#I can’t work out where ‘the gods of the Christian are leather and porcelain and pewter’ is from

[why-bless-your-heart]

Lunacy and Letters (1901)

A considerable amount of testimony exists to indicate the rather astonishing fact that the British Museum Library, in addition to its multifarious services, discharges a great many of the functions of a private madhouse. Men and women in that vast palace of knowledge go quietly to and fro, ransack the wisdom of the ages and are waited on by the servants of the State, who in a less humane age would have been screaming in Bedlam upon a heap of straw. It is said that it is no uncommon thing for a family which is responsible for a harmless lunatic to send him to the British Museum Library that he may play with dynasties and philosophies as a sick child plays with soldiers. Whether or no this be true to the full extent, it is assuredly true that this colossal temple of hobbies has all the air of containing many tragedies, for, indeed, a hobby often means a tragedy.

There go the loves that wither

The old loves on wearier wings,

And all dead things draw thither

And all disastrous things.

In that library may be seen figures so weird and dehumanised that they might be born and die in the Library without seeing the light of the sun. They seem like a fabulous and subterranean people, the gnomes of the mine of learning. But it would be hasty and irrational to say that all this amounts to madness. The love of a bookworm for musty old folios may easily be more sane than the love of many poets for the sunshine and the sea. The inexplicable attachment of some old professor for a tattered old hat may be a far less vitally diseased sentiment than some light-minded society lady’s craving for a gown from Worth’s. It is too often forgotten that conventionalities may be morbid as well as unconventionalities. Of course there is no absolute definition of madness except the definition which we should each of us endorse that madness is the eccentric behaviour of somebody else. It is, indeed, an absurd exaggeration to say that we are all mad, but it is true that we are none of us perfectly sane, just as it is true that we are none of us perfectly healthy. If there were to appear in the world a perfectly sane man he would certainly be locked up. The terrible simplicity with which he would walk over our minor morbidities, our sulky vanities and malicious self-righteousness; the elephantine innocence with which he would ignore our fictions of civilization—these would make him a thing more desolating and inscrutable than a thunderbolt or a beast of prey. It may be that the great prophets who appeared to mankind as mad were in reality raving with an impotent sanity.

In a large number of cases, doubtless, these literary eccentrics, in pursuing their hobbies, are pursuing the sanest of all human impulses, the impulse that bids us put our trust in industry and a defined aim. There is probably many an old collector whose friends and relations say that he is mad on Elzevirs, when as a matter of fact it is the Elzevirs that keep him sane. Without them he would drift into soul- destroying idleness and hypochondria; but the drowsy regularity of his notes and calculations teaches something of the same lesson as the swing of the smith’s hammer or the plodding of the ploughman’s horses, the lesson of the ancient commonsense of things. But when full allowance has been made for that wholesome cheerfulness which often peculiarly attaches to laborious and useless employments, there does remain a problem of the sanity of scholarship. Books, like all other things which are the friends of man, are capable of becoming his enemies, are capable of rising in revolt, and slaying their creator. The spectacle of a man raving in brain-fever through the mysteries of a trumpery pamphlet of rag paper that he can carry in his pocket has the same ironic majesty as the sight of a man struck down by a railway engine. Man is supremely complimented even in death; in a sense he dies by his own hand. This diabolic quality in books does exist; madness lies in wait in quiet libraries, but the nature and essence of that madness can only be approximately defined.

One general description of madness, it seems to us, might be found in the statement that madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents. The most obvious example is the religious maniac, in whom the worship of Christianity involves the negation of all those ideas of integrity and mercy for which Christianity stands. But there are many other examples. Money, for example, is a symbol; it symbolises wine and horses and beautiful vesture and high houses, the great cities of the world and the quiet tent by the river. The miser is a madman, because he prefers money to all these things; because he prefers the symbol to the reality. But books are also a symbol; they symbolise man’s impression of existence, and it may at least be maintained that the man who has come to prefer books to life is a maniac after the same fashion as the miser. A book is assuredly a sacred object. In a book certainly the largest jewels are shut in the smallest casket. But that does not alter the fact that superstition begins when the casket is valued more than the jewels. This is the great sin of idolatry, against which religion has so constantly warned us.

In the morning of the world the idols were rude figures in the shapes of man and beast, but in the civilized centuries they still remain in shapes even lower than those of beast or man, in the shape of books and blue china and quart pots. It is written that the gods of the Christian are leather and porcelain and pewter. The essential of idolatry is the same. Idolatry exists wherever the thing which originally gave us happiness becomes at last more important than happiness itself. Drunkenness, for example, may be fairly described as an engrossing hobby. And drunkenness is, when really comprehended in its inward and psychological reality, a typical example of idolatry. Essential intemperance begins at the point where the one incidental form of pleasure, which comes from a certain article of consumption, becomes more important than all the vast universe of natural pleasures, which it finally destroys. Omar Khayyam, who is for some inexplicable reason often regarded as a jovial and encouraging poet, sums up this final and horrible effect of drink in one stanza of incomparable wit and power:

And much as wine has played the infidel,

And robb’d me of my robe of honour—Well,

I wonder often what the vintners buy

One half so precious as the stuff they sell.

The Persian was a poet of immense fancy and fertility, but the full force of his imagination could not summon from this multifarious universe anything to rival the attractions of a particular red substance that had undergone a chemical change. This is idolatry: the preference for the incidental good over the eternal good which it symbolises. It is the employment of one example of the everlasting goodness to confound the validity of a thousand other examples. It is the elementary mathematical and moral heresy that the part is greater than the whole. Now in this sense bibliomania is capable of becoming a kind of drunkenness. There is a class of men who do actually prefer books to everything with which books are concerned, to lovely places, to heroic actions, to experiment, to adventure, to religion. They read of godlike statues, and are not ashamed of their own frowsy and lazy ugliness; they study the records of open and magnanimous deeds, and are not ashamed of their own secretive and self-indulged lives. They have become citizens of an unreal world, and, like the Indian in his Paradise, pursue with shadowy hounds a shadowy deer. And that way lies madness.

In the limbo of the misers and the drunkards, which is the limbo of idolators, many great scholars may be found. Here, as in almost all ethical problems, the difficulty arises far less from the presence of some vicious tendency than from the absence of some essential virtues. The possibilities of mental derangement which exist in literature are due not so much to a love of books as to an indifference to life and sentiment and everything that books record. In an ideal state, gentlemen who were immersed in abstruse calculations and discoveries would be forced by Act of Parliament to talk for forty-five minutes to an ostler or a landlady, and to ride across Hampstead Heath on a donkey. They would be examined by the State, but not in Greek or old armour, which are their pleasures, and in which they may be trusted as safely as children at cross-touch. They would be examined in Cockney dialect, or in the colours of various omnibuses. They would be purged of all the tendencies which have sometimes brought lunacy out of learning; they would be taught to become men of the world, which is a step towards becoming men of the Universe.