![[Illustration]](https://oldbook.b-cdn.net/kitaplar/1/pg5317-h/images/cover.jpg)
Through the Magic Door
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Contents
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I.
I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which itadorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the caresof the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead,and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry andvexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all thatis sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in theirranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have butto hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surelythere would be something eerie about a line of books were it not thatfamiliarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed incere-cloth and natron of leather and printer’s ink. Each cover of a truebook enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of thewriters have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpabledust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.
It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the miraculousgood fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were suddenly to learn thatShakespeare had returned to earth, and that he would favour any of us with anhour of his wit and his fancy. How eagerly we would seek him out! And yet wehave him—the very best of him—at our elbows from week to week, andhardly trouble ourselves to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matterwhat mood a man may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door hecan summon the world’s greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he bethoughtful, here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are themasters of fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can signal to any one ofthe world’s great story-tellers, and out comes the dead man and holds himenthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may come tothink too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many ofus, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be everobsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion aresurely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most ofthe human race. But best of all when the dead man’s wisdom and the deadman’s example give us guidance and strength and in the living of our ownstrenuous days.
Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green settee, whereyou can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of volumes. Smoking is notforbidden. Woul