Captivity Waite never approved of
my fondness for fairy literature. She shared
the enthusiasm which I expressed whenever “Robinson
Crusoe” was mentioned; there was just enough
seriousness in De Foe’s romance, just enough
piety to appeal for sympathy to one of Captivity Waite’s
religious turn of mind. When it came to fiction
involving witches, ogres, and flubdubs, that
was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of the
little Puritan revolted.
Yet I have the documentary evidence
to prove that Captivity’s ancestors (both paternal
and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as
abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined.
The Waites of Salem were famous persecutors of witches,
and Sinai Higginbotham (Captivity’s great-great-grandfather
on her mother’s side of the family) was Cotton
Mather’s boon companion, and rode around the
gallows with that zealous theologian on that memorable
occasion when five young women were hanged at Danvers
upon the charge of having tormented little children
with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human
thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps
swinging from one extreme to the other. Within
the compass of five generations we find the Puritan
first an uncompromising believer in demonology and
magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving
the play of fancy.
I felt harshly toward Captivity Waite
for a time, but I harbor her no ill-will now; on the
contrary, I recall with very tender feelings the distant
time when our sympathies were the same and when we
journeyed the pathway of early youth in a companionship
sanctified by the innocence and the loyalty and the
truth of childhood. Indeed, I am not sure that
that early friendship did not make a lasting impression
upon my life; I have thought of Captivity Waite a
great many times, and I have not unfrequently wondered
what might have been but for that book of fairy tales
which my Uncle Cephas sent me.
She was a very pretty child, and she
lost none of her comeliness and none of her sweetness
of character as she approached maturity. I was
impressed with this upon my return from college.
She, too, had pursued those studies deemed necessary
to the acquirement of a good education; she had taken
a four years’ course at South Holyoke and had
finished at Mrs. Willard’s seminary at Troy.
“You will now,” said her father, and
he voiced the New England sentiment regarding young
womanhood; “you will now return to the quiet
of your home and under the direction of your mother
study the performance of those weightier duties which
qualify your sex for a realization of the solemn responsibilities
of human life.”
Three or four years ago a fine-looking
young fellow walked in upon me with a letter of introduction
from his mother. He was Captivity Waite’s
son! Captivity is a widow now, and she is still
living in her native State, within twenty miles of
the spot where she was born. Colonel Parker,
her husband, left her a good property when he died,
and she is famous for her charities. She has
founded a village library, and she has written me
on several occasions for advice upon proposed purchases
of books.
I don’t mind telling you that
I had a good deal of malicious pleasure in sending
her not long ago a reminder of old times in these words:
“My valued friend,” I wrote, “I see
by the catalogue recently published that your village
library contains, among other volumes representing
the modern school of fiction, eleven copies of ‘Trilby’
and six copies of ‘The Heavenly Twins.’
I also note an absence of certain works whose influence
upon my earlier life was such that I make bold to send
copies of the same to your care in the hope that you
will kindly present them to the library with my most
cordial compliments. These are a copy each of
the ‘New England Primer’ and Grimm’s
‘Household Stories.’”
At the age of twenty-three, having
been graduated from college and having read the poems
of Villon, the confessions of Rousseau, and Boswell’s
life of Johnson, I was convinced that I had comprehended
the sum of human wisdom and knew all there was worth
knowing. If at the present time for
I am seventy-two I knew as much as I thought
I knew at twenty-three I should undoubtedly be a prodigy
of learning and wisdom.
I started out to be a philosopher.
My grandmother’s death during my second year
at college possessed me of a considerable sum of money
and severed every tie and sentimental obligation which
had previously held me to my grandmother’s wish
that I become a minister of the gospel. When
I became convinced that I knew everything I conceived
a desire to see something, for I had traveled none
and I had met but few people.
Upon the advice of my Uncle Cephas,
I made a journey to Europe, and devoted two years
to seeing sights and to acquainting myself with the
people and the customs abroad. Nine months of
this time I spent in Paris, which was then an irregular
and unkempt city, but withal quite as evil as at present.
I took apartments in the Latin Quarter, and, being
of a generous nature, I devoted a large share of my
income to the support of certain artists and students
whose talents and time were expended almost exclusively
in the pursuit of pleasure.
While thus serving as a visible means
of support to this horde of parasites, I fell in with
the man who has since then been my intimate friend.
Judge Methuen was a visitor in Paris, and we became
boon companions. It was he who rescued me from
the parasites and revived the flames of honorable
ambition, which had well-nigh been extinguished by
the wretched influence of Villon and Rousseau.
The Judge was a year my senior, and a wealthy father
provided him with the means for gratifying his wholesome
and refined tastes. We two went together to
London, and it was during our sojourn in that capital
that I began my career as a collector of books.
It is simply justice to my benefactor to say that
to my dear friend Methuen I am indebted for the inspiration
which started me upon a course so full of sweet surprises
and precious rewards.
There are very many kinds of book
collectors, but I think all may be grouped in three
classes, viz.: Those who collect from vanity;
those who collect for the benefits of learning; those
who collect through a veneration and love for books.
It is not unfrequent that men who begin to collect
books merely to gratify their personal vanity find
themselves presently so much in love with the pursuit
that they become collectors in the better sense.
Just as a man who takes pleasure in
the conquest of feminine hearts invariably finds himself
at last ensnared by the very passion which he has
been using simply for the gratification of his vanity,
I am inclined to think that the element of vanity
enters, to a degree, into every phase of book collecting;
vanity is, I take it, one of the essentials to a well-balanced
character not a prodigious vanity, but a
prudent, well-governed one. But for vanity there
would be no competition in the world; without competition
there would be no progress.
In these later days I often hear this
man or that sneered at because, forsooth, he collects
books without knowing what the books are about.
But for my part, I say that that man bids fair to
be all right; he has made a proper start in the right
direction, and the likelihood is that, other things
being equal, he will eventually become a lover, as
well as a buyer, of books. Indeed, I care not
what the beginning is, so long as it be a beginning.
There are different ways of reaching the goal.
Some folk go horseback via the royal road, but very
many others are compelled to adopt the more tedious
processes, involving rocky pathways and torn shoon
and sore feet.
So subtile and so infectious is this
grand passion that one is hardly aware of its presence
before it has complete possession of him; and I have
known instances of men who, after having associated
one evening with Judge Methuen and me, have waked
up the next morning filled with the incurable enthusiasm
of bibliomania. But the development of the passion
is not always marked by exhibitions of violence; sometimes,
like the measles, it is slow and obstinate about “coming
out,” and in such cases applications should
be resorted to for the purpose of diverting the malady
from the vitals; otherwise serious results may ensue.
Indeed, my learned friend Dr. O’Rell
has met with several cases (as he informs me) in which
suppressed bibliomania has resulted fatally.
Many of these cases have been reported in that excellent
publication, the “Journal of the American Medical
Association,” which periodical, by the way,
is edited by ex-Surgeon-General Hamilton, a famous
collector of the literature of ornament and dress.
To make short of a long story, the
medical faculty is nearly a unit upon the proposition
that wherever suppressed bibliomania is suspected
immediate steps should be taken to bring out the disease.
It is true that an Ohio physician, named Woodbury,
has written much in defence of the theory that bibliomania
can be aborted; but a very large majority of his profession
are of the opinion that the actual malady must needs
run a regular course, and they insist that the cases
quoted as cured by Woodbury were not genuine, but
were bastard or false phases, of the same class as
the chickenpox and the German measles.
My mania exhibited itself first in
an affectation for old books; it mattered not what
the book itself was so long as it bore an
ancient date upon its title-page or in its colophon
I pined to possess it. This was not only a vanity,
but a very silly one. In a month’s time
I had got together a large number of these old tomes,
many of them folios, and nearly all badly worm-eaten,
and sadly shaken.
One day I entered a shop kept by a
man named Stibbs, and asked if I could procure any
volumes of sixteenth-century print.
“Yes,” said Mr. Stibbs,
“we have a cellarful of them, and we sell them
by the ton or by the cord.”
That very day I dispersed my hoard
of antiques, retaining only my Prynne’s “Histrio-Mastix”
and my Opera Quinti Horatii Flacci (8vo,
Aldus, Venetiis, 1501). And then I became interested
in British balladry a noble subject, for
which I have always had a veneration and love, as
the well-kept and profusely annotated volumes in cases
3, 6, and 9 in the front room are ready to prove to
you at any time you choose to visit my quiet, pleasant
home.