Bookish men

Monday, December 17th., Chiltern Court, London.

There are bookish men whose morbid appetite demands to be titillated by an everlasting diet of new books, and I regard them as cases for brain specialists. Their malady is akin to alcoholism, which is I think the worst malady of the mind known to medical science. The morbid appetite for new books will drive the sufferer to strange caprices. One of my interlocutors told me that, despairing, he read some Kipling. With an air of astonishment he confessed that he found Kipling very good! Indeed he seemed to think that he had discovered Kipling. He had to be told that Kipling is still, after more than thirty years, the most popular serious English author alive. I am informed that the rumour of Kipling's readableness has even reached the hunting and cocktail classes.

On the other hand I am well acquainted with bookish men who day in and day out protest that too many new books are published. They gloomily assert that the majority of new books are worthless and can do no good to anyone; that the sytem is monstrous by which publishers avowedly expect to recoup themselves by their profits from one successful book the losses on half a dozen failures. Lastly, they weep, in a manner of speaking, because this is a decadent age and things are not what they were.

I have a primitive desire to assassinate these men. But I refrain, for the reason that they are misguided rather than vicious. They sin in ignorance. They are merely persons who do not know what they are talking about. This is no more a decadent age in the literary sense than any other age. On the contrary, in no previous age have so large a proportion of the population shown such discrimination among books, such intelligent interest in good books, as obtains today. Further, the success of a book is not necessarily a criterion of its worth. Even today bad books occasionally achieve large sales. 

I am myself a bookish man. The sort of bookish man who takes a broad view, is tolerant of the short-sightedness and prejudice of others, and has an infallible sense of what constitutes a 'good' book. I am also rather modest. In fact only the jury of time is able to give a verdict on the worth of a book, and this is because we who review new books are, in spite of our best efforts, unable to achieve objectivity. Kipling may fall out of favour in time; in fact I believe that he will because a reaction will set in as the Empire declines, which it inevitably will. I myself may be read only by a discerning few in years to come.