Obiter Dicta!

Our book today is an amplified edition of Obiter Dicta, which English politician Augustine Birrell first published in 1885 but had occasion to re-issue a couple of times between 1885 and 1890. The book is a collection of some of the literary pieces Birrell was always working on while also serving in various governments at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century. Birrell worked on these pieces in part because he was genuinely bookish but also because such things were expected of Victorian statesmen, who weren’t expected to be joyless grinds who go from official post to official post, constantly running for office, then retiring, having a vague and defensive memoir ghost-written, then dying. Instead, good form consisted of at least some pretense of an actual intellectual life.

In Birrell’s case, it was passion rather than social expectation: he was a thorough bookworm, and his essays collected in Obiter Dicta sparkle with his wit and wide-ranging curiosity (“In order to enjoy the pleasure of reading your own books over and over again,” he quips at one point, “it is essential that they should be written either wholly or in part by somebody else”). He writes wonderful long essays about Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander Pope, and others, always sharp in his opinions, almost always illuminating even in his quick rants:

Burke was no prating optimist: it was his very knowledge how much could be said against society that quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower criticism than that which accuses Burke in his later years of apostasy from so-called Liberal opinions. Burke was all his life though a passionate maintainer of the established order of things, and a ferocious hater of abstractions and metaphysical politics. The same ideas that explode like bombs through his diatribes against the French Revolution are to be found shining with mild effulgence in the comparative calm of his earlier writings.

He also writes about broader subjects – “The Muse of History,” “The Office of Literature,” and a splendid discussion called “Book-Buying” in which he mentions that his long-time friend and enemy William Gladstone was often heard to grumble about how far fewer bookstores there were in the present than there were in his youth – and then launches into another little rant, one that will ruffle the feathers of both most living authors and all living Barnes & Noble employees:

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Nether he nor any othe sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the advice of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glorified the term ‘second-hand,’ which other crafts have ‘soiled to all ignoble use.’ But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are necessarily second-hand.

Birrell’s personal life was at times very hard, and reading these essays it’s easy to see what a haven literature and the reading life were to him. Every chapter of this book glows with the quiet smile of a man retreating to his study. And smiles like that are contagious, even a century later.