'The Following Pages Are Frankly Bookish'

If you're familiar with Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at all, it’s likely as a collector of folk and fairy tales. I remember as a kid reading some of his twelve “Coloured” Fairy Books. He was also a prolific poet and critic, though that work is largely forgotten. He remains best known not for his original productions but as a collector of other people’s work. Here’s how Lang begins the title essay in his Adventures Among Books (1905): 

“In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people?  I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions.”

 

That’s probably the finest almost-polite description of Coleridge’s gassiness I have ever encountered: “alien disquisitions.” He is the father of today’s critical bombast. Lang is something else – a dedicated reader whose bookish tastes started when he was a boy in Scotland. He continues:

 

“The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice.  In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common.  It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.”

 

Like other longtime readers, if I were ever to write an autobiography (fat chance), its scaffolding would be my reading history. That would reveal more about my nature than a recitation of schools attended and jobs held—mere externals. I enjoy the company of old-fashioned, unapologetic, non-academic bookmen like Lang. His example reminds me of John Gross’ bookish apologia in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1991; rev. ed. 1991):

 

“Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds. . . . Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”