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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Heaven may be the perfect library but some on earth come close

The best private libraries I know are to be found in long-established country houses in Ireland. They were the creation, over a quarter-millennium, of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, one of the most civilised ruling elites in history, ‘no mean people’, as W.B. Yeats called them. They are not based on standard library principles but on taste, whim and sheer enjoyment. Their treasures are hidden, but sometimes surprising. You may search in vain for the volume you want, though assured by the owner it is there ‘somewhere’, but in scrabbling around you may come across a first edition of Pride and Prejudice, or another of Browning’s Sordello, uncut after the first few pages once the reader failed to follow the impenetrable meaning of the text and gave up in despair and irritation.

I am thinking of the splendid library at Tullynally, Gothic palace of the Pakenham earls of Longford in County Westmeath, or Clandeboye, in Ulster, where repose the global treasures of the first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. This amiable, even saintly, man was governor-general of Canada, viceroy of India and conqueror of Burma, ambassador to Paris and Rome, and holder of many other magnificent public offices until, in his credulous old age, he fell victim to a city slicker. There is a vivid portrait of him in Harold Nicolson’s book Helen’s Tower, which describes the house and its setting.

Such libraries — and I can think of a dozen more — are cosy places in which to stretch out in the many easy chairs with which they are provided and watch the rain lash the green universe outside the windows, thinking how lucky you are to be inside, warm and dry — a view shared by the handsome loose horses which occasionally peer enviously within. The carpets may be old, but they are deep and grateful. Within the large old-style fireplace an enormous fire roars cheerfully up the well-swept chimney, for Anglo-Irish houses are famous for cunning wood-girls who know how to stack a superb fire, and the sweeps of Ireland, like the notorious ‘Walking-Easy’, are good at their job. Thus you can wile away an afternoon enjoying the books, many signed by the authors with cryptic messages, or repositories of letters from them relating amorous escapades or dark doings during the Troubles. And you can be confident that, at ‘half-four’ or thereabouts, the parlour-maid will wheel in a sumptuous tea.