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LIBRARIES

IN THE

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE PERIODS.

J.W. CLARK, M.A., F.S.A. REGISTRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY, AND FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

CAMBRIDGE: MACMILLAN AND BOWES. 1894

LIBRARIES.

A library may be considered from two very different points of view: as a workshop, or as a Museum.

Wherever a fresco peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains: One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, A lion who dies of an ass's kick, The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.

I must begin with a few words about Roman libraries, because their methods influenced the Middle Ages, and are, in fact, the precursors of those in fashion in our own times. The Romans preserved their books in two ways: either in a small room or closet, for reading elsewhere; or in a large apartment, fitted up with greater or less splendour, according to the taste or the means of the possessor, in which the books were doubtless studied as in a modern library. An instructive example of the former class was one of the first discoveries at Herculaneum in 1754. It was a very small room, so small in fact that a man who stood with his arms extended in the centre of it could almost touch the walls on either side, yet 1700 rolls were found in it. These were kept in wooden presses which stood against the walls like a modern bookcase. Besides these a rectangular case occupied the central space, with only a narrow passage to the right and left between it and the wall-cases. These cases were about a man's height, and had been numbered. It may be concluded from this that a catalogue of the books had once existed. In larger libraries the books were kept in similar presses, but they were ornamented with the busts or pictures of illustrious men, under each of which was a suitable inscription, usually in verse.

The library-era, as we may call it, of the Christian world, began with the publication of the Rule of S. Benedict, early in the sixth century. But, just as that Rule emphasized and arranged on the lines of an ordered system observances which had long been practised by isolated congregations or individuals living in solitude--so the part of it which deals with study was evidently no new thing. S. Benedict did not invent literature or libraries; he only lent the sanction of his name to the study of the one and the formation of the other. That libraries existed before his period is proved by allusions to them in the Fathers and other early writers; but, as those allusions are general, and say nothing from which either their size or their arrangement can be inferred, I shall dismiss them in very few sentences. The earliest is said to have been the collection got together at Jerusalem, by Bishop Alexander, at the beginning of the third century. Another was founded about fifty years later at Caesarea by Origen. This is described as not only extensive, but remarkable for the importance of the manuscripts it contained. Others are recorded at Hippo, at Cirta, at Constantinople, and at Rome, where both S. Peter's and the Lateran had their special collections of books. I suspect that all these libraries were in connexion with churches, possibly actually within their walls. At Cirta, for example, it is recorded that during the persecution of 303-304 the officers "went to the church where the Christians used to assemble, and spoiled it of chalices, lamps, etc., but when they came into the library , the presses there were found empty." This language seems to imply that the sacred vessels and the books were in different parts of the same building. The instructions, again, of the dying Augustine, who bequeathed his library to the church at Hippo, lead to the same conclusion. The library of S. Peter's at Rome, though added to the basilica erected by Constantine, long after its primitive foundation, was on the ground-floor in the angle between the nave and the north limb of the transept, a position which may perhaps have been selected in accordance with early usage.

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; hence brethren ought, at certain seasons, to occupy themselves with manual labour, and again, at certain hours, with holy reading....

Between Easter and the calends of October let them apply themselves to reading from the fourth hour till near the sixth hour. After the sixth hour, when they rise from table, let them rest on their beds in complete silence; or, if any one should wish to read to himself, let him do so in such a way as not to disturb any one else....

From the calends of October to the beginning of Lent let them apply themselves to reading until the second hour.... During Lent, let them apply themselves to reading from morning until the end of the third hour ... and, in these days of Lent, let them receive a book apiece from the library, and read it straight through. These books are to be given out at the beginning of Lent. It is important that one or two seniors should be appointed to go round the monastery at the hours when brethren are engaged in reading, in case some ill-conditioned brother should be giving himself up to sloth or idle talk, instead of reading steadily; so that not only is he useless to himself, but incites others to do wrong.

"Behold! how great a matter a little fire kindleth!" These simple words, uttered by one who in power of far-reaching influence has had no equal, gave an impulse to study in the ages it once was the fashion to call dark which grew with the growth of the Order--till wherever a Benedictine house arose--or a monastery of any one of the Orders which were but off-shoots from the Benedictine tree--books were multiplied, and a library came into being, small indeed at first, but increasing year by year, till the wealthier houses had gathered together a collection of books that would do credit to a modern University.

It is very interesting to notice, as Order after Order was founded, a steady development of feeling with regard to books, and an ever increasing care for their safe-keeping. S. Benedict had contented himself with general directions for study; the Cluniacs prescribe the selection of a special officer to take charge of the books, with an annual audit of them, and the assignment of a single volume to each brother; the Carthusians and the Cistercians provide for the loan of books to extraneous persons under certain conditions--a provision which the Benedictines in their turn adopted. Further, by the time that the Cluniac Customs were drawn up in the form in which they have come down to us, it is evident that the number of books exceeded the number of brethren; for both in them, and in the statutes which Lanfranc promulgated for the use of the English Benedictines in 1070, the keeper of the books is directed to bring all the books of the House into Chapter, after which the brethren, one by one, are to bring in the books they had borrowed on the same day in the previous year. Some of the former class of books were probably service-books, but, after this deduction has been made, we may fairly conclude that by the end of the eleventh century Benedictine Houses possessed two sets of books: those which were distributed among the brethren; those which were kept in some shed out our open hands to receive all that was brought to us by the precious, forbidden books, the books which made our pulses beat faster, and aroused from the darkest depths of our souls all that was capable of perfection in us. How many helpless women whose talents bore no hope of fruition have lived their youth solely in books and for books! And as though their hearts were the chords of a quivering instrument, Heyse played his tender tale of the far horizon, and sang to them of liberty, of spiritual greatness, and of the glory of woman, beside which the doctrine of self-renunciation which was preached to us at home and at school appeared ugly and dull in the extreme.

Then came Ibsen, the first after Heyse whose woman-problems were discussed by the press and in the family between the girls and older women. He succeeded Heyse in the souls of the younger generation, and put his stamp upon the women among them just as Heyse had done to his pupils in former times. But the daughters of Ibsen were different from the daughters of Heyse. They were poor people's children and had to earn their own living; they lived in mean surroundings without any prospect of improving them, and love was a luxury which they had not time to think about. They had grown up in poverty and were poorly dressed; they had over-exerted themselves in the "struggle for life" which sometimes attained the dimensions of an entire philosophy of life; yet they too, one and all, claimed a right which they would not relinquish; it was the same which had been made by Heyse's women, it was the right to cultivate the ego.

Paul Heyse had pictured woman in her best moments, and under the most favourable circumstances of her development, the high days and holidays of life. But Ibsen drew our wretched, bitter, barren existence such as it was every day of our lives, he described our mothers, brothers, husbands, guardians and teachers as they only too often were, when they deprived us of light and air and expected us to be thankful for the little that was left, when they broke our wings and asked us in surprise why it was that we could not fly. He threw a fierce, penetrating light into the back parlours of the middle classes, revealing with a disgusting plainness the dingy make-believe of respectable family life. Horror and disgust, combined with a nervous longing to escape, to find oneself, to live one's own life in this short existence where so much had already been lost,--such were the feelings which Ibsen aroused with inconceivable intensity. I cannot better describe the influence which these two writers exerted over some of the most gifted women of their time than by quoting what one of them said to me on the subject. She was a woman who afterwards filled an important position in life besides attaining to personal happiness, and all through her own courage and her own unaided efforts. "I was doomed to be discontented," she said. "I was born in one of the most out-of-the-way places on the frontier, amid social conditions worthy of Little Peddlington. At the age of fourteen or fifteen I read Heyse. He did not arouse me to rebellion, he only woke me quite imperceptibly to the knowledge of myself. He gave me a spirit of proud reserve, he taught me to respect my physical and spiritual nature as a woman, and to watch over my integrity for its own sake. He gave me a glimpse into the possibilities of great happiness or of no happiness at all, and he made me understand that one could not choose. He gave me a certain dreamy peace, which refreshed and soothed me. Ten years later Ibsen's books found their way into our nest. I read him and was beside myself. I lay on the floor and writhed with feelings which could not find expression either in thoughts or words. The people and the social conditions in his dramas were just my circle, my social conditions, my world. Never before had I seen so clearly what it was that bound me down and thwarted me. I saw that I must get away, that I should have no peace if I remained. Go I must, and at once! I had no connections anywhere, and I was ignorant of the world, but I went with a desperate faith in the one thing that I possessed--my scrap of talent. If it had not been for Ibsen I should never have gone. I lived for years alone in a strange country among strangers, among people who were indifferent to me,--but I belonged to myself. I was free from the stupid tempers and prejudices of others. I read and thought about what I liked. I belonged to myself! I supported myself entirely, and felt my personality, both intellectual and spiritual, struggling towards freedom. I owed nothing to my surroundings or personal intercourse. Heyse and Ibsen were my awakeners and the guides of my life."

The curious thing in this life was that the influence of these two great antipodeans was held in the balance, and the one appeared as continuing the work begun by the other.

One would have thought that it was impossible, and that the influence of the one would not have allowed itself to be ingrafted on the work of the other. Imagine Heyse's refined sensualism beside Ibsen's negation of the senses! Between the disciples of the one, a comprehensive sympathy; between the others--no mercy. That there is no mercy to be found amongst the people of our day--that each one is imprisoned in the iron harness of his own interests--that was just the terrible news that Ibsen imparted to us in his dramas, when he urged us to help ourselves because there was no other help to be had.

Yet the figures of Ibsen's principal women are to be found in Heyse, for before Ibsen Heyse had already met with and understood the apparitions with which Ibsen has revolutionised us; Heyse discovered the same highly developed type in a few solitary specimens which have only been discovered by Ibsen many years later.

Bj?rnson's Svava is also forestalled by Heyse in the person of a young girl of noble family who sends away her strong, handsome young lover as soon as she discovers that he has lived with another woman.

Thus we find that the heroines of the Scandinavian problem-novel are no northern discoveries, but are developments of this century who had their origin in real life, where Heyse, who understood women, found them, and made them known to the public in his writings long before the problem-novel was invented.

In the meantime external conditions have undergone a considerable change.

Heyse's woman was an aristocrat who was protected on all sides, but Ibsen's woman lived alone in the midst of that universal "struggle for life," which is the peculiar feature of our time, and Bj?rnson's reformer was a woman of the people, who elbowed her way alone through the crowd, and preached morals to men.

From Russia, England and Sweden, the new type of woman gladly joined in the cry.

What a difference between the noble, spiritual-minded woman of Heyse's time and the women of Strindberg's creation! How changed was the image of the woman in the author's soul! The entire character of the age had undergone a great change in the last twenty or thirty years. Women had entered into the war of competition with men, and had really won some success in the battle. Numbers of fathers and brothers were released from the burden of supporting their unmarried women-folk; they were even released from the necessity of marrying them. Indeed, nowadays, many daughters and sisters work for their parents and younger brothers. The world has grown more morose, and the whole of existence has assumed the appearance of an immense grey day of toil. Year after year competition grows harder, and every department of labour is overcrowded with envious, nervous, panting people, who are pitted one against the other. Merchant against merchant, author against author, man against woman,--all business people, all race-runners for their own gain, all struggling, restless, joyless ... all in a rudimentary or advanced stage of degeneration. And woman keeps pace bravely. She keeps pace because she knows that this is the only possible means by which she can attain to the full possession of herself, to perfect independence, to the right to dispose of her own person; she keeps pace because she must either run or be downtrodden; she runs, because every one else runs, and she takes the matter seriously, as is invariably the case with beginners. But she expects a great deal too much. She whose bodily frame is so dependent on leading a natural and healthy life, whose brain gets so easily tired, sits on school benches and studies for junior and senior examinations, and goes in for higher educational courses, and continues with these until she has reached or passed her twentieth year. She then sits on in badly-ventilated rooms as an art-worker, a book-keeper, or a telegraph clerk, and if she is exceptionally clever and industrious and has the necessary means, she studies, and when she has finished, she is six-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty, or more. After that the real work of life begins.

She is free!

True--but she is also a woman; or has she ceased to be one?

Many women have instinctively avoided this question, in the same way as they would avoid the subject of death, and they are apt to give way to an ugly exhibition of temper towards the man, but more especially towards the woman, who ventures to allude to it; but for all that, they cannot dispose of the fact any more than they can dispose of death. When they look at themselves in their glasses, they see that their eyes are tired, and their skin faded and pale from anaemia ... they see that they are sickly and overworked; the sweetest instincts of womanhood are silenced within them, or are shown only by fits and starts. Work, always work; they have few pleasures, and even those few are often too much for them. Of what use is their liberty?

They look at themselves in another glass, and this time it is the woman's own mirror,--the works of her favourite authors. And what do they see there? It is no longer Keller and Heyse, nor even Ibsen. It is no longer those who first opened the eyes of woman, who handed us our youth as though it were a budding rose, and who let the zephyrs of spring expand our sails, while they threw open to us the door of life, and led us by the hand towards the man who loves us for our own sakes, and whom we love with the whole strength of our being. No, these old gentlemen are quite out of date nowadays, and the woman sees herself in the writings of the new authors.

There she discovers that she is good for nothing,--a vampire, an ugly, sickly, troublesome creature, only capable of exciting a passing passion, that she is a burden which a man drags after him, a luxury which he can scarcely afford, an evil which is only borne from a natural compulsion, a thing that always remains strange to us, and with which we cannot have any real sympathy, to which we are only bound by a kind of instinct, a parasite that is shaken off as we grow older, and which we attack with our fists when we meet it in the labour-market. That, according to Strindberg, is the relationship between man and woman.

Or else a Russian barbarian--who was never even heard of in Germany until his best talent was spent--comes and denounces woman as impure, advocates childlessness, and preaches subjection and the suppression of the personality, preaches a servile self-renunciation, and will have nothing but the brotherly and sisterly affection of sexless men and women. From him woman learns to regard herself as a harmful superfluity who cannot become anything worthy of respect, until she ceases to be a woman.

She has no longer either the time or the strength to be a woman. Competition in the labour-market monopolizes all her time and all her strength, she begins of her own accord to despise her womanhood, and to look upon it as a burden, while she persuades herself that a state of childless liberty is everything, and that work is the only satisfaction. This is because she has become an incongruous being, who no longer believes in herself as woman!

Nevertheless Strindberg was a great writer; he let woman gaze down into the abysses of her own nature, whose depths she had never guessed, and because he was afraid of her, he gave her an idea of her own power, such as was never dreamed of before.

Tolstoy too, in his younger days, has described the natural instinct of women as few have succeeded in doing, and he, too, was one of those who revealed woman to herself. But there was no good in either of these writers now that the confidence which had existed between man and woman had become a thing of the past. The source of their most intimate relationship was poisoned, the union between man and woman was changed into an ugly, brutal act, from which both needed to be purified, and above the yawning gulf that stretched between the sexes sat two fierce, suspicious-looking beasts of prey, who lay in wait for one another.

This was the latest revelation which woman received from her authors.

The well of her existence--the rich stream of her life--was beginning to be drained, man no longer wanted it, he asked for nothing better than to be quite free of her. She had become a torment to him.

There is yet another generation which consists of quite young girls, and the latest school of so-called "authors," viz., our young naturalists.

They are there, no doubt. But these young people are the last to have any idea as to how they are to treat women!

Naturalism, as through a slight misunderstanding it is generally called, is the point of view taken by the Philistine in literature. In Germany it is through naturalism especially that the bourgeois spirit tries to become literary. These "authors" seem to say: "We cannot afford to waste anything, we have no superfluities, and we must do our best to succeed. Neither can we afford to give, we would sooner accept from others. For Heaven's sake leave us in peace with your problems, and with the woman-problem in particular. As a matter of fact there is no such thing as a woman-problem, there are washer-women, and there are Christian mothers, and of course there are family quarrels and hereditary peculiarities, just as there are free unions which end badly. Once we saw a girl student who fell in love--but in quite a sisterly fashion--with a book, and therefore we have the right to maintain that we understand women. We also knew a socialist who married a baron after having presided for many years over a mantle warehouse. And one of our young girls actually went off on the spot with the very first young man whose acquaintance she made; but it did very well on the stage. We describe life exactly as we understand it, and everything that we do not understand is false and fantastical. Women are a useful institution as wives and readers, but in other ways they are as useless and insignificant as ourselves."

Authors are the most conspicuous feature of any given period. When they are not great precursors, they are like the little house-masters of a school--a rather more presentable example of the whole class whom they affect to despise.

The man of this weary, utilitarian age is half a decadent and half a barbarian. What does he want with the superior woman? Nothing, of course. She is merely an annoyance to him, a burden. If he is enterprising, he marries a well-filled purse; if he has an affectionate disposition, he marries a wife of his own class. The more cultured, more highly developed women are thrust on one side, nay more, they are starved. They have a gnawing at the heart, a rankling distrust of happiness, of love, and of men in particular. They are driven to seek for consolation in their mutual affection for one another, and they refuse to have anything more to do with men.

There is no need to describe woman such as she became during the last half of the present century--how she developed in the struggle to compete with man, and how she was influenced from the point of view of personal independence--how she became free and became her own master, and won for herself a place in the history of her time--how she escaped from her subjection to man, yet could not forego him altogether--that is a subject on which there are a mass of confessions written by some of the most celebrated women of our time, by means of which many women are led to a better comprehension of themselves, and many men are able to find the solution to the riddle of woman which has been to them the cause of much suffering.

A vase filled with anemones, violets, ranunculuses and other spring flowers is standing on the table in front of me as I write; I took the trouble to fetch them out of the wood so that I might have something alive and sweet-smelling near while I think of Keller. Otherwise it would have been impossible to write about him, for his books are the essence of life and gladness.

When he, in the person of "Green Henry," forsook the narrow surroundings of his home life and went out into the wide world, he believed that everything good, strong, free and new was to be found abroad.

After a long journey, undertaken for the sake of his education, "Green Henry" returned to his home wiser than when he left it. He became a Swiss in the superlative case--the Swissest of the Swiss. But although he had occasion to see all the frailties and follies of Europe disporting themselves in his beloved native land, he did not include foreign countries in the blame. He possessed the same sensible, confident self-assertion that characterises his honest fellow-countrymen who, while they are ever ready to assist strangers in a polite and blameless manner to rid themselves of their superfluous coin, always remain in their behaviour towards them as unaffectedly, great-grandfatherly, considerate and true-hearted as before.

In that Keller is quite old-fashioned. All other writers, at home and abroad, are anxious to change their skin, and complain bitterly because they cannot. Keller stretched himself in his with an expression of well-being that was positively annoying, and declared that it was a very good skin. He was still more old-fashioned in that he never sought for a problem, and never made anything of one, although he produced them by the bushel and left the precious gems lying scattered throughout his novels. Wherever he went, the strangest, most profound things seemed to cling to him like burs from roadside ditches. But the only use he made of them, when he did not immediately throw them away, was to play a little game of football with them. Three such problems, as he squandered by the dozen, would be sufficient excuse nowadays to call forth a new German literature with a new set of publishers, but he was so essentially old-fashioned in those matters that he was quite unconscious of the scope of his material, and was certainly not what we should call an "earnest" writer. He was old-fashioned in other ways also--for instance, in his best moments he possessed an individual language of his own which was quite unmistakable, and which seemed to have fallen from the clouds, no one knew how. Our modern authors, on the contrary, are always working in the sweat of their brows in the hope of obtaining an original style, and that without the smallest chance of success.

Keller was like a ploughed field where the rooks hop about in search of nourishment, and he has enough left still to fatten many rooks.

Of all German writers, Keller is the one whom we are least able to understand with our unaided intellect. For in order to understand him, we must feel him, and he is far too reserved to admit of every one's feeling him. Special qualifications are needful, and our modern society takes good care that these special qualifications should not exist for the great mass of sensitive readers.

Both as a man and as an author, Keller is distinctly a lover of fresh air, and for that reason he keeps all genuine townsmen at a suitable distance. It is true that they snuffle round him and become intoxicated with the strong scent of the woods and meadows, but it is just this exaggerated enthusiasm which forms as it were a Chinese wall between him and them. Keller needs to be passively enjoyed, in a waking sleep, like the peasant following his plough, or a person wandering in the mid-day sunshine, or a child resting in the arms of its mother. Keller as an author is the personification of the quiet equanimity of natural health.

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