Things near & far Chapter 11: Part 11

Hawthorne peered, into the places of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging into the unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white track that vanishes over the hill. _Chapter VI_ We are, I think, in the period 1890–1900; or, perhaps, to be more accurate, let us say 1889–1899. Between these dates I made a translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century book by an odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God Pan,” “The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,” a short collection of experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,” “Hieroglyphics,” “The White People,” the first part of “A Fragment of Life,” and “The Red Hand.” As I have said, I had inherited a little capital and spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words of some character in “The Three Impostors,” I regarded my various legacies as an endowment of research. Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate “Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think), a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me, and I set about cataloguing books for them. I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought. And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could, and so I went to work. I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,” I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work, that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places. The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,” by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views, plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash, Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal. There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well, indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising” is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together. The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort of books that have illustrations by Fragonard. “And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no objection to your saying so.” It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held “Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they sold. They dealt in rare books. Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was, had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to Brother Ned as I entered. “You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said. “Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson, and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr. Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing these things and a _wrong_ way.” Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also: that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant treatment I received. Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr. Edward,” and began to translate without more ado. And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master. But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master, and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore: poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it, and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about translating, not