THE KEY OF THE BOOK CASE.

Where did the Italians get these homely lines? they who have no “casa piccolina,” and whose home is an opera box. Now I have just such a casa as this domestic maxim implies; and I love it beyond measure. Though often glad to leave it behind me, I always return to it with satisfaction. I never knew any, but the foolish and the worthless of my own sex, who did not feel a real pleasure in the performance of domestic duties; and though one may be sometimes inclined to leave behind, “tous ses maris et tous ses enfans,” as Madame de Coulanges has it, still a true woman always comes back with pride and delight to the fuss, and rummage, and self-importance of domestic legislation. The great must know less of this, than those whose fortunes are at odds with their tastes and position; and the blue stockings, of all ranks, affect to have souls above saucepans. But we of the trade, who have taken our places as candidates for the emoluments and honours of authorship, are not forced upon such affectation.

“One of the advantages of being a wit,” says Swift, “is the license it gives to play the fool;” and one of the privileges of a female writer who has no longer a name to make, is, that she may make her own—pudding, if she likes it. For myself, I am a heaven-born cook: but of this, more hereafter. Still, what I miss most, when I leave my own house, is not my batterie de cuisine, but my library. Not that it is as large as the Alexandrian, nor as curious as the Vatican; but that it is just that sort of library in which, as Madame de Sévigné says, “you cannot lay your hand on a volume without a desire to read it through.”

Madonna mia! how well I know the smell of a country-house library! Being, by divine indignation, an author, people think I do nothing but read and write books, “eat paper, and drink ink,” as Sir Nathaniel says; and are pleased to consider that which is but the episode, as the history of my life. It frequently happens that, before I have made acquaintance with half the rose trees, smelled the geraniums, or swallowed a draught of the delicious air I left town expressly to breathe, I am presented with the key of the book-case—[I would as soon lock up my bells as my books, since the great merit of both is to be always at hand]—So I go twisting and turning the said key into its rusty lock; and, ouf! the fust and the must, when the book-case is opened! Then, what a search for something one can read through in less than a twelvemonth. Out of every hundred volumes, there are scarcely more than six or seven works; for country-house libraries are made up of folios, quartos, or large octavos, pour le moins; except that here and there is a sort of thick, short, squat volume, that belongs to no class of form; and every work runs from ten to fifteen volumes. The reason is, that country-house libraries are generally heir-looms, originally collected as a mark of gentility by the wisdom of the country-house ancestors. They consist of what are called standard books—books that would let the world stand still to the end of time!—composed and collected when knowledge, instead of being given, as now, in quintessential drops, was weighed out by the stone, or measured by the yard. Concentration, in all things—the throwing off the rubbish, and getting at the element—is the true proof of excellence; and it is now, in literature, as in medicine; instead of being choked with a pint of bark mud, (all port wine as it may be,) we swallow a few pellucid drops of quinine, without wry faces or deep inspirations! It formerly took a life to write a book, and half a one to read it. Oh, the “Rollin’s Histories,” and “Voyages round the World,” and the “Clelias and Cassandras,” and the poems in fifty-nine cantos—the folio “Thoughts upon Nothing,” and the seven-volume ponderosity of “Sir Charles Grandison!”

Denon—whose own work on Egypt, hit off, as it is, with his own peculiar finesse and spirit, (touche fine et spirituelle,)—is a fair illustration of the genuine style of modern writing—Denon was the most impatient person under the infliction of voluminous works (myself excepted) that I ever knew. It was a constant theme of abuse and laughter between us. One night I was leaning on his arm, at a soirée, at the Prince de Beauveau’s, when the excellent and estimable Monsieur S——, in passing close by us, trod on his foot: he turned to me, with an expression of pain, and said, “Ah! ma chère petite, les dix-huit volumes m’ont tombé sur le pied!”⁠[58] And yet, after all, I, too, have appeared pranked out in two quarto volumes, heavier than myself, and quite as tall: but of this presumptuous magnitude, I stood as guiltless as of the Talmud. Three small, compact, lady-like octavos were ever the utmost boundary of my authorical ambition. For all beyond this, my publishers were more in fault than I.

One exception I must make: I originally wrote my “Novice of St. Dominick” in ten goodly, stout volumes, which, with much humility, as I thought, I cut down to seven. With these seven—by far the heaviest part of my luggage—I arrived in London, and presented myself to Sir Richard Phillips, who advised me, to take back my manuscript, like a good girl, and reduce it to five. “Insatiate monster, would not one suffice!” But down went the volumes; and when I took the remaining sibyl leaves to Sir Richard, he again begged they might be reduced to four. This was too much; though I verily believe, at this moment, that the publisher’s good-natured consideration of my amour propre alone prevented him from stinting my exuberance to two volumes, which, perhaps, he ought to have done. The work, however, succeeded, in spite of its bulk, and still maintains a preference over my lighter and better productions, in the estimation at least of my cotemporaries, the ladies of a certain age, who first read its multitudinous pages, when they were as young as the author who wrote them; and who still mistake their own first, warm impressions for the merits of a work, which, truth to tell, had not too many to boast of.

Extreme youth, like extreme age, is naturally verbose. If the aged speak from the fulness of memory, the young are loquacious from the novelty and strength of their sensations. Youth, likewise, suspects not its own tritisms and plagiarisms; nor thinks it is telling what every body knows, and nobody cares for. The secret, the grand secret, that “l’art d’ennuyer est l’art de tout dire”⁠[59]⁠—that to exhaust a subject is not to illustrate it—is unknown to the young, who know so little, and who feel so much.

When I wrote “The Novice,” two volumes or ten were alike to me. But I must keep the history of my authorship for another time. It would make a cat laugh: alas! it has often made me cry!