The Erecting of a Library

No book-lover, who would “ possess a library the most august and ample that hath ever been erected,” can safely overlook the advice to that end offered in 1627 by Gabriel Naudé, and “ interpreted ” in English in 1661 by that diligent and voluminous worthy, John Evelyn. It is to be hoped that the four hundred fortunate possessors of this beautifully printed and quaintly embellished edition of Evelyn’s work will lend an ear to Naudé’s solicitous plea that all owners of libraries graciously instruct their “ Protobibliothecaries ” to afford free access to their treasures for all who would peruse them. To one who likes the mellow flavor of age in his reading, who has eyes for the wide vistas that open from any honest book, –however little and old, –and who cares for queer, vital personalities, the Erecting of a Library will bring as keen a pleasure as it will to the lover of noble printing and the comely page.

Evelyn’s part in the making of the book was far from inconsiderable. He contrives to get in two long and exhaustive dedicatory epistles, and his rather cavalier handling of his original is distinctly engaging. He is aware that the best way to surmount a difficulty is to skirt it circuitously, and he is quite ready to pervert, or omit, his author’s meaning where his own theological or political prejudices are at stake ; yet his version has a charm that is not easily neglected. Evelyn, like all the early members of the Royal Society, held a clear ideal of the perfect literary manner. Indeed, he was one of a dozen men who were loudest in advocacy of that “ naked and natural ” way of speech, which became the chief merit of the great English prose of the following generation. He writes with the lucidity and briskness which distinguished the best literary work of the Society, but he has a lingering regard for the big, old word with its burden of meaning, which gives his page a color that did not always grace the writing of his fellows.

It is, however, the curiously furnished mind of Naudé that gives the book its greatest appeal. He was a librarian of the most admirable type, in whom a ripe and unaffected love of learning was united to an equally ripe and unaffected zeal for its diffusion. This tract, written while he was still a young man, a score of years before his great achievement, the organization of the Mazarin Library, is full of the wide sympathy and vigorous discernment which later called forth the admiration of Sainte-Beuve. There is much of the catalogue in his work, yet even this could ill be spared. How pleasing is his lament that “ men have come to neglect the works of Albertus Magnus, Niphus, Ægidius, Saxonia, Pomponacius, Achillinus, Hervicus, Durandus, Zimores, Buccaferrus, and a number of the like, out of which all the great books which we now follow are for the most part compiled and transcribed word for word.”

It must not be inferred from this that there was aught of the pedant in Naudé. He had, indeed, a scorn of pedants, and most of his quite charming traits were the reverse of pedantic. He was all for little and usable books, and his dislike of “ monstrous and gigantine books ” is expressed with emphasis and point. Worth noting in connection with this is his account of a dictionary scholar, “ who, having encountered a difficult word at the first offering of the Book of Equivocals, as it was presented to him, he had recourse to one of these Dictionaries, and transcribed out of it above a page of writing upon the margent of said Book, and that in presence of a certain Friend of mine and of his; to whom he could abstain from saying, that those who should see this remark, would easily believe that he had spent above two days in composing it; though he had in truth but the pains onely of transcribing it.”

The openness and candor of Naudé’s mind, despite his remote and recondite learning and professional enthusiasms; his shrewd remarks on the Aristotelian logomachies, which were only just ceasing to constitute the intellectual life of Europe ; his eager wish to put the best books in the hands of fit readers; all these traits show him as a superior man and an ideal librarian. It is to be hoped that the perusal of his labor of love will remind all Protobibliothecaries that literature antedated the card catalogue, and that there were libraries before library schools. F. G.