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He was essentially a bookman, but of that high type the only type that is worthy of a spark of our admiration which explores through books the voyages of the human reason, the shifting impulses of the human heart, the chequered fortunes of great human conceptions.
Gilbert was aware of this, and felt that quite possibly his host was prouder of his whimsical avocation as gourmet than of his sacred profession as a bookman. "Is it possible, sir," he began, in lucid Johnsonian, "that you can concoct so delicious an entree in so few minutes? You are not hoaxing me? There is no secret passage between Gissing Street and the laboratories of the Ritz?"
We forget in the vitality and artistic grouping of the picture, in the nobility of the author's purpose and the lasting moral effect of the story, the occasional stiffness of the style. It is the style of the refined scholar, perhaps also of the bookman and the too conscious critic. Occasionally it lacks spontaneity, directness and naturalness. It might unbend more and forget ceremony.
"But those whistles," the bookman said, "they stop the handworkman too." "Yes. In the days of my father, the days of handwork, they meant only steamboat', coming, going; but now swarm' of men and women, boys, and girl', coming, going, living by machinery the machine-made life."
Even whatever was intellectual in his countenance spoke, as in those portraits, of a mind sharpened rather in active than in studious life; intellectual, not from the pale hues, the worn exhaustion, and the sunken cheek of the bookman and dreamer, but from its collected and stern repose, the calm depth that lay beneath the fire of the eyes, and the strong will that spoke in the close full lips, and the high but not cloudless forehead.
The bookman cannot content himself with a selected library. He wants, as a minimum, a library reasonably complete in all departments. With such a basis acquired, he can afterwards wander into those special byways of book-buying which happen to suit his special predilections.
I say that if daily events and scenes do not constantly recall and utilise the ideas and emotions contained in the books which you have read or are reading; if the memory of these books does not quicken the perception of beauty, wherever you happen to be, does not help you to correlate the particular trifle with the universal, does not smooth out irritation and give dignity to sorrow then you are, consciously or not, unworthy of your high vocation as a bookman.
It has gone, it is to be feared, with those Memnonian mornings we sleep through with so determined snore, those ancient mysteries of night we forget beneath the mimic firmament of the music-hall. Only in the lamplit closet of the bookman, the fanatic of first and fine editions, is it remembered and revered.
During the hours of the day when he is visiting patients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about corn, or composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and eighty minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a man can work or hope to get.
From the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of Notre Dame while they lay safe in that locked room, and Tignonville crouched in his haymow Huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine. On the river bank Spire Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own books.
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