Part 15
The first edition was printed at Geneva in 1560 and copies in good condition are scarce and valuable. In fact, they are really worth more than the price they sell for to-day. It was for years the household Bible of the English race. Although translated by the English exiles at Geneva during Queen Mary’s reign, it was dedicated “To the Moste Vertuous and Noble Quene Elisabet, Quene of England, France, and Ireland.”
At least two hundred editions of the Bible and New Testament were issued before 1630, consequently for centuries it was in almost every home. The later editions of this Bible have therefore become the _bête noir_ of every bookseller. They turn up everywhere, their proud possessors asking fortunes for copies hardly worth the value of old paper. The copies published after 1600 are the worst offenders. It is a pity, for the peace of mind of the booksellers, that they were not all destroyed in the Great Fire of London. They still exist to torment the souls of bookmen, and although the language of the Genevan Bible has always been considered good, homely English, the language of the biblio-fiend, when he receives one on approval, with charges collect, is certainly more vigorous and expressive.
Not long ago a woman came to my Philadelphia library with a Breeches Bible. True, it was rather ancient, authentically dated 1629. From the moment I met her I realized she suffered from suppressed emotions of some sort. Although I am accustomed to prospective sellers with queer symptoms, I was rather alarmed. Her hands shook violently, she was deadly white one moment and a flaming pink the next. When I inquired what she wanted for her Bible she replied in quick, nervous tones, “Fifty thousand dollars!” Now I am always amazed at these grand ideas of value evinced by the layman. I hope I do not always show my surprise. Indeed, some people accuse me of having a poker face. This Bible was certainly worth no more than twenty dollars. But before I apprised her of the distressing news, which I always hate to impart, I was cautious enough to call in one of my assistants to aid me should she collapse on my hands.
It is to the eternal credit of bookmen that the sense of humor has been the ruling passion with them all. They all see the joyous, the fantastic, the capricious side. They are never _sérieux_, never unduly bowed down with the gravity of their calling. Although they are ardent, nay, passionate lovers, they always remain gay and debonair. The history of old Bibles bears eloquent witness on this point. Why do Bug Bibles, Vinegar Bibles, Wicked Bibles, tickle the fantasy of collectors? For instance, Matthew’s Bible of 1551 contains the reading in Psalm xci, 5: “So that thou shalt not nede to be afraid for any bugges by nighte, nor for the arrow that flyeth by day.” Or think how the Christian world would have been disrupted if it had followed the Commandments of the 1631 Bible, which leaves out entirely the “not” in the Seventh. This terrible, wicked book reads: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Only four copies escaped the public executioner, and the poor printer was fined £300 by Archbishop Laud.
Baskett’s Oxford Bible of 1717 is a mine of magnificent errors, the most amusing being that of “the parable of the vinegar,” instead of “vineyard.”
There are three tremendously important American Bibles: the Eliot Indian Bible, the Saur, and the Aitken Bible. John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians, translated the Bible into their language and had it printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1661-63. Thus the first Bible issued on this continent was, appropriately, in the tongue of its natives. And the second was in German, the first in a European language printed in America, from the press of Christopher Saur, at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1743. The third, at last in English, was printed in 1782 by R. Aitken “at Pope’s Head, three doors above the Coffee House, in Market Street,” Philadelphia. The great demand for early Americana will surely raise these three treasures to heights at present undreamed of in the bookman’s philosophy.
VIII
WHY AMERICA BUYS ENGLAND’S BOOKS
During my frequent visits to England I have often been asked why Americans are so persistent, even voracious, in acquiring the great literary treasures of Great Britain. I have been accused in its public prints of being the greatest offender. I have been likened unto the ogre of ancient times. Perhaps it is pertinent, therefore, to know the reason why Americans are so anxious to obtain, at almost any price, not only the choicest English books and manuscripts, but the outstanding contemporary documents that chronicle so faithfully and so inexorably the political and literary history of England.
According to some of the English newspapers that bewail the loss to England of her great monuments of the past, it is a new thing, this interest in things English on the part of the American public. On the contrary, it has been going on, increasing in volume, it is true, from about the year 1840. Before the Civil War those two farsighted collectors, John Carter Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, and James Lenox of New York, were scouring England for volumes relating to the early history of this country, and incidentally gobbling up such rarities as the first folio of Shakespeare. They were ably assisted in their raids by an American who had taken up his residence in London, Henry Stevens of Vermont, the Green Mountain Boy, who, among the string of titles after his name, included the cryptic letters, BLK BLD, ATHM CLB, meaning “Blackballed by the Athenæum Club!”
It is extremely gratifying to note the extraordinary love of books persisting in one American family for almost a century. In England the Huths and many others have shown the tendency, the collector’s instinct passed on from father to son for many generations. In this country it is rare. The remarkable exception, however, is evidenced by the Browns of Providence. The great library founded by John Carter Brown, with its glittering array of superb volumes--among the finest in the world--bears eloquent testimony to a continual devotion to books and learning. The family of the original founder has never for a moment flagged in its interest, and the volumes added to the collection since its establishment bear silent witness, unequaled in America, of a loving regard for books.
In 1847, James Lenox brought to this country from England the first Gutenberg Bible. The earliest first folio of Shakespeare in America was purchased in London about 1836. Since then they have flowed to us in a constant and ever widening stream, until to-day there are far more of them in the United States than in the British Empire.
England need not complain, however, or consider it such a serious loss, as some of her statesmen do. She has within her narrow boundaries superb volumes that America can never hope to possess. The British Museum and the great libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, to say nothing of the wonderful Spencer collection, now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, are treasure houses that luckily can never be despoiled. They will be able to resist the American invader and they will remain always at the service of students and scholars. It is not generally known that the libraries of England have left no stone unturned to increase their already stupendous hoards. The British Museum has added constantly to its collections and to-day it is a greater library, in many respects, than the Bibliothèque Nationale, which long held the leadership. I think it is actually the largest and most important library in the world.
Under the able direction of Mr. Alfred W. Pollard, formerly Keeper of Printed Books, the British Museum acquired many books and manuscripts of great intrinsic value, and it is to the extraordinary genius of this man that the British public owes much. Not only is he a bibliographer of remarkable ability, but, when in charge of the books, he developed the rare faculty of finding the very volumes that would complete a certain series; he was, therefore, ever on the alert to secure for the Museum the things that were most needed. And this in the face of American competition! As to the latter, it is worthy of note that the late J. P. Morgan, and his son as well, in forming their memorable collection, whenever possible never bid against the Museum. If the authorities particularly desired a certain manuscript that belonged of right to the Museum, the Morgans gracefully refrained from bidding.
In fact, Englishmen have always taken a greater pride in their national library than Americans in theirs. Ever since its foundation, the British Museum has received important bequests from collectors, such as the superb gifts of George III and the Honorable Thomas Grenville. Recently when it was found that there was in the Museum no first folio containing the portrait of Shakespeare in its first state, several patriotic and discerning Englishmen secured it for the Nation.
True, a few citizens have made noteworthy gifts to our national library in Washington, but in the main it has been sadly neglected. Americans have given wisely and well to their own local foundations, but the Congressional Library, which should be the pride of every American, has never received the encouragement it deserves. Dr. Herbert Putnam, the gifted Librarian of Congress, is making every effort to remedy this glaring defect in our national armor. The Right Honorable Ramsay MacDonald told me, during his recent visit to Philadelphia, that an organized effort was being made by friends of the British Museum to secure the invaluable things that the Museum required. Why not form a society of friends of the Library of Congress, in order to purchase for it, while we have still the opportunity, the many volumes of Americana and the precious holograph documents that bear directly upon our country’s history?
It is a curious thing that rare books and the precious things of the collector follow the flow of gold. When the United States became the great creditor nation, taking the place of England, at least for the time being, it was but natural that the various objects of art and interest should gravitate to this side. During the last twenty years rare books and literary documents have left the shores of Albion at an alarming rate (for England). Most of them are now in the private and public libraries of the United States. I should hate to state how much I assisted in this magic exodus.
England was the great offender in this same sort of thing a century ago. It is the old threadbare saying, which must have first been uttered by Methuselah, that history repeats itself. In the eighteenth century, Italy, France, and Spain were complaining of the raids made on their artistic resources by Englishmen, as England is complaining of us to-day. The extraordinary increase in gold in England during the Napoleonic Wars was responsible for this. It was the era when the great collectors, Richard Heber, Earl Spencer, the Duke of Roxburghe, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Devonshire, Sir Mark Sykes, and Robert Stayner Holford were making the Grand Tour and buying in the great emporiums in Rome and in Florence, in Paris and Madrid, their choicest objects. It is true that the Grand Tour has been the fashion in England ever since the days of Chaucer and that great libraries were formed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, but it was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the greatest collections were made. In those days Sir Richard Wallace could purchase the finest Watteau in Paris at the price of an etching to-day. The best eighteenth-century paintings, drawings, bibelots, furniture, so dear to the heart of Frenchmen, were transferred from the Rue St. Honoré to Carlton House Terrace, or to grace the drawing-rooms of the elegant country homes of Great Britain.
The wheel of time, however, turns.
It is really unfortunate for England that she is compelled now to give up some of her possessions. No nation has a finer appreciation of great works of the imagination. She receives payment for them, it is true, but money is a thing that can be had; it passes in cycles from one nation to another; a rare book or a manuscript, if it once goes into a public institution, can never be regained. Whether England, to protect her historical and literary relics, should make laws, as Italy has done, is no concern of mine. In her wisdom she probably knows the most expedient procedure. It is an economic as well as cultural question, and of economics I am glad to say I know absolutely nothing. There are, however, masters of the subject in Great Britain; they will probably solve this difficult problem.
The wisest among the collectors in England do not look upon this exchange as a total loss to England. I shall never forget my last conversation with the late Sir George Holford in Dorchester House, London, after I had purchased some of his dearest possessions. He said, “The world is growing smaller--Englishmen are great travelers; they can see these very books some day in an American institution far more readily than in the private collections in England. I know, myself, how difficult it is to throw open private homes to students. You recall as well as I do that the finest library of English poetry was never at the beck and call of students. I am glad that most of it has gone to America where it will be accessible to scholars of all nations.” Broadminded men, like that erudite scholar, Lord Crawford, know that these books will have tender and loving care in America, and that they will be an inspiration to our students.
We Americans have the enthusiasm of youth. Perhaps the traditional Englishman has been so accustomed to seeing about him the finest things of art and literature that in the course of years he becomes a trifle bored. Perhaps we shall also, in the fullness of time, experience this, but at present we are eager to fill the great libraries and edifices in America with the rarest and most precious books. In the East, and in the West as well, there are enormous library buildings of the finest architectural types. Alas, they have not the books to fill them. The Free Library of Philadelphia has spent nearly seven million dollars on a superb edifice. It will be necessary to fill this building with suitable volumes. The growth of American universities, unparalleled in all time, calls for the apparatus of the student. They must have the tools of their trade--books. It is no wonder that there are not enough to go round. The demand is greater than the supply. Consequently prices will go steadily upward, and it is well to secure them while we may.
It seems a pity that some Americans give such enormous sums for library buildings and spend literally nothing upon the volumes themselves. Books, not edifices, make libraries. A friend of mine only fifteen years ago spent four million dollars on a superb library building; some are already complaining that it is no longer up-to-date! Buildings pass; they soon become obsolete. Books alone are everlasting. “Men may come and men may go, but books go on forever!” The late Mr. Huntington used to say: “The ownership of a fine library is the surest and swiftest way to immortality!”
I have to-day in my New York vault a collection of early English manuscripts unequaled in any library on this side of the Atlantic. It includes four manuscripts of Chaucer, two of Gower’s _Confessio Amantis_, several of Lydgate’s _Fall of Princes_, and the famous manuscript of Occleve’s _Poems_ with a contemporary portrait of Chaucer. It will be impossible ever to secure another assemblage like it, for it does not exist. They will be appreciated after the last building has tottered on its foundation.
The past fifty years has produced in this country a group of book collectors equal to any that has appeared in England or on the Continent, men well in advance of their time, like the greatest book lover of them all, Richard Heber. I always envied this bibliomaniac his two possessions; as Sir Walter Scott so neatly puts it, “Heber the magnificent, whose library and cellar are so superior to all others in the world!” Would that Americans could be as successful gathering old vintages as old books! In this, England has it all over us.
It is melancholy to record that in the last few months three of our most distinguished collectors have passed away, each one of them possessing in full measure the most extraordinary vision. I refer first to Mr. Edward E. Ayer of Chicago, who was one of the pioneers in making a serious collection of books relating to the American Indian, which he presented, before his death, to the Newberry Library in Chicago. The late Mr. William A. White of Brooklyn (of beloved memory) was among the earliest of our collectors to gather the choice and alluring volumes of the great Elizabethans. His judgment was excellent and he had a vivid understanding of this golden period, equaled by few scholars. He did not hesitate to lend his finest volumes to any student who showed an intelligent interest in English literature.
I cannot speak at length of Mr. Henry E. Huntington. I feel his loss too poignantly at the present time. He was, without doubt, the greatest collector of books the world has ever known. Without possessing a profound knowledge of literature or of history, his flair for fine books was remarkable. His taste was sure, impeccable. The library at San Gabriel, California, which houses his wonderful collections, will be the Mecca of students for all time. No gift to a nation or to a state can ever equal his. America does not appreciate it to-day, but, as time spins its web, and the world becomes better acquainted with the Huntington treasures, this fact will be adequately recognized.
I do not mean to imply that American collectors are forming great libraries and art galleries solely for patriotic reasons, or for the good of their generation. It is perhaps after all a secondary consideration with them. Certainly it is not the first. Neither is their motive the encouragement of scholarship or of the arts. It is something more human. The bump of acquisitiveness is strongly developed in our collectors, and perhaps I know this as well as anyone. They like to exhibit their treasures as other mortals do, to show them to their envious friends with a twinkle in their eyes and a certain amount of deviltry. American amateurs, who have built railroads and great suspension bridges, who have been financial giants and captains of industry, must surely possess the red blood that made them thus. Of course they like to flaunt a folio of Ben Jonson or a Keats’s _Poems_ (with a presentation inscription!) before the eyes of other collectors. In these ecstatic moments they do not care a whit for the Nation or for the people. But with the passing of years, with the gradual oozing of the enthusiasm and candor of youth, they think of the ultimate disposal of their books. It is then, and then only, that the people of America come into their own.
It is a wonderful and magnificent thing that the gathering of books in this country is in the hands of leaders of her industries, the so-called business kings, and not in the hands of college professors and great scholars. The latter, generally, in forming a collection make a sad mess of it. The instinct of the collector, the _heluo librorum_ of Cicero, is entirely different from that of the scholar. They are two distinct and separate faculties: the acquisition of knowledge and the gathering of books. Men to be successful in either must have an entirely different cosmos. Both are indispensable. It is paradoxical, but true, that not a single great library in the world has been formed by a great scholar.
Every year our collectors pitch their tents on the fair and hospitable shores of Great Britain, where they exchange their useless gold for ancient and modern English books. The pleasant bookshops all over England, Ireland, and Scotland welcome the American visitors, who take home with them such ingratiating little volumes as Herrick’s _Hesperides_ and Lovelace’s _Lucasta_. The supply of such charming volumes has become well-nigh exhausted. Nowhere can this migration be more clearly seen than in the _Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1475-1640_ issued by The Bibliographical Society. This monumental work has been compiled by A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, and a host of the ablest English scholars. A glance at its pages reveals the fact that there are many important books of English dramatic poetry of which no copy now remains in England. Take, for instance, the second edition of _Hamlet_, published in London, in 1604. It is really the first edition containing the true text, as the first, of 1603, was a pirated one, with inferior readings. Twenty-five years ago three copies, all that exist, were in important private libraries in England. To-day all three are in America--in the Huntington Library, in the Elizabethan Club at Yale University, and in the private collection of Mr. H. C. Folger of New York. The check-list shows that of many of the most exquisite volumes of poetry and romance not a single copy remains in the great country that saw its birth. On the other hand, there are thousands of books remaining in the British Museum, at the Universities and Colleges, at Lambeth, at Edinburgh, in the Patent Office, at Peterborough, at Winchester, of which not a single example exists in any library in the United States.
The situation, for England’s scholars, has certain compensations. The books are really accessible in this country. Following the procedure of the members of the old Roxburghe Club, beautiful reprints have been made by American collectors of various great rarities and distributed to the libraries of Great Britain. Heywood’s _King Edward the Fourth_, 1599, which exists in a single copy in the library of Mr. C. W. Clark, has now been made in facsimile by the courtesy of the owner and issued for the use of students. Wager’s unique Interlude, _Enough is as good as a Feast_ (about 1565), has also been reprinted. It was in Lord Mostyn’s library for many, many years, quite out of the reach of most scholars. I trust no one will infer from this that the great English collectors bury their things and are niggardly in offering their books and manuscripts to the learned. On the contrary, the Duke of Devonshire, Sir R. L. Harmsworth, and Mr. Thomas J. Wise have always opened their doors to worthy scholars.