his kind, such as can be found in large towns, the bookworm may for a time succeed in forgetting that he is not a hero, but a sort of pariah among his fellowmen. Indeed, as has been said, his blindness sometimes leads him to the length of railing against the unlearned, as though he were carrying the whole world along with him. For a proper awakening, and in order that society may have its full revenge upon him, let the bookworm be tracked out alone, and taken away to spend a few months in the midst of an agricultural neighborhood; that is to say, let him be put for once among a people occupied not with the fictitious interests of imagination or of the past, but with those real and constantly recurring interests which attach to turnips considered either in respect of their own qualities or of the quantity of game to which they will afford a shelter, the conflicting merits of different kinds of guns and cartridges, the capacities and the ailments of the horse and the dog, etc. In the midst of these things he soon discovers how remote his speculations have lain from the practical business of life. To such varied subjects will be added about nightfall disquisitions upon the purchase and history of wines and of cigars — is he more at home here? — or upon that never-failing topic, the history of the coloring of a meerschaum pipe. Among the other sex, besides the universal and purely feminine interests of dress and babies, some local disturbance — the dispute between the clergyman and his archdeacon, between the schoolmaster and the Dissenting minister — involves, it is evident, some deepest considerations of policy or of religion, but so intricately that they are quite inexplicable to the uninstructed layman.

At first, with a sinful hankering after forbidden pleasures, our bookworm hopes to gain some consolation from his accustomed companions. He carries the accursed thing in pocket volumes about with him, and tries to steal away into arbors or unused morning rooms. But he is oppressed by a sense of guilt and a constant fear of detection, which eat into and in time quite wear away his power of enjoyment. There are some hosts and hostesses who feel it to be a reflection upon their character if their guest is seen occupied with a book, deeming that nothing but the extremity of dulness could ever bring one to such a pass. And so, if he goes to the library at all, the bookworm must go there under the plea of writing letters, and take good heed not to become too absorbed, lest he should find that some expedition out of doors has been waiting for him to join it. Or he must stand by the bookshelf in an attitude of pretended irresolution — the true dawdling attitude of a country house — as though only casually, and as it were accidentally, peering into the volume. When he drives to a picnic he longs for a seat on the box, which might afford a chance for gratifying his craving; but if he gets there he is allowed no peace, and is almost required to twist his head off for fear of missing the sights of the neighborhood. These are penalties sufficient for whatever contemptuous expressions he or his associates may in happier moments have been betrayed into towards the unreading public. For, if he is a true brother of the order, some daily dose of literature is as necessary to the bookworm as his daily drops are to the opium-eater; without it he must die, or abruptly end his visit. Towards the end of the day his agonies grow very intense. During the protracted discussion of wines in the dining room his spirits have been rapidly falling, just as the opium-eater's spirits fall when the hour for his dose has long passed, and at last threaten a total extinction; and when he gets into the drawing-room and the music is found fairly under way — "John Peile" for the benefit of the country gentlemen — he is mechanically drawn to the one bookshelf the room contains. Alas, it has glass doors and they are locked! A row of standard authors in virgin bindings — sleeping beauties — lie before his eyes, ready for a touch to awake them into life; but he has not the audacity of the true prince. Certainly the enchantment consists of nothing more than two comparatively inexpensive glass doors. He could break through it, after such a period of torture; but his resolution is not fixed before he is recalled to the excitement of a round game at cards.

Nevertheless, let him take courage, for his time will come at last. Have we not said that otherwise he must perish? It comes when the household has retired for the night. There in bed, at the double danger of murder and suicide — only that, like Macaulay, he has too often run the risk of committing patricide, matricide, and fratricide to attach much weight to such a consideration as that — we may leave him to his orgies. The early habits of the country, early chiefly in the direction of retiring to rest, are a great inducement towards reading in bed, supposing any inducement to such an indulgence were necessary; and for ourselves we have never known any moments of this enjoyment more keenly pleasurable than such as were won under the circumstances in which we have placed the bookworm. Increase of appetite has not in these cases grown from what it fed on, but from a terrible and protracted fast. Fortunately in the present day no household is so unlettered as not to offer us plenty of matter worth reading; indeed there is a certain class of literature almost always to be met with in those country wildernesses, and seeming to have a peculiar appositeness and vitality there. We can remember making our first close acquaintance with Bewick's "British Birds" in the most bookless house in which it was ever our fortune to be cast. Bewick and Walton and White of Selborne are of course sure to be lurking somewhere; and these three authors, less than any that we know, should be read in copies furnished from a lending library. If we do not possess them ourselves, we should certainly wait till we can borrow them from a friend; for they are treasures too sacred and individual to form a part of any communal schemes. In addition to these classics, the country house may be reckoned upon to hold a number of works which are too rapidly disappearing from our town bookshelves — the bygone classics, standing monuments of wit and beauty as they were esteemed by our fathers, now almost utterly faded from the recollection of the present generation. Here they find their asylum, their harbor of refuge, where the peace of their last resting-place is seldom broken. Such books as we mean are "Tom and Jerry," or Seymour's "Sporting Sketches," or "The Book of Beauty, Edited by the Countess of Blessington," with its story by B. Disraeli, Esq., and elegant verses by Thomas Haynes Bayly, or Mrs. Radcliffe or Mrs. Gore, or "our immortal Joanna Baillie" herself — the expression is Scott's — and many immortals more back to the time of the author of "Douglas;" or, again, some of the antique numbers of magazines and reviews — the Gentleman's Magazine of sixty years ago, or the Quarterly and Blackwood under the editorship of Southey and Lockhart. When we read such relics of the past, we see that the historic imagination may be exercised without going further away than the youth time of the last generation; and for any unkindly rubs of fortune in our own case, some unaccountable blindness of the reading public towards our merits, we gain the solace of a free criticism of other former reputations. How remote some of these things seem from us — impossible beauties, impossible sentimental stories, impossible political theories of Southey and Lockhart. We might be exploring an antediluvian literature. The proverb is something musty. "Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet! then there is hope that a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year."