The British Museum Myth

LITERATURE has its superstitions no less than religion. It has its pilgrimages of irrational devotion, from which return, not palmers with visions to relate of Jerusalem, or the stations of Rome, or the shrine of St. James of Compostella, but authors with prefaces to show that their books, having been written in some chosen haunt of books and learning, must necessarily be admirable. It is often taken as sufficient proof of learning in a book if it have this prefatory mark of respectability. To have read in the British Museum or in the National Library of France adds a halo to a head that might otherwise be indistinguishable from the crowd. Of course nobody would think of denying the pleasure and utility of a visit to the British Museum. To Americans the pilgrimage thither has long seemed indubitable proof of merit in an author. Freeman observed this curious fact, and commented upon it with his habitual courtesy. It certainly did not enhance his amiability to be asked, as he almost invariably was by everybody whom he met when he traveled in the United States, if he had not found the British Museum of great use to him in his historical investigations. He replied, orally and in print, that the British Museum was no doubt an excellent library for many purposes, but that it was far from being a treasurehouse of material for the study of those centuries of English politics in which he was most deeply interested.

For all the effect which his words had on the American mind, he might just as well have preserved his dignity and his silence. In fact, the suspicion is natural that whatever doubts there are in this country as to Freeman’s infallibility in the spelling of Anglo-Saxon proper names, and in the other minutiae of his memorable writings, Sprang up in that dreadful moment when it was discovered that he was an incorrigible heretic, who no more prized a pilgrimage to the shrine of imperial learning than ordinary English people above the social level of ’Arry and “Arriet esteem the privilege of visiting the Tower of London. It gave the superstitious American a chill of misgiving to find a man who was an authority in his field of investigation, and yet was fanciful enough to believe that his own library was better adapted to a specific task than the ocean of script and print in the national collection of Great Britain. American pilgrims continued still their journey to the great library, as to the fount of universal learning, with the same orthodox assurance as of old. Not Jacques de Vitry, in his most enthusiastic parables about the merit of going on pilgrimage, could be more convinced that angels consoled the peregrine religious, and that the beatified King David harped for them in their slumbers, than the modern American is of consulting with success the British oracle on any subject that may occur to him.

The inhabitant of London may properly treat the British Museum in a commonplace way ; it is in a sense his municipal library. But for an American to do this is juvenile ; to do it with display, as if getting a citation from a book in the British Museum rather than from the same book elsewhere were an act worthy of a footnote or a preface, is literary superstition as benighted as heathenism. It would be well at least to glance at catalogues before going on this now almost universal American pilgrimage. To take a vacation in London, and then to give it an air of profound and laborious mystery by hints of recondite studies, is a practice which must be corrected. Reading in the British Museum for the sake of a breathless and open-mouthed American public, and finding nothing that could not have been drawn from the Lenox, or the Astor, or the Athenæum, or Harvard, or Yale, or Cornell, or that could not have been got for what the voyage cost. — this may be forgiven ; but positively all flourishes, oral or printed, must hereafter be omitted. To illustrate the difference between the wise and the foolish in this matter: The Pennsylvania professor who recently collated the manuscripts of an ancient English poet, and gave American men of letters the results, put the British Museum to its legitimate use ; on the contrary, the callow Representative elect who announced a year or so ago, in a newspaper interview, that he should read in the British Museum preparatory to taking his seat in Congress, merely made — to use post-classic Hellenistic slang — a theatre of himself, and that gratuitously.