Chapter 49

ADVANTAGE OF SMALL LIBRARIES.

We never see a valuable book without wanting it. The most of us have been struck through with a passion for books. Town, city and state libraries to us are an enchantment. We hear of a private library of ten thousand volumes, and think what a heaven the owner must be living in. But the probability is that the man who has five hundred volumes is better off than the man who has five thousand. The large private libraries in uniform editions, and unbroken sets, and Russia covers, are, for the most part, the idlers of the day; while the small libraries, with broken-backed books, and turned-down leaves, and lead-pencil scribbles in the margin, are doing the chief work for the world and the Church.

For the most part, the owners of large collections have their chief anxiety about the binding and the type. Take down the whole set of Walter Scott's novels, and find that only one of them has been read through. There are Motley's histories on that shelf; but get into conversation about the Prince of Orange, and see that Motley has not been read. I never was more hungry than once while walking in a Charleston mill amid whole harvests of rice. One handful of that grain in a pudding would have been worth more to me than a thousand tierces uncooked. Great libraries are of but little value if unread, and amid great profusion of books the temptation is to read but little. If a man take up a book, and feel he will never have a chance to see it again, he says: "I must read it now or never," and before the day is past has devoured it. The owner of the large library says: "I have it on my shelf, and any time can refer to it."

What we can have any time we never have. I found a group of men living at the foot of Whiteface Mountain who had never been to the top, while I had come hundreds of miles to ascend it. They could go any time so easily. It is often the case that those who have plain copies of history are better acquainted with the past than those who have most highly adorned editions of Bancroft, Prescott, Josephus and Herodotus. It ought not so to be, you say. I cannot help that; so it is.

Books are sometimes too elegantly bound to be read. The gilt, the tinge, the ivory, the clasps, seem to say: "Hands off!" The thing that most surprised me in Thomas Carlyle's library was the fewness of the books. They had all seen service. None of them had paraded in holiday dress. They were worn and battered. He had flung them at the ages.

More beautiful than any other adornments are the costly books of a princely library; but let not the man of small library stand looking into the garnished alcoves wishing for these unused volumes. The workman who dines on roast beef and new Irish potatoes will be healthier and stronger than he who begins with "mock-turtle," and goes up through the lane of a luxuriant table till he comes to almond-nuts. I put the man of one hundred books, mastered, against the man of one thousand books of which he has only a smattering.

On lecturing routes I have sometimes been turned into costly private libraries to spend the day; and I reveled in the indexes, and scrutinized the lids, and set them back in as straight a row as when I found them, yet learned little. But on my way home in the cars I took out of my satchel a book that had cost me only one dollar and a half, and afterward found that it had changed the course of my life and helped decide my eternal destiny.

We get many letters from clergymen asking advice about reading, and deploring their lack of books. I warrant they all have books enough to shake earth and heaven with, if the books were rightly used. A man who owns a Bible has, to begin with, a library as long as from here to heaven. The dullest preachers I know of have splendid libraries. They own everything that has been written on a miracle, and yet when you hear them preach, if you did not get sound asleep, that would be a miracle. They have all that Calvin and other learned men wrote about election, and while you hear them you feel that you have been elected to be bored. They have been months and years turning over the heavy tomes on the divine attributes, trying to understand God, while some plain Christian, with a New Testament in his hand, goes into the next alley, and sees in the face of an invalid woman peace and light and comfort and joy which teach him in one hour what God is.

There are two kinds of dullness--learned dullness and ignorant dullness. We think the latter preferable, for it is apt to be more spicy. You cannot measure the length of a man's brain, nor the width of his heart, nor the extent of his usefulness by the size of his library.

Life is so short you cannot know everything. There are but few things we need to know, but let us know them well. People who know everything do nothing. You cannot read all that comes out. Every book read without digestion is so much dyspepsia. Sixteen apple-dumplings at one meal are not healthy.

In our age, when hundreds of books are launched every day from the press, do not be ashamed to confess ignorance of the majority of the volumes printed. If you have no artistic appreciation, spend neither your dollars nor your time on John Ruskin. Do not say that you are fond of Shakespeare if you are not interested in him, and after a year's study would not know Romeo from John Falstaff. There is an amazing amount of lying about Shakespeare.

Use to the utmost what books you have, and do not waste your time in longing after a great library. You wish you could live in the city and have access to some great collection of books. Be not deceived. The book of the library which you want will be out the day you want it. I longed to live in town that I might be in proximity to great libraries. Have lived in town thirteen years, and never found in the public library the book I asked for but once; and getting that home, I discovered it was not the one I wanted. Besides, it is the book that you own that most profits, not that one which you take from "The Athenæum" for a few days.

Excepting in rare cases, you might as well send to the foundling hospital and borrow a baby as to borrow a book with the idea of its being any great satisfaction. We like a baby in our cradle, but prefer that one which belongs to the household. We like a book, but want to feel it is ours. We never yet got any advantage from a borrowed book. We hope those never reaped any profit from the books they borrowed from us, but never returned. We must have the right to turn down the leaf, and underscore the favorite passage, and write an observation in the margin in such poor chirography that no one else can read it and we ourselves are sometimes confounded.

All success to great libraries, and skillful book-bindery, and exquisite typography, and fine-tinted plate paper, and beveled boards, and gilt edges, and Turkey morocco! but we are determined that frescoed alcoves shall not lord it over common shelves, and Russia binding shall not overrule sheepskin, and that "full calf" shall not look down on pasteboard. We war not against great libraries. We only plead for the better use of small ones.