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The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft-Part4_George Gissing(1857-1903)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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illustration of the great truth that virtue is made easy by

circumstance. But I confess that, so long as a volume hold



together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.

I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy



as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For

one thing, I know every book of mine by its SCENT, and I have but to



put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition,



which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty

years--never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores



to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it

as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare--it



has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these

volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read



them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to

take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the



leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and

what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in



hand. For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this

edition. My eyes being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which



I bought in days when such a purchase was something more than an

extravagance; wherefore I regard the book with that peculiar



affection which results from sacrifice.

Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word. Dozens of my books



were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what

are called the necessaries of life. Many a time I have stood before



a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual

desire and bodily need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach



clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long

coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I COULD not let



it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine. My Heyne's Tibullus was

grasped at such a moment. It lay on the stall of the old book-shop



in Goodge Street--a stall where now and then one found an excellent

thing among quantities of rubbish. Sixpence was the price--



sixpence! At that time I used to eat my midday meal (of course my

dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old



coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found. Sixpence

was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a



plate of meat and vegetables. But I did not dare to hope that the

Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell



due to me. I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my

pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me. The



book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of

bread and butter I gloated over the pages.



In this Tibullus I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct.

4, 1792." Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred



years ago? There was no other inscription. I like to imagine some

poor scholar, poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with



drops of his blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did.

How much THAT was I could not easily say. Gentle-hearted Tibullus!-



-of whom there remains to us a poet's portrait more delightful, I

think, than anything of the kind in Roman literature.



An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,

Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?



So with many another book on the thronged shelves. To take them

down is to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph. In those



days money represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think

about, but the acquisition of books. There were books of which I



had passionate need, books more necessary to me than bodily

nourishment. I could see them, of course, at the British Museum,



but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them,




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