The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (top non fiction books of all time txt) 📖

it weren’t for Walt Whitman. Talk about Mr. Britling—Walt was the man who ‘saw it through.’

“The glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history… . Aye, a deadly path indeed. The German military men weren’t idlers, but they were gluttons and fools to the nth power. Look at their deadly path! And look at other deadly paths, too. Look at our slums, jails, insane asylums… .

“I used to wonder what I could do to justify my comfortable existence here during such a time of horror. What right had I to shirk in a quiet bookshop when so many men were suffering and dying through no fault of their own? I tried to get into an ambulance unit, but I’ve had no medical training and they said they didn’t want men of my age unless they were experienced doctors.”

“I know how you felt,” said Titania, with a surprising look of comprehension. “Don’t you suppose that a great many girls, who couldn’t do anything real to help, got tired of wearing neat little uniforms with Sam Browne belts?”

“Well,” said Roger, “it was a bad time. The war contradicted and denied everything I had ever lived for. Oh, I can’t tell you how I felt about it. I can’t even express it to myself. Sometimes I used to feel as I think that truly noble simpleton Henry Ford may have felt when he organized his peace voyage— that I would do anything, however stupid, to stop it all. In a world where everyone was so wise and cynical and cruel, it was admirable to find a man so utterly simple and hopeful as Henry. A boob, they called him. Well, I say bravo for boobs! I daresay most of the apostles were boobs—or maybe they called them bolsheviks.”

Titania had only the vaguest notion about bolsheviks, but she had seen a good many newspaper cartoons.

“I guess Judas was a bolshevik,” she said innocently.

“Yes, and probably George the Third called Ben Franklin a bolshevik,” retorted Roger. “The trouble is, truth and falsehood don’t come laid out in black and white—Truth and Huntruth, as the wartime joke had it. Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth,” he cried bitterly. “Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments. I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers. I saw the world clawing itself to shreds in blind rage. I saw hardly any one brave enough to face the brutalizing absurdity as it really was, and describe it. I saw the glutton, the idler, and the fool applauding, while brave and simple men walked in the horrors of hell. The stay-at-home poets turned it to pretty lyrics of glory and sacrifice. Perhaps half a dozen of them have told the truth. Have you read Sassoon? Or Latzko’s Men in War, which was so damned true that the government suppressed it? Humph! Putting Truth on rations!”

He knocked out his pipe against his heel, and his blue eyes shone with a kind of desperate earnestness.

“But I tell you, the world is going to have the truth about War. We’re going to put an end to this madness. It’s not going to be easy. Just now, in the intoxication of the German collapse, we’re all rejoicing in our new happiness. I tell you, the real Peace will be a long time coming. When you tear up all the fibres of civilization it’s a slow job to knit things together again. You see those children going down the street to school? Peace lies in their hands. When they are taught in school that war is the most loathsome scourge humanity is subject to, that it smirches and fouls every lovely occupation of the mortal spirit, then there may be some hope for the future. But I’d like to bet they are having it drilled into them that war is a glorious and noble sacrifice.

“The people who write poems about the divine frenzy of going over the top are usually those who dipped their pens a long, long way from the slimy duckboards of the trenches. It’s funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.”

There was a pause, while Roger watched some belated urchins hurrying toward school.

“I think any man would be a traitor to humanity who didn’t pledge every effort of his waking life to an attempt to make war impossible in future.”

“Surely no one would deny that,” said Titania. “But I do think the war was very glorious as well as very terrible. I’ve known lots of men who went over, knowing well what they were to face, and yet went gladly and humbly in the thought they were going for a true cause.”

“A cause which is so true shouldn’t need the sacrifice of millions of fine lives,” said Roger gravely. “Don’t imagine I don’t see the dreadful nobility of it. But poor humanity shouldn’t be asked to be noble at such a cost. That’s the most pitiful tragedy of it all. Don’t you suppose the Germans thought they too were marching off for a noble cause when they began it and forced this misery on the world? They had been educated to believe so, for a generation. That’s the terrible hypnotism of war, the brute mass-impulse, the pride and national spirit, the instinctive simplicity of men that makes them worship what is their own above everything else. I’ve thrilled and shouted with patriotic pride, like everyone. Music and flags and men marching in step have bewitched me, as they do all of us. And then I’ve gone home and sworn to root this evil instinct out of my soul. God help us— let’s love the world, love humanity—not just our own country! That’s why I’m so keen about the part we’re going to play at the Peace Conference. Our motto over there will be America Last! Hurrah for us, I say, for we shall be the only nation over there with absolutely no axe to grind. Nothing but a pax to grind!”

It argued well for Titania’s breadth of mind that she was not dismayed nor alarmed at the poor bookseller’s anguished harangue. She surmised sagely that he was cleansing his bosom of much perilous stuff. In some mysterious way she had learned the greatest and rarest of the spirit’s gifts—toleration.

“You can’t help loving your country,” she said.

“Let’s go indoors,” he answered. “You’ll catch cold out here. I want to show you my alcove of books on the war.”

“Of course one can’t help loving one’s country,” he added. “I love mine so much that I want to see her take the lead in making a new era possible. She has sacrificed least for war, she should be ready to sacrifice most for peace. As for me,” he said, smiling, “I’d be willing to sacrifice the whole Republican party!”

“I don’t see why you call the war an absurdity,” said Titania. “We HAD to beat Germany, or where would civilization have been?”

“We had to beat Germany, yes, but the absurdity lies in the fact that we had to beat ourselves in doing it. The first thing you’ll find, when the Peace Conference gets to work, will be that we shall have to help Germany onto her feet again so that she can be punished in an orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce so that she can pay her indemnities—we shall have to police her cities to prevent revolution from burning her up—and the upshot of it all will be that men will have fought the most terrible war in history, and endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing their enemy back to health. If that isn’t an absurdity, what is? That’s what happens when a great nation like Germany goes insane.

“Well, we’re up against some terribly complicated problems. My only consolation is that I think the bookseller can play as useful a part as any man in rebuilding the world’s sanity. When I was fretting over what I could do to help things along, I came across two lines in my favourite poet that encouraged me. Good old George Herbert says:

 

A grain of glory mixed with humblenesse Cures both a fever and lethargicknesse.

 

“Certainly running a second-hand bookstore is a pretty humble calling, but I’ve mixed a grain of glory with it, in my own imagination at any rate. You see, books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their hopes and strivings and all their immortal parts. It’s in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is. I never realized the greatness of the human spirit, the indomitable grandeur of man’s mind, until I read Milton’s Areopagitica. To read that great outburst of splendid anger ennobles the meanest of us simply because we belong to the same species of animal as Milton. Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn’t that high enough mission for a man? The bookseller is the real Mr. Valiant-For-Truth.

“Here’s my War-alcove,” he went on. “I’ve stacked up here most of the really good books the War has brought out. If humanity has sense enough to take these books to heart, it will never get itself into this mess again. Printer’s ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. There’s Hardy’s Dynasts for example. When you read that book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated—oh, it’s not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one’s brain! It hurts! There’s enough T. N. T. in that book to blast war from the face of the globe. But there’s a slow fuse attached to it. It hasn’t really exploded yet. Maybe it won’t for another fifty years.

“In regard to the War, think what books have accomplished. What was the first thing all the governments started to do— publish books! Blue Books, Yellow Books, White Books, Red Books— everything but Black Books, which would have been appropriate in Berlin. They knew that guns and troops were helpless unless they could get the books on their side, too. Books did as much as anything else to bring America into the war. Some German books helped to wipe the Kaiser off his throne—I Accuse, and Dr. Muehlon’s magnificent outburst The Vandal of Europe, and Lichnowsky’s private memorandum, that shook Germany to her foundations, simply because he told the truth. Here’s that book Men in War, written I believe by a Hungarian officer, with its noble dedication “To Friend and Foe.” Here are some of the French books—books in which the clear, passionate intellect of that race, with its savage irony, burns like a flame. Romain Rolland’s Au-Dessus de la Melee, written in exile in Switzerland; Barbusse’s terrible Le Feu; Duhamel’s bitter Civilization; Bourget’s strangely fascinating novel The Meaning of Death. And the noble books that have come out of England: A Student in Arms; The Tree of Heaven; Why Men Fight, by Bertrand Russell—I’m hoping he’ll write one on Why Men Are Imprisoned: you know he was locked up for his sentiments! And here’s one of the most moving of all— The Letters of Arthur Heath, a