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diff --git a/76079-0.txt b/76079-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb42e4e --- /dev/null +++ b/76079-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7556 @@ + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76079 *** + + + + + +A CHILD’S GUIDE TO READING + + + + +[Illustration: _Engraved by T. Westneth._ + +MILTON] + + + + + A CHILD’S GUIDE TO + READING + + + BY + JOHN MACY + + + The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading + while we are young.--WILLIAM HAZLITT. + + Though in all great and combined facts there + is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine, + there is also in very many a great deal + which can only be truly apprehended for the + first time at that age.--WALTER BAGEHOT. + + + NEW YORK + THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY + 1909 + + + + + COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY + THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY + + Published, November, 1909 + + + THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK + + + + +PREFACE + + +This is a Child’s Guide to Literature and not a Guide to Juvenile +Books. The larger part of the books discussed in the various chapters +and included in the supplementary lists were written for adult readers, +and nearly all of them are at least as interesting to the reader of +forty as to the reader of fourteen. The great writers are the goal and +the child is the traveler. That is why in a Child’s Guide appear the +names of Browning, Carlyle, Tolstoi, Meredith, Gibbon, Darwin, Plato, +Æschylus. A normal child will not be reading those masters, certainly +not all of them, but he will be reading toward them; and between the +greatest names will be found lesser writers who make easy upward slopes +for young feet that are climbing to the highest. In the supplementary +lists will be found very little of what is admittedly ephemeral, and +still less of that kind of “Juvenile” which has not sufficient literary +quality to outlast the most childish interests and tastes. On the other +hand, if we have any feeling for the abundant human nature of children, +we cannot invite them to fly, nor pretend that we have ourselves flown, +to the severe heights of Frederic Harrison’s position when he advises +that we read only authors of the first rank in every subject and every +nation. That ideal, which, to be sure, in his excellent essay on the +“Choice of Books” is tempered by his humanity and good sense, is at too +chilly an altitude for a Child’s Guide, or, I should think, for any +other guide written with appreciation of what kind of advice ordinary +humanity can or will benefit by. + +In the advice offered by some very wise men to young and old readers +there is much that is amusingly paradoxical. Schopenhauer, like +Frederic Harrison, enjoins us to devote our reading time exclusively to +the works of those great minds of all times and countries which overtop +the rest of humanity. Yet Schopenhauer is giving that advice in a book +which he certainly hopes will find readers and which, however great we +may consider him, his modesty would not allow him to rank among the +works of the greatest minds of all ages. Emerson counsels us to read no +book that is not at least a year old. But he is himself writing a book +of which he and his publishers undoubtedly hope to sell a few copies +before a year has passed. Thoreau tells us that our little village is +not doing very much for culture, and then he frightens us away from our +poets by one of those “big” ideas with which he and the other preachers +of his generation liked to make us children ashamed of ourselves. +“The works of the great poets,” he says, “have never yet been read by +mankind, for only great poets can read them.” Well, Thoreau, whatever +else he was, was not a great poet, and yet he seems to have read the +great ones and to have understood them while he was still a young +man. It is nearer the truth to say that anybody can read the great +poets. That is the lesson, if there is one, which this Guide seeks to +inculcate. + +There should be a chapter in this book about the Bible and religious +writings. But practical considerations debarred it. The American +parent, though quite willing to intrust to others many matters relating +to the welfare of his children, usually prefers to give his own +counsels as to the spirit in which the Bible should be read and what +other religious works should be read with it. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + CHAPTER PAGE + + I.--OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING 17 + + II.--THE PURPOSE OF READING 27 + + III.--THE READING OF FICTION 40 + + IV.--THE READING OF FICTION (_continued_) 60 + + List of Fiction 71 + + V.--THE READING OF POETRY 96 + + VI.--THE READING OF POETRY (_continued_) 109 + + List of Books of Poetry 123 + + VII.--THE READING OF HISTORY 143 + + List of Works of History 153 + + VIII.--THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY 164 + + List of Biographies 172 + + IX.--THE READING OF ESSAYS 179 + + List of Essays 192 + + X.--THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS 204 + + XI.--THE PRESS OF TO-DAY 217 + + XII.--THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 235 + + List of Works on Literature 257 + + XIII.--SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 260 + + List of Works in Science and Philosophy 267 + + + + +LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS + + + FACING + PAGE + + Milton _Frontispiece_ + + Dickens 30 + + Thackeray 46 + + Scott 56 + + Hawthorne 68 + + Cooper 76 + + Eliot 84 + + Shelley 104 + + Tennyson 120 + + Longfellow 134 + + Wordsworth 142 + + Emerson 196 + + + + +A CHILD’S GUIDE TO READING + + + + +CHAPTER I + +OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING + + +If you ever go into the Maine woods to hunt and fish you will have as +your companion a veteran of forest and stream, a professional guide. +It will be his duty to show you where the game and fish are most +plentiful; to see that you do not get into trouble with the authorities +by breaking the game laws; to make your camp comfortable; and if you +are very green, to keep a watchful eye on you lest you accidentally +shoot him or mistake another sportsman for a deer. If you are the right +sort--the Maine guide is almost certain to be the right sort--you will +get a great deal more from your companion than the simple services +for which you pay him. He will be not only guide, but friend and +philosopher, and will grudge you nothing of his stores of wisdom, +kindliness, and humor. + +If, however, you are to receive most profit and pleasure from life in +the woods with this good comrade, you must do your part of the work, +use what wits you have, and not show a disposition to lean too limply +on his strength. There are some things that the best guide cannot do. +Not only will he be unable to think for you, but if you are too ready +to let him do all the paddling, he will give you only perfunctory help +and sulky advice. If, on the contrary, you are handy, he will be doubly +handy. The more you learn, the more he can tell you. The more rapidly +you approach the time when you are qualified to set up as professional +guide yourself, the more you will enjoy the niceties of his theories of +hunting, fishing, and wood lore. + +Now, a guide to reading--if he be of the right sort--can do for the +beginner in literature very much the same degree of service as the +Maine woodsman. The literary guide is merely one who has lived longer +among books than the unprofessional reader. Since he has elected to +pass his life in the literary woods, he may be supposed to have a good +nose for interesting clews, and sharp eyes and alert ears for leading +signs. He knows what novels are good fishing and what poetic trees are +sound and what are hollow. But his services, however willingly tendered +and skillfully performed, have limitations. You must do your own +thinking and your own reading, and understand that only when you cease +to be in floundering need of a guide will you begin to receive the +richest benefits of reading. The guide’s idea of his duty is to help +you to get along altogether without him. + +No guide, no literary adviser can give you ears for poetry or eyes for +truth. The wisest companion can only persuade you to live among good +books in order that your ear may have opportunity to reveal its fine +capacities if it has them, and in order that your eye, dwelling upon +beautiful things, may grow practiced in discernment. He cannot read for +you. If you do not intend or hope to read any of the books mentioned in +this volume, it will be waste of time for you to turn this page. If you +passively receive every judgment of your guide about the merits of the +scores of books we shall discuss, and never once question or try his +judgment for yourself, you may be learning something about this guide, +but you will not be learning about literature. It is not the part of a +good pupil to surrender right of private judgment, but it is his part +to give his judgment solid matter to work upon. On the other hand, too +much independence, especially if it is not grounded in experience, is +not modest. Even those who have read a good deal and arrived at mature +opinions about books, may be content to accompany for a while a new +guide whose experience has, necessarily, been different from that of +others. + +Whatever your hope or intention, your guide is only a guide; he has +not power to lead you against your will, he has not the schoolmaster’s +right to prescribe a set course of reading. The reading must be +voluntary, and to have value it must involve some hard work. Healthful +entertainment and recreation we can safely promise. As for wisdom, +reverence, the deeper delights of communion with noble minds, whether +you meet these great spiritual experiences depends on you. The guide +can merely indicate where they may be sought. + +Let us at the outset agree not to map out our journey too rigidly. A +young friend of mine conceived at the age of sixteen the inordinate +ambition to read everything that is good. He procured a public library +catalogue, and asked a school-teacher to check off the titles of all +the books knowledge of which is essential to a perfect education. The +teacher smiled and confessed that she did not know even the titles +herself. She might have added that neither does any one else know the +titles, much less the insides, of all good books. But she marked some +hundred names, and the ambitious youngster entered upon his long feast. +He never finished all the books that were checked, for one or two +proved discouragingly stiff and dull, and as he ran his eye down the +list for the next prescribed masterpiece he saw other alluring titles +which were not checked, and he wrote the numbers on library slips. The +experience taught him that he must select books for himself, and that +the world’s library is too vast for anyone to be acquainted with all +its treasures. + +A youth so eager to know good books can be trusted sooner or later to +find his way to them. For the benefit of less zealous persons, great +faith used to be placed in lists of the Hundred Best Books. Such +lists, even the very judicious selection made by Sir John Lubbock +(Lord Avebury), can never be satisfactory. Lord Avebury is too good a +student of nature and human nature to regard his list as final. It was +not final for one man, John Ruskin, who has given us a most inspiring +essay on books, “Of Kings’ Treasures.” Ruskin thought that Lubbock had +included in the chosen hundred some books that were not only unworthy +but injurious. No man could make a list which would fare any better at +the hands of another critic of solid convictions. Who shall select a +social Four Hundred, all of whom we should accept as friends? Who can +select a Four Hundred or a One Hundred of books and not leave out some +of the noblest and best? It may be that Lubbock and Ruskin were both a +little priggish to take that century of masterpieces quite so solemnly. + +In books, as in all things, we cherish much that is not the best, but +is good in its way. It is not natural nor right to reject all but the +superlatively excellent. It is natural to prefer sometimes a book of +secondary value, and it is perversely natural to turn away from the +book that we are assured too insistently we “ought to read.” A formal +list of “oughts” is a severe test for ordinary human patience. Becky +Sharp in “Vanity Fair” is a bad-tempered and bad-hearted young woman, +but one can have a little sympathy with her when she throws her copy of +Johnson’s Dictionary at the head of her teacher as she parts forever +from the school gates. It is not altogether her fault if Johnson’s +Dictionary seems to her at that moment of all printed things the most +detestable. + +Yet perhaps no better book than a good dictionary could be found +whereon to base a library and a knowledge of literature. The wit who +said that the dictionary is a good book, but changes the subject too +often, told but a partial truth, for the dictionary keeps consistently +to the first of all subjects, the language in which all subjects +are expressed. If it be true that Americans are of all peoples the +most assiduous patrons of the dictionary, the future of our popular +education and of our national literature is secure, for although mere +words will not make thought, it is only thoughtful people who have a +zealous interest in the dictionary. The schoolmaster who first made +the present writer conscious that there is a difference between good +English and bad used to tell us in the moments when regular school +exercises were pending to study our dictionaries. The dictionary would +be a reasonable answer to that delightful conundrum: “If you were +wrecked on a desert island, and could have only one book, what book +would you choose?” + +The shrewdest of all answers to that question evaded it: “I should +spend so much time trying to choose the book that I should miss the +steamer and not be wrecked.” These conundrums--the best book?--the +best hundred books?--the greatest novel?--the greatest poem?--are not +to be answered. The use of them is that they stir our imaginations +and whet our judgments. If we come close and try to settle them in +earnest, we bring tumbling about our heads a multitude of conflicting +answers. Then we flee from the disorder and realize that conundrums are +only stimulating nonsense. Individual choice among the riches of the +world’s literature is not to be confined by hard and fast rules and +tests. + +As a practical matter we are not altogether free to choose. Our +book friends, like our human friends, are in part chosen for us by +accidental encounters. We do not wander over the world seeking for +the dozen souls that are most fit to be grappled to us with hoops of +steel. We merely choose the most congenial among our neighbors. So it +is with books. Each of us wishes to select the best among such as are +available, to have judgment in accepting the right one when it falls +in our way. Biography is full of instances of chance encounters in the +world’s library that have shaped great careers. + +John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography how Wordsworth’s +poetry brought about in him a spiritual regeneration. At the age of +twenty-one, precociously far advanced in his study of economics and +philosophy, he found himself dejected and with no clear outlook upon +life. He had often heard of the uplifting power of poetry, and read +the whole of Byron, but Byron did him no good. He took up Wordsworth’s +poems “from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief.” “I found +myself,” he says, “at once better and happier as I came under their +influence.” The reading of Wordsworth was the immediate occasion, +though not the sole cause, of a complete change in his way of thinking, +and his new way of thinking led him to life-long associations with +other great men. + +We cannot tell which poet, which thinker, will do for us what +Wordsworth did for Mill. But while we are young we can take trial +excursions into literature until we find our own. And when we do find +our own, the treasure that is most precious to our souls, we shall know +it, and know it the better, perhaps, if we have tried many good books +and failed to like them. + +If we are to rely so frankly upon our own likings, a word of caution +may be necessary to help us distinguish liberty of choice from +unreasonable license. We have to ask not only, Does this book interest +me?--but, Does this book appeal to the best tastes and emotions in me? +Many of us, by no means bad human beings, are so constituted that if +our eye meets the morbid, the coarse, the senselessly horrible, we are +fascinated, we are indeed interested. But it requires only the most +simple self-analysis and a little honesty, to pull ourselves together +and realize that it is an unworthy side of us, a side that we do not +care to show our friends, which is being held at attention. Not that +we need, like the stupidest of the old Puritans, be afraid of a book +simply because it does thrill us and make us breathless. For every bad +book which holds the depraved mind guiltily alert, a good book can be +found, so absorbing, so compelling, that beside it the bad book is tame. + +I once had a pupil whose transparent honesty was only one of his many +lovable qualities. He believed that “Literature” consisted of dull +books written by authors who died long ago. The ill-reasoned conclusion +was his own, but I found that the raw materials of his error lay +in the prudishness of one of his teachers. When I told him that +“Huckleberry Finn,” by a very live author, is literature, and that a +short story by Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman in a current magazine seemed +to me literature of rare excellence, his delight so aroused his wits +that for some time after that my part of the lessons consisted merely +in meeting his enthusiasm halfway. + +A friend once asked me what he could read to improve his mind. In the +pride of a little superior wisdom, I loftily recommended Shakespeare. +His reply was, “That is too deep for me.” A wiser counselor than +I, knowing his circumstances, would not have tried to cultivate a +sprouting ambition with quite so perfect an intellectual instrument. +But I stuck to my advice, and shortly after I had opportunity to prove +that I was, if not wise, at least on the side of wisdom. We went +together to see “Othello”--from gallery seats. After that my friend +read the play and another that was bound with it. + +Shakespeare is deep, forsooth. Hamlet’s soliloquy in the fourth act: + + How all occasions do inform against me, + +is so profound that it is darkened by its very depth. But the play +“Hamlet” is a stirring melodrama that keeps the “gallery gods” leaning +forward in their seats. The larger part of literature is by dead +authors, because the “great majority” of the race is dead and includes +its proportionate number of poets and prophets. Some great books _are_ +dull except to a comparatively few minds in certain moods. But most +dull books by old writers have been forgotten; our ancestors saved +us the trouble of rejecting them. Most books that have survived are +triumphantly alive in all senses. The vitality of a book that is just +born may be brief as a candle flame. The old book that is still bright +has proved that its brightness is the true luster of the metal; else we +should not know its name. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE PURPOSE OF READING + + +The question why we read books is one of those vast questions that need +no answer. As well ask, Why ought we to be good? or, Why do we believe +in a God? The whole universe of wisdom answers. To attempt an answer +in a chapter of a book would be like turning a spyglass for a moment +toward the stars. We take the great simple things for granted, like +the air we breathe. In a country that holds popular education to be +the foundation of all its liberties and fortunes, we do not find many +people who need to be argued into the belief that the reading of books +is good for us; even people who do not read much acknowledge vaguely +that they ought to read more. + +There are, to be sure, men of rough worldly wisdom, even endowed with +spiritual insight, who distrust “book learning” and fall back on the +obvious truth that experience of life is the great teacher. Such +persons are in a measure justified in their conviction by the number of +unwise human beings who have read much but to no purpose. + + The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, + With loads of learned lumber in his head + +is a living argument against mere reading. But we can meet such +argument by pointing out that the blockhead who cannot learn from books +cannot learn much from life, either. That sometimes useful citizen +whom it is fashionable to call a Philistine, and who calls himself a +“practical man,” often has under him a beginner fresh from the schools, +who is glib and confident in repeating bookish theories, but is not +yet skillful in applying them. If the practical man is thoughtless, +he sniffs at theory and points to his clumsy assistant as proof of +the uselessness of what is to be got from books. If he is wise, the +practical man realizes how much better off he would be, how much +farther his hard work and experience might have carried him, if he had +had the advantage of bookish training. + +Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will +not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom +so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation, +take holiday tours into the literature of other men’s lives and labors. +The man who does not like to read any books is, I am confident, seldom +found, and at the risk of slandering a patriot, I will express the +doubt whether he is a good citizen. + +Honest he may be, but certainly not wise. The human race for thousands +of years has been writing its experiences, telling how it has met our +everlasting problems, how it has struggled with darkness and rejoiced +in light. What fools we should be to try to live our lives without the +guidance and inspiration of the generations that have gone before, +without the joy, encouragement, and sympathy that the best imaginations +of our generation are distilling into words. For literature is simply +life selected and condensed into books. In a few hours we can follow +all that is recorded of the life of Jesus--the best that He did in +years of teaching and suffering all ours for a day of reading, and the +more deeply ours for a lifetime of reading and meditation! + +If the expression of life in words is strong and beautiful and true it +outlives empires, like the oldest books of the Old Testament. If it is +weak or trivial or untrue, it is forgotten like most of the “stories” +in yesterday’s newspaper, like most of the novels of last year. The +expression of truth, the transmission of knowledge and emotions between +man and man from generation to generation, this is the purpose of +literature. Not to read books is like being shut up in a dungeon while +life rushes by outside. + +I happen to be writing in Christmas week, and I have read for the tenth +time “A Christmas Carol,” by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which +the hard, bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth, that +wizard’s caldron in which humor bubbles and from which rise phantom +figures of religion and poetry. Can anyone doubt that if this story +were read by every man, woman, and child in the world, Christmas +would be a happier time and the feelings of the race elevated and +strengthened? The story has power enough to defeat armies, to make +revolutions in the faith of men, and turn the cold markets of the +world into festival scenes of charity. If you know any mean person, +you may be sure that he has not read “A Christmas Carol,” or that he +read it long ago and has forgotten it. I know there are persons who +pretend that the sentimentality of Dickens destroys their interest in +him. I once took a course with an overrefined, imperfectly educated +professor of literature, who advised me that in time I should outgrow +my liking for Dickens. It was only his way of recommending to me a kind +of fiction that I had not learned to like. In time I did learn to like +it, but I did not outgrow Dickens. A person who can read “A Christmas +Carol” aloud to the end and keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a +safe person to trust with one’s purse or one’s honor. + +It is not necessary to argue about the value of literature or even +to define it. One way of bringing ourselves to realize vividly what +literature can do for us is to enter the libraries of great men and see +what books have done for the acknowledged leaders of our race. + +You will recall John Stuart Mill’s experience in reading Wordsworth. +Mill was a man of letters as well as a scientific economist and +philosopher, and we expect to find that men of letters have been +nourished on literature; reading must necessarily have been a large +part of their professional preparation. The examples of men of action +who have been molded and inspired by books will perhaps be more +helpful to remember; for most of us are not to be writers or to engage +in purely intellectual work; our ambitions point to a thousand +different careers in the world of action. + +[Illustration: DICKENS] + +Lincoln was not primarily a man of letters, although he wrote noble +prose on occasion, and the art of expression was important, perhaps +indispensable, in his political success. He read deeply in the law and +in books on public questions. For general literature he had little +time, either during his early struggles or after his public life began, +and his autobiographical memorandum contains the significant words: +“Education defective.” But these more significant words are found in a +letter which he wrote to Hackett, the player: “Some of Shakespeare’s +plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as +frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are ‘Lear,’ +‘Richard III,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and, especially, ‘Macbeth.’” + +If he had not read these masterpieces, no doubt he would have become +President just the same and guided the country through its terrible +difficulties; but we may be fairly sure that the high philosophy by +which he lifted the political differences of his day above partisan +quarrels, the command of words which gives his letters and speeches +literary permanence apart from their biographical interest, the +poetic exaltation of the Gettysburg Address, these higher qualities +of genius, beyond the endowment of any native wit, came to Lincoln in +some part from the reading of books. It is important to note that he +followed Franklin’s advice to read much but not too many books; the +list of books mentioned in the biographical records of Lincoln is not +long. But he went over those half dozen plays “frequently.” We should +remember, too, that he based his ideals upon the Bible and his style +upon the King James Version. His writings abound in biblical phrases. + +We are accustomed to regard Lincoln as a thinker. His right arm in +the saddest duty of his life, General Grant, was a man of deeds; as +Lincoln said of him, he was a “copious worker and fighter, but a very +meager writer and telegrapher.” In his “Memoirs,” Grant makes a modest +confession about his reading: + +“There is a fine library connected with the Academy [West Point] from +which cadets can get books to read in their quarters. I devoted more +time to these than to books relating to the course of studies. Much +of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those +of a trashy sort. I read all of Bulwer’s then published, Cooper’s, +Marryat’s, Scott’s, Washington Irving’s works, Lever’s, and many others +that I do not now remember.” + +Grant was not a shining light in his school days, nor indeed in his +life until the Civil War, and at first sight he is not a striking +example of a great man influenced by books. Yet who can deny that the +fruit of that early reading is to be found in his “Memoirs,” in which +a man of action unused to writing and called upon to narrate great +events, discovers an easy adequate style? There is a dangerous kind of +conjecture in which many biographers indulge when they try to relate +logically the scattered events of a man’s life. A conjectured relation +is set down as a proved or unquestioned relation. I shall say something +about this in the chapter on biography, and I do not wish to violate my +own teachings. But we may, without harm, hazard the suggestion, which +is only a suggestion, that some of the chivalry of Scott’s heroes wove +itself into Grant’s instincts and inspired this businesslike, modern +general, in the days when politeness has lost some of its flourish, to +be the great gentleman he was at Appomattox when he quietly wrote into +the terms of the surrender that the Confederate officers should keep +their side arms. Stevenson’s account of the episode in his essay on +“Gentlemen” is heightened, though not above the dignity of the facts, +certainly not to a degree that is untrue to the facts as they are to +be read in Grant’s simple narrative. Since I have agreed not to say +“ought to read,” I will only express the hope that the quotation from +Stevenson will lead you to the essay and to the volume that contains it. + +“On the day of the capitulation, Lee wore his presentation sword; it +was the first thing that Grant observed, and from that moment he had +but one thought: how to avoid taking it. A man, who should perhaps have +had the nature of an angel, but assuredly not the special virtues of +a gentleman, might have received the sword, and no more words about +it: he would have done well in a plain way. One who wished to be a +gentleman, and knew not how, might have received and returned it: he +would have done infamously ill, he would have proved himself a cad; +taking the stage for himself, leaving to his adversary confusion of +countenance and the ungraceful posture of a man condemned to offer +thanks. Grant, without a word said, added to the terms this article: +‘All officers to retain their side arms’; and the problem was solved +and Lee kept his sword, and Grant went down to posterity, not perhaps a +fine gentleman, but a great one.” + +Napoleon, who of all men of mighty deeds after Julius Cæsar had the +greatest intellect, was a tireless reader, and since he needed only +four or five hours’ sleep in twenty-four he found time to read in +the midst of his prodigious activities. Nowadays those of us who are +preparing to conquer the world are taught to strengthen ourselves for +the task by getting plenty of sleep. Napoleon’s devouring eyes read far +into the night; when he was in the field his secretaries forwarded a +stream of books to his headquarters; and if he was left without a new +volume to begin, some underling had to bear his imperial displeasure. +No wonder that his brain contained so many ideas that, as the +sharp-tongued poet, Heine, said, one of his lesser thoughts would keep +all the scholars and professors in Germany busy all their lives making +commentaries on it. + +In Franklin’s “Autobiography” we have an unusually clear statement of +the debt of a man of affairs to literature: “From a child I was fond +of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever +laid out in books. Pleased with the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ my first +collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.... +My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic +divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at +a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had +not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved that I should not be +a clergyman. ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ there was in which I read abundantly, +and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also +a book of De Foe’s, called an ‘Essay on Projects,’ and another of Dr. +Mather’s, called ‘Essays to do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a turn of +thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events +of my life.” + +It is not surprising to find that the most versatile of versatile +Americans read De Foe’s “Essay on Projects,” which contains practical +suggestions on a score of subjects, from banking and insurance to +national academies. In Cotton Mather’s “Essays to do Good” is the germ +perhaps of the sensible morality of Franklin’s “Poor Richard.” The +story of how Franklin gave his nights to the study of Addison and by +imitating the _Spectator_ papers taught himself to write, is the best +of lessons in self-cultivation in English. The “Autobiography” is proof +of how well he learned, not Addison’s style, which was suited to Joseph +Addison and not to Benjamin Franklin, but a clear, firm manner of +writing. In Franklin’s case we can see not only what he owed to books, +but how one side of his fine, responsive mind was starved because, as +he put it, more proper books did not fall in his way. The blind side of +Franklin’s great intellect was his lack of religious imagination. This +defect may be accounted for by the forbidding nature of the religious +books in his father’s library. Repelled by the dull discourses, the +young man missed the religious exaltation and poetic mysticism which +the New England divines concealed in their polemic argument. Franklin’s +liking for Bunyan and his confession that his father’s discouragement +kept him from being a poet, “most probably,” he says, “a very bad +one,” show that he would have responded to the right kind of religious +literature, and not have remained all his life such a complacent +rationalist. + +If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to put ourselves in +communication with the best minds of our race, we need go no farther +for a definition of “good reading.” Whatever human beings have +said well in words is literature, whether it be the Declaration of +Independence or a love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in +taking one of the volumes in which somebody has said something well, +opening it on one’s knee, and beginning. + +We take it for granted, then, that we know why we read. We shall +presently discuss some books which we shall like to read. But before +we come to an examination of certain kinds of literature and certain +of its great qualities, we may ask one further question: How shall we +read? One answer is that we should read with as much of ourselves as a +book warrants, with the part of ourselves that a book demands. Mrs. +Browning says: + + We get no good + By being ungenerous, even to a book, + And calculating profits--so much help + By so much reading. It is rather when + We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge + Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, + Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth-- + ’Tis then we get the right good from a book. + +We sometimes know exactly what we wish to get from a book, especially +if it is a volume of information on a definite subject. But the great +book is full of treasures that one does not deliberately seek, and +which indeed one may miss altogether on the first journey through. It +is almost nonsensical to say: Read Macaulay for clearness, Carlyle +for power, Thackeray for ease. Literary excellence is not separated +and bottled up in any such drug-shop array. If Macaulay is a master +of clearness it is because he is much else besides. Unless we read +a man for all there is in him, we get very little, we meet, not a +living human being, not a vital book, but something dead, dismembered, +disorganized. We do not read Thackeray for ease; we read him for +Thackeray and enjoy his ease by the way. + +We must read a book for all there is in it or we shall get little or +nothing. To be masters of books we must have learned to let books +master us. This is true of books that we are required to read, such +as text books, and of those we read voluntarily and at leisure. The +law of reading is to give a book its due and a little more. The art +of reading is to know how to apply this law. For there is an art of +reading, for each of us to learn for himself, a private way of making +the acquaintance of books. + +Macaulay, whose mind was never hurried nor confused, learned to +read very rapidly, to absorb a page at a glance. A distinguished +professor, who has spent his life in the most minutely technical +scholarship, surprised us one day by commending to his classes the fine +art of “skipping.” Many good books, including some most meritorious +“three-decker” novels, have their profitless pages, and it is useful +to know by a kind of practiced instinct where to pause and reread +and where to run lightly and rapidly over the page. It is a useful +accomplishment not only in the reading of fiction, but in the business +of life, to the man of affairs who must get the gist of a mass of +written matter, and to the student of any special subject. + +Usually, of course, a book that is worth reading at all is worth +reading carefully. Thoroughness of reading is the first thing to preach +and to practice, and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginner +that any book should be skimmed. The suggestion will serve its purpose +if it indicates that there are ways to read, that practice in reading +is like practice in anything else; the more one does, and the more +intelligently one does it, the farther and more easily one can go. In +the best reading--that is, the most thoughtful reading of the most +thoughtful books, attention is necessary. It is even necessary that +we should read some works, some passages, so often and with such close +application that we commit them to memory. It is said that the habit of +learning pieces by heart is not so prevalent as it used to be. I hope +that this is not so. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs, +no verses from the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you have +not begun to read, you have not learned how to read. + +We have said enough, perhaps, of the theories of reading. The +one lesson that seems most obvious is that we must come close +to literature. Therefore we shall pause no longer on general +considerations, but enter at once the library where the living books +are ranged upon the shelves. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +THE READING OF FICTION + + +Our reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments +of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that +it is the branch of literature most widely known and enjoyed. Pretend +as we may to prefer poetry and “solid books” (as if good fiction lacked +solidity!) most of us have read more novels than histories, more short +stories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrote a dull history of +Nantucket could not understand why the young people preferred novels to +his veracious chronicle; which was the same as saying that he did not +understand young people, or old people, either. Since the beginning of +recorded human history the world has gathered eagerly about the knees +of its story-tellers, and to the end of the race it will continue to +applaud and honor the skillful inventor of fiction. + +There was a time when preachers and teachers, at least those of the +English-speaking nations, had a somber view of life and looked with +distrust on pleasant arts; and no doubt they were right in holding +that if stories take our thoughts off the great realities, we cannot +afford to abandon our minds to such toys and trivial inventions. But +the severe moralists never made out a good case against the arts; +they could not prove that joy and laughter and light entertainment +interfered with high thinking and right living; and in time they +rediscovered, what other wise men had never forgotten, that art is good +for the soul. In the past century the novel has taken all knowledge +for its province and has allied itself to the labors of prophets, +preachers, and educators. The philosopher finds that some of the great +speculative minds have uttered their thoughts in the form of artistic +fiction. The true scholar no longer confines himself to annotating +the fictions of the Greeks and Romans and the established classics +of his race. He sees in the best art of his contemporaries the same +effort of the human soul to express itself which informed the ancient +masterpieces. + +Jane Austen, whose delicate novels inspired stronger writers than she, +who by her gentleness and truth influenced creative powers greater +than her own, whimsically recognized and perhaps helped to remove +the pedantic prejudice against fiction. The following passage from +“Northanger Abbey” will give a taste of that delicious book. It is a +quiet satire on the absurdly romantic such as is still manufactured and +sold by the million copies to readers who, one may suppose, have not +had the good fortune to read Jane Austen. + +The heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” Catherine and Isabella, “shut +themselves up to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not +adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel +writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very +performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining +with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on +such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own +heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn +over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel +be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect +protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to +the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and +over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with +which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an +injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive +and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation +in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. +From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our +readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of +the ‘History of England,’ or of the man who collects and publishes in +a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper +from the _Spectator_, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by +a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the +capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting +the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend +them. ‘I am no novel reader; I seldom look into novels; do not imagine +that _I_ often read novels; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such +is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ----?’ ‘Oh, it is +only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book +with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only “Cecilia,” +or “Camilla,” or “Belinda,”’ or, in short, only some work in which the +greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough +knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, +the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in +the best chosen language.” + +Since that was written the novel has overridden its detractors by sheer +bulk and power. The greatest man in Russia, Tolstoi, is, or was, a +novelist. The greatest poet and thinker alive but yesterday in England, +George Meredith, was a novelist. Of the two wisest living writers in +America, one, Mr. William Dean Howells, is a novelist, and the other, +Mark Twain, whom one hardly knows how to rank or label, has done a part +of his best writing in the form of fiction. We no longer question the +power and dignity of the novel. Our only concern is to discriminate +good stories from bad and get the greatest delight and profit from the +good. + +To bring our discussion to a vital example, let us consider Thackeray’s +“Henry Esmond,” an all but perfect fiction, in which every element of +excellent narrative is present. + +The first element is plot. A story must begin in an interesting set +of circumstances and arrive by a series of events to a conclusion +that satisfies. The plot of “Esmond” is unusually well made, and it +is composed of rich matter. From the first chapter in which Henry is +introduced to us as “no servant, though a dependent, no relative, +though he bore the name and inherited the blood of the house”--a +youth with a mystery--on through the schemes for the restoration of +the Stuart King, through Esmond’s unsuccessful rivalry with the other +suitors of Beatrice, to the end of the high intrigues of politics and +the quiet conclusion of Esmond’s career, the story moves steadily +with well-mannered leisure. It takes its own time, but it takes the +right time, slow when events are preparing, rapid and flashing when +events come to a crisis. The great crisis, when Esmond overtakes the +prince at Castlewood, breaks his sword and renounces both allegiance +to the Stuarts and his own birthright, is one of the supreme dramatic +scenes in literature. There Thackeray matches, even excels, Scott and +Dumas. And such is the variety of his power that on other pages he +writes brilliant and witty comedy surpassed only by the lighter plays +of Shakespeare, on yet other pages he gives compact lucid summary of +events, the skill of which an historian might envy, and again he writes +pages of comment on human character which equal the best pages of +Esmond’s friend, “the famous Mr. Joseph Addison.” + +The actors in these events are as distinct and memorable as any in +history or as any in life. It would be impossible for a reader not +well acquainted with the age of Queen Anne to tell which of the +personages in the book once moved in the flesh and which Thackeray +created. And readers who have a wide acquaintance with the world and +have known many of its sons and daughters will find in their gallery of +memories no brilliant and heartless woman whom they seem to remember +with more sense of intimacy and understanding than the woman who led +Mr. Esmond such an uncomfortable dance and was the means of defeating +Stuart ambitions--Beatrice Esmond. How are these personages of a +fiction made to seem so lifelike? Genius only can answer, and genius is +often unaware by just what devices a character is made to take on its +own life and to walk, as it were, independent of the author. One thing +is generally true of characters that strike us as real: they talk each +in a style of his own, and yet they talk “like folks.” The thing that +they do may be far removed from anything in our experience, a soldier +may be talking to a king, Esmond may be speaking in noble anger to the +prince; we feel somehow that the words on the page have in them the +sound of the human voice, that a man placed in such circumstances would +think and speak as the novelist makes him speak. + +In a good novel human beings, whose emotions represent and idealize +our own, act and talk amid intelligible circumstances and entertaining +events. These persons, since they seem real, are visible to the eye of +fancy and the events happen in scenes--the divisions of a drama are +called “scenes”--which strike the imagination as if they were actually +striking the senses. Each person is recognizable by look and gesture; +each place is distinct from all other places, as the room you sit in +and the street beyond your window are different from all other rooms +and all other highways in the world. Our master of story telling is a +master of description. An unskillful author tries to persuade us that +a woman is beautiful by merely asserting it, and his assertion makes +no impression on us because it appeals to the part of our brain that +collects information and not the part that sees pictures. But Thackeray +paints Miss Beatrice tripping down the stairs to greet Esmond, and no +eye that has seen her through Thackeray’s words but can recall the +portrait at will. Further description of Beatrice accompanies the +action all through the book and no one can tell, or cares to tell, +where narration pauses and description begins. + +No one can tell, either, where out of all this emerges that quality of +writing called style. Manner of expression is not a separable shell +in which the stuff is contained like a kernel. The manner is in the +substance. Yet there is a charm of words felt for itself which seems to +lie above and around the thing conveyed. In other books Thackeray loses +his plot, and sometimes apparently forgets his characters, and yet +he carries the reader on by virtue of saying things compellingly and +invitingly. When, as in “Esmond,” the order of action is so satisfying +and the people are so interesting to watch and be with, and in +addition every page is a delight to the ear, then literary excellence +is complete. + +[Illustration: THACKERAY] + +Here, united in one book, are the elements of fiction--plot, character, +description and style. And from these elements, however blended, there +results a total value, the measure of a book’s importance in relation +to the other things in life. This value is essentially moral, not so +much because literature is under peculiar obligations to preach and +teach morality as because it is part of life and the fundamental things +in life are moral in the large sense of the word. It is as impossible +to think of a fiction which shall be neither moral nor immoral as +to think of an act which shall be, in the modern meaningless word, +unmoral. Even a very slight fiction, like a trivial act, weighs on +one side or the other. All the best of our novelists have been fully +conscious of their ethical obligations to their readers. Having thought +deeply enough about life to write about it, they could not have failed +to think deeply about their professional responsibility, their part in +life. + +I am going to quote at length a passage from Anthony Trollope’s “Life +of Thackeray” in the series of biographies known as _English Men of +Letters_. The young reader can find no better book about the novel than +this account of one great novelist by another. In spite of a current +idea that shop-talk is not interesting, a thoughtful craftsman talking +about his work is likely to be at his best. Moreover, Trollope’s +judgments on the moral obligation of the novelist are especially worthy +of confidence, for he is no heavy-handed preacher, no metaphysical +critic, but a broad-minded humorist, an affectionate student of human +nature, a cheerful workman who regarded his own books in a modest +businesslike way. + +“I have said previously,” says Trollope, “that it is the business +of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will go further, +and will add, having been for many years a prolific writer of novels +myself, that I regard him who can put himself into close communication +with young people year after year without making some attempt to do +them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However poor your matter +may be, however near you may come to that ‘foolishest of existing +mortals,’ as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to be, still, +if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly be more +or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because the +novelist amuses that he must be influential. The sermon too often has +no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of +having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that +which is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted +unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with +the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the +honest and simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never +unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative +or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or +falsehood; the lad will be taught honor or dishonor, simplicity or +affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There +are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they +amuse any one. + +“I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own fraternity +if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and +middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels +they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; +fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the +excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country that has such +mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer +than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the +mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses +for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against +rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can +hardly do into her task work; and there she is taught--how she shall +learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far +she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not +throw herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the +young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the +suspicion of such tutorship. But he, too, will learn either to speak +the truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either +of real manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten +demeanor which too many professors of the craft give out as their +dearest precepts. + +“At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house +now from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them +almost indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own +novel? Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed--this +inner confidence--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and +what thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young +friend?... A novelist has two modes of teaching--by good example or +bad. It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be +evil, therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages +with whom we have been acquainted from our youth upward would have +been omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the +teaching is not more efficacious which comes from an evil example. +What story was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine +reticence, and the horrors of feminine evildoing, than the fate of +Effie Deans [in “The Heart of Midlothian” by Scott]. The ‘Templar’ [in +Scott’s “Ivanhoe”] would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has +not encouraged others by the freedom of his life. ‘Varney’ [in Scott’s +“Kenilworth”] was utterly bad--but though a gay courtier, he has +enticed no others to go the way he went. So has it been with Thackeray. +His examples have generally been of that kind--but they have all been +efficacious in their teaching on the side of modesty and manliness, +truth, and simplicity.” + +To return to the elements of the novel, plot, character, description, +style, if we think of a score of great novels that have had many +readers for many years, we shall see that some novelists are blessed +with genius for one element more than for another, or that they have +chosen to put their energies into one or the other. And we shall see, +too, that few novels are perfect, few as nearly perfect as “Esmond,” +and that we should not expect them to be. All that we need demand is +that a writer give us enough of something to make the reading of his +book worth while. + +No rules that have so far been laid down about the requirements +of fiction are final or from the reader’s point of view of great +assistance. Some of us have made up our minds that the English novel +is growing more shapely and well constructed: Mr. W. D. Howells, for +instance, by precept and practice, and some other novelists and critics +who are under the influence of French fiction, insist on construction +and form and simplicity of plot. Then in spite of all “tendencies” and +rules of fiction, along comes Mr. William De Morgan with three novels +which might have been written fifty years ago, and wins instantaneous +and deserved success as a new novelist--at the age of seventy. His +plots are as wayward and leisurely as most of Thackeray’s, his people +are human, and his discursive individual style is as fresh as if +novelists had not been filling the world with books for two centuries. +“Joseph Vance” and “Alice-for-Short” prove how inconsiderate genius is +of rules made by critics and how far is the “old-fashioned” novel from +having gone stale and fallen on evil days. + +So long as a plot has vitality of some kind, truth to life, or +ingenuity, or dramatic power, it makes no difference to the mere +reader what material the novelist chooses. Twenty years ago there was +a strange contest between realists and romanticists. The realists, or +as they sometimes call themselves, “naturalists,” take the simpler +facts of common life and weave them into stories. The romanticist +selects from highly colored epochs of history, or from no-man’s land, +or from the more unusual circumstances of actual life, such startling +adventures, such well-joined incidents, such mysteries, surprises, +and dramatic revelations as we do not meet with in ordinary times and +places. Thackeray is a romanticist in “Henry Esmond,” a realist in +“Pendennis” and “The Newcomes.” Scott’s novels are romantic. Those +of Trollope, of Mr. Henry James, of Mr. W. D. Howells are realistic. +There is no sharp line between the two. Dickens found extraordinary +romance in ordinary London streets, which he knew with journalistic +realism to the last brick and cobblestone. In “Bleak House,” he says, +he “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” But, +though he may have considered this book a special quest for the +romantic in real life, it does not differ in the kind or the proportion +of its romanticism from a dozen others of his novels. It is no more +romantic than “David Copperfield” or “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no less +romantic than the historical fiction, “A Tale of Two Cities.” His +imagination penetrated life, real or unreal, familiar or remote, and +found it rich with plot and subplot; he touched the slums with his +mythmaker’s wand, and in obedience to his touch the children of the +streets and dark tenements became heroes of strange adventure, moving +through mysteries as varied and wonderful as fairyland. + +Because Dickens loved human beings and understood their everyday +sorrow and happiness, he wrought into the great fabric of his plots +a multitude of people as real, as like to us and our friends, as can +be found in the work of the most thorough-going realist; he reflects, +too, like the avowed realist, the social and political problems of +his own times. He is both romanticist and realist. So also are his +contemporaries, the Brontë sisters and Charles Reade. And their +greatest successors in the English novel, Thomas Hardy and George +Meredith, are equally masters of common social facts, human nature in +its daily aspects, and of the highly colored, the picturesque, the +mystery, the surprise, the dramatic complexity of events. + +The genius of English fiction in most of its powerful exponents has +this dual character of romance and realism. “Robinson Crusoe” is a +romantic adventure; its scene is transported far away from human life +to a solitude such as only the wanderer’s eye has looked upon; the +reader is taken bodily into another world. Yet Defoe is the first great +realist in English prose fiction; he piles detail upon detail, gives +an exact inventory of Crusoe’s possessions, and compels belief in the +story as in a chronicle of events that really happened. + +Later in the eighteenth century appeared Richardson’s “Clarissa +Harlowe,” a vast romantic tragedy, which held the attention of all +novel readers of the time; the story was published in parts, and when +it was learned before the last part was printed that the ending was to +be tragic, ladies wrote to Richardson begging him to bring his heroine +out of her difficulties and allow her to “live happily ever after.” The +plot of this novel is imposed by the logic of character upon the facts +of English society; the plot is not realistic or even probable in its +relations to the known circumstances of the civilization in which it is +laid; any magistrate could have rescued Clarissa. But everything stands +aside to let the great romance pass by; the readers of the time, who +knew better than we do the social facts surrounding an English girl, +did not question the probability of the plot, because they accepted +the character. The plot granted, Richardson’s method is realistic. We +know Clarissa’s daily acts and circumstances; we have a bulletin of her +feelings every hour. No modern psychological novelist ever analyzed +the workings of a human mind more minutely, with greater fidelity and +insight. The result is a voluminous diary of eighteenth-century manners +and customs and sentiments hung upon as romantic a plot as was ever +devised. + +Midway in time between Richardson and Dickens stands the king +of romantics, Scott, and he, too, is a realist in his depiction +of Scottish life and character. In “The Bride of Lammermoor” so +melodramatic and “stagey” that it seems to be set behind footlights +and played to music--a familiar opera is based upon it--there is one +character that Scott found not in legend or history, but in the life +he knew, Caleb Balderstone. Like the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” he is +a link between unusual, we might fairly say unnatural, events and +common humanity. In many of Scott’s novels, beside the strutting heroes +that startle the world in high astounding terms, walk the soldiers, +servants, parsons, shepherds, who by their presence make us feel that +it is the firm earth upon which the action moves. + +Argument among critics as to the nature of romance and realism helps, +as all questions of definition may help, to make us understand the +relation of one novel to another and to see the range and purpose of +fiction. But that any one should say of two novels that one is better +than the other, simply because it is more realistic or more romantic, +is to impose a technicality on enjoyment with which enjoyment refuses +to be burdened. Who that picks up a novel for the pleasure of reading +it cares whether it is romance or realism? So long as it has vitality +of its own kind, and gives us enough of the many virtues which a novel +may possess, we are content to plunge into it and ask no questions. +A lily is not a rose; it takes no great wisdom to know that; the +botanists will tell us the exact difference, and the gardener will +tell us how they grow; but if botanist or horticulturist tells us +which is more beautiful, we listen to his opinion and keep our own. +Mr. Kipling’s “Kim,” or Mr. Howells’s “A Modern Instance”; “Far from +the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy, or Scott’s “Ivanhoe”; Stevenson’s +“Kidnapped,” or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”--which of these books +is realistic and which is the other kind? Suppose you read them to +find out. In the midst of any one of them you will have forgotten the +question, because the novelist will have filled your whole mind with +other--and more important--interests. + +A good novel is a self-contained, complete world with its own laws and +inhabitants. The inhabitants and laws of different novels resemble +each other in some degree or we should not be able to understand them. +Great books, and great men, have common qualities, and yet it is true, +in large measure, that they are memorable for their _difference_ from +other books and men. This suggests why histories of literature and +analytical studies of the forms of literature are so often artificial +and lifeless. The critic is fond of grouping books and authors +together, of finding points of resemblance, of marking genius with +brands and labels. In some histories of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare +is neatly placed in the center of a rising and declining “school of +playwrights.” He is laid out like the best specimen of a collection +in a glass case. Shakespeare was a playwright; no doubt he was a +“practical” one. But the important thing about him is that he was the +greatest of poets, and he is not at ease in any school or class of +literary workmen. He is inexplicably, gigantically different from all +other Elizabethan dramatists, and if he is to be grouped at all, his +fellows are the few greatest poets of the world, not his contemporaries +in the art, or the business, of playmaking, the best of whom do not +reach to his shoulder. All the supreme creative geniuses are difficult +to classify. They work in conventional art forms, the drama, the epic, +in which scores of lesser poets have worked; but the greatest art +emerges above the form. When rules of art and sharp characterizations +of schools of art fit snugly on the shoulders of a writer, that alone +is sufficient to prove that he is not a writer of the highest power. + +[Illustration: SCOTT] + +However wisely critics and philosophers may argue about fiction and +other forms of art, inexperienced readers will be narrowing their +outlook if they make up their minds, after one or two experiments +or as a result of a critical opinion which they get at second hand, +that there are certain classes of stories that they do not like. If +one knows that Stevenson is a romanticist and happens to have read +“David Balfour” and failed to like it, it is foolish to rule out the +romantic, for perhaps Dumas will prove better. Some people are tired +beyond recovery of historical novels, because so many bad ones have +been urged upon the public during the last fifteen years. Some people +have decided that they do not like stories that end unhappily. This +seems a thoughtless decision because many of the great fictions from +the “Iliad” to “The Mill on the Floss” terminate with the death of the +principal characters and sadness for the characters that survive. When +we hear some one say, “There is tragedy enough in real life, I want +something pleasant to read,” we may suggest that the great tragedy that +is told in the Gospels has brought more lasting joy and good feeling to +the race than any other story. Not to make so high an argument, I feel +that I could give to any person who pretends to like only “pleasant” +fiction a half dozen tragic novels that would capture and delight this +sad soul that has seen enough of “tragedy in real life.” + +Arguments are unnecessary, for fiction itself outstrips them or +defeats them and triumphs. The public is tired, we say, of historical +romance, and it cannot be charmed by sad stories which end in death +and disaster. Yet during the past winter one of “best sellers” was +Miss Mary Johnston’s “Lewis Rand.” This is an historical romance laid +in Jefferson’s Virginia. It is a tragic romance; the finest gentleman +is killed, the titular hero goes to prison on the last page, a ruin of +ambitious genius, and the heroine, his wife, parts from us at the end +to enter, in the world that lies just beyond the covers of books, a +life of inevitable sadness. + +Individual vitality is what makes the good book. When the good book +appears we like to classify it and examine its form and material, +but its vitality defies us. You may group all your friends and +acquaintances in familiar types, and in thinking of them when they +are absent you may assure yourself that they fall into definite +intelligible classes. But in the presence of any one of them, the most +transparent and simple, you recognize the mystery of a person, a power, +however slight, that is unlike other powers, a vital soul that baffles +analysis. And so it is with books: each makes its effect as a living +individual and it may have an entirely different effect from the book +that seems nearest like it. + +Somebody once expressed the idea that he did not care for Dickens +because so many of his characters are low persons who would not be +interesting to associate with in real life; and other readers have +expressed the same idea, either sincerely or in thoughtless repetition. +If they do not like Dickens, it is probably for some other reason than +that Dickens portrays “common” people, for that reason is not broad +enough to stand on. These same readers may like another writer whose +characters are as low and uncultivated as most of the people whom +Dickens loved. If such a writer is not to be found in our libraries, +his first book may be still unpublished; he may walk to-morrow into the +town where we live, discover the humor and pathos of our commonplace +neighbors, and of the low persons whom we do not acknowledge as +neighbors. And ever after our village will be a shrine for tourists. +The great fiction writer is a magician; he upsets conventional values +in a flash and turns lead into gold in spite of all the chemists. The +true reader of fiction will be a believer in that miracle, and he will +keep his mind receptive to it in every form in which it manifests +itself. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE READING OF FICTION--(_Continued_) + + +In discussing the question of plots we could not keep out the question +of character, which we agreed for the purposes of our discussion is +the second element of fiction. In importance it is the first--the +indispensable element. What is fiction for except to tell us about +human beings? I cannot believe what somebody said, that the three +essentials of stories are first plot, second plot and third plot. In +the first place, that sounds too clever to be true and in the second +place--it is not true. The plot is the means of keeping persons in +action so that we can get to know them. In this “naturalists” and +“realists” find a good argument, for they put their emphasis on human +character. They say: “Here we exhibit you and your friends and your +enemies. Plot? We are telling a story. Stories are all about you. But +we have not forced events out of probable order or distorted the facts +of life beyond recognition for the sake of an exciting situation. We +draw our fellow men, so that you recognize them as they are. Even as +they are in their homes and shops and churches, so they are in these +pages, talking, loving, hating, bargaining, intriguing, dying. We +select the significant, we heighten the values of life; but we portray +life essentially as it is.” True enough. The realist gives us “folks.” +But he has no monopoly of human beings. We are quite as well acquainted +with Alice who wandered in Wonderland and went through the Looking +Glass as we are with Mr. David Copperfield and Miss Maggie Tulliver. +Peter Pan (in Mr. J. M. Barrie’s play), who flew in the face of nature +and refused to grow up, is so true a person that all the children +recognized him at once and old men chuckled and remembered him. + +The English novel is varied and abundant, and its characters, +collectively, form a populous democracy. Everybody is in it somewhere +from peasant to king, and if some of us and our friends have been left +out, new novelists are at hand watching every kind and grade of life +and preparing to fix it in a living page. The American novel is not yet +old and broad enough to have captured all our types of men and women +and recreated them in fiction. But a good beginning has been made. The +varied voices of the American country town are heard from all corners +of the land, but so far most of them have been voices of short compass, +incapable of sustained utterance. We still depend for studies of +American character on sketches and short stories, and these in the mass +are an important body of literature. New England, Virginia, California, +the Middle West, the great cities, have had their short-story writers. +The novelists are still on the way. Our national life is so scattered +and changing that the novelist has difficulty in keeping a group of +Americans together long enough to plot them into a large book. In +Europe where a small town contains every kind of society the novelist +finds the compact social stage all set and characters in abundance. +Anthony Trollope, with little care to plot, sets society to turning in +the quiet eddy of a small cathedral town and presently we are looking +into the heart of England. He introduces the same people into novel +after novel and we are always glad to see them again. The success of +his many novels supports the contention that characters are the staff +of fiction. A defect of plot is easier to pardon than a defect in +character drawing. + +Untruth to human nature, violence either to its waking experiences or +its dreams, destroys a book, destroys the living world it represents +and leaves us holding a thing of ink and paper. The other day I was +reading a novel which has multiplied itself over the land by force +of printing presses and sensational advertising. It is a story about +modern people of an undistinguished but potentially interesting kind; +the heroine is, if I remember right, a confidential secretary to a +business man. The author makes her say something like this to her lover: + +“Ere I knew you, there had come into my life but few pleasures and +diversions; I had been like a bird shut up in a cage; and you set me +free. Yet it was not that alone which attracted me to you. Grateful as +I was, I was charmed, too, by your conversation which was so totally +different than (_sic_) anything I had known heretofore. You saved me +from the wretched monotony of commonplace existence and took me into a +new world, and my gratitude for that blossomed into love”; and so on. + +The only thing in that which sounds like human speech is the blunder +in the use of “than,” which I suspect is an unintentional blunder on +the part of the author. The speech is no more appropriate to the given +character in the given place than a sentence out of Macaulay’s essays. +The most ingenious plotting could not entice a discriminating reader +beyond that dead line of empty words, for they are proof enough that +the author himself does not know his heroine’s character. To be sure, +dialogue in novels cannot be “natural as life,” for actual conversation +taken down word for word is diffuse and hard to read. The conversations +in books must sound natural, appropriate to the place, the time, and +the character of the person whom the reader is expected to believe +in. There cannot be any rules for making conversation; if there are +any rules they are for the novelists to study, not for the reader. +The reader only knows whether the speeches sound right or whether the +author is cheating him by passing off as talk mere words which the +author strung out on paper and did not hear with his inner sense from +the lips of his character. + +In the same book there is a description which I will quote, if I can +resist the temptation to parody it: + +“The house nestled amid the verdurous shade of immense trees; to +the left of the wooded park were sloping lawns dotted here and there +with beds of the most exquisite flowers, which in contrast to the old +weatherbeaten house greatly enhanced the beauty of the scene. Inside +the house the utmost good taste prevailed from the antique colonial +hatrack in the front hall to the handsome, but simple furniture of the +parlor, in one corner of which on a sofa that was a cherished heirloom, +a young girl might have been seen sitting engaged in embroidering a +fine piece of linen. She was beautiful with large dark eyes and a +luxuriant mass of richest brown hair,” and so on. + +Except for the poor fun of making sport of the author no one with a +sense of humor will read beyond that. The author himself cannot see +the place he would present to his reader’s eye. Description, which we +have chosen to regard as the third element of fiction, must aid the +imagination to realize the events and the people or it is worse than +ineffectual. The novelist whose story is “dotted here and there” with +descriptions which really “enhance the beauty” of his story is to be +numbered among the immortals. + +The masters of description touch in details of sound and vision as they +progress with the narrative, and the reader hears and sees without +being aware that he has read description. The more leisurely novelists, +who are great enough to carry a story through three volumes, do often +stop and paint a picture, and even the great ones frequently fail to +get the pictorial effect they seek. Scott’s descriptions sometimes +interfere with his story and descend into a catalogue of details. +But the total effect of his description is to make the entire world +familiar with Scotland, streets, houses, mountains, and moors. It is +part of Scott’s patriotic purpose to preserve in a series of novels the +legend, the history, the character, the ideals, the social customs of +old and new Scotland; and he allows himself, as a kind of antiquarian, +all the space he needs for minute description. So his descriptions +serve a purpose, even when they lack imaginative vision. Moreover, the +great river of his stories is broad and swift enough to carry an amount +of dead wood which would choke narratives of lesser volume and power. + +A great example of a long descriptive passage in fiction is in the +fifty-fifth chapter of “David Copperfield.” There is to be action +enough presently to sweep the reader off his feet; in preparation for +it Dickens gives three or four pages of description of the storm. The +excellence of that description grows upon the reader who finds how +seldom even the better novelists succeed in painting on large canvases. +Few artists in prose have been adequate to the greatness of the sea. +Stevenson has succeeded in giving both the seas on the Scotch coast and +the Pacific with its mysterious islands. Of living writers in English +the masters of “sea pieces” are Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Joseph +Conrad. But none of the younger writers, even of those especially +devoted to the sea, has excelled Dickens, landsman and London cockney +as he was, in that great picture of the storm. + +I once knew some young ladies who were enamored of the books of that +third-rate novelist, Miss Marie Corelli. To be fair, I never read +but two of her novels, and though they are so false that I doubt her +ability to write anything beautiful and true, she may have written +masterpieces that I have unfortunately missed. The young ladies had +named their club after one of Miss Corelli’s books. I asked one +worshipper what she liked in her favorite novelist. The reply was +startling: “I love the beautiful descriptions.” It was interesting +to find a young lady who liked beautiful descriptions for their own +sake--most of us are not so far advanced in our critical enjoyment of +fiction--and it was interesting to learn that Miss Corelli had written +beautiful descriptions. But when I ungraciously pressed the matter, my +friend confessed that she could not find any descriptive passage that +seemed especially worth exhibiting. + +The secret of this case, if we are ungallant enough to subject to +inquisition so tender a thing as a young lady’s conscience and +literary tastes, is that she had learned from some muddied source +that a beautiful description is a precious thing in a novel. She was +afraid that the things in the book which really interested her might +not be admirable--though I dare say they are harmless enough--and so +she presented that little white excuse for reading the novel. Just +so ladies who are not young have been known to admire a fiction of +doubtful character wholly for its “exquisite style,” when if they +really appreciated “exquisite style,” they would be reading something +else. + +There is an enjoyment of style that seems either apart from the +other kinds of enjoyment in reading or is a refinement, an addition, +which makes the other kinds keener. In choosing novels, however, +we do not need, as a practical matter, to hunt for style, any more +than we need to hunt for descriptions, for the writer who is great +enough to contrive plots and draw characters must have learned how +to write well. The good novels are all in good style. The fiction +maker whose style is poor is almost certain to fail in other ways +and be altogether unacceptable. It is true that among the great ones +some have more distinction of manner than others. Thackeray never +writes so clumsily as Dickens at his worst. Stevenson’s phrasing is +invariably excellent, whereas a greater novelist, Walter Scott, often +for pages at a time throws off his sentences so hastily that they are +not easy, not pleasant, to read. Jane Austen in her style is near to +perfection; George Eliot, a writer of much more power, whose heights +of eloquence are not equaled by any other woman, seems sometimes to be +either expressing a kind of thought, or expressing it in a vocabulary +and with a complexity of construction, which would be tolerable in a +philosophic essay but is not suited to fictitious narrative. It is well +to begin to be aware of the degrees of style and their general effect, +to enjoy beauty and eloquence and grace in some measure for their own +sake. But the inexperienced reader is safe to choose his novels for +their substance; the style will usually be adequate and the merits of +the style will enter the reader’s consciousness gradually and without +effort of appreciation on his part. + +In choosing novels the ordinary reader need not at first +concern himself with the history of a novelist or his technical +characteristics, or with the place which critics have given to him in +their schemes of literary development. A simple method of selection is +to find on somebody’s advice a novel that has interested many readers, +and then if it prove good, to try another by the same author. If a +writer has produced two novels that interest you, it is safe to assume +that he has written a third and a fourth. Some writers, it is true, +have been distinguished for a single masterpiece. “Don Quixote” is +the only book of Cervantes’ that we are likely to care for. “Robinson +Crusoe” is all that most people have found good in Defoe’s tales +(though there is much merit in his other stories). No other book of +Mrs. Stowe’s is even second to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Vicar of +Wakefield” is the glorious whole of Goldsmith’s narrative prose, +though he succeeded in every other form of literature, including the +prose drama. But the man who can write two novels can write three if +he has time; the two-novel power is likely to be a ten-novel power +with torpedo fleets of short stories and essays. Anyone who has liked +“Silas Marner” and “Middlemarch” will not need to be urged to read +“Felix Holt,” “Adam Bede,” “Romola,” “The Mill on the Floss.” The +person who has once read and enjoyed two novels of Dickens is likely +to read six or eight. “Pendennis” leads to “The Newcomes.” And any +of Trollope’s “Barchester,” novels is an introduction to the happily +interminable series. + +[Illustration: HAWTHORNE] + +I have purposely said little about the short story, because in this day +of magazines we all read short stories, some of them pretty good ones. +There are fifty persons who can write one or two acceptable short tales +to one who can make a novel of moderate merit. And the great writers of +the tale have often been novelists as well, so that if one begins to +read novels one will meet with the best short stories which have been +worth collecting into volumes. Readers of “The House of Seven Gables” +and “The Scarlet Letter” will make the acquaintance of Hawthorne’s +“Twice Told Tales” and “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Among modern +fictionists of importance Poe stands almost alone as a writer of tales +who never tried the longer and greater form of the novel, though there +are several excellent authors, such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Miss Sarah +Orne Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, whose short tales outweigh in +value, if not in quantity, their more extended narratives. + +In our discussion of fiction we have dwelt entirely on books for +adults and neglected what is known as juvenile fiction. Here again the +omission was intended. Juvenile fiction is certain to make its way +in more than ample supply into American homes, and I doubt whether +fiction that is wholly good for adults is not the best for boys +and girls of, say, thirteen. When our fathers and mothers, or our +grandfathers and grandmothers, were young, they read the newest book +by Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and were no worse for having +fewer “juveniles” than modern publishers purvey for the benefit of +the growing generation. I should think that Henty’s books, which have +merits, but were turned out on a steam lathe, would suggest that +Scott’s historical romances are better, and that the Pattys and Pollys +and Lucys and Brendas, whose adventures are chronicled in many an +entertaining series would speedily make way for heroines like Maggie +Tulliver and heroes like Master Tom Brown, whose youth is perennial. +When “juveniles” are really good, parents read them after children have +gone to bed. I do not know whether “Tom Brown at Rugby” is catalogued +by the careful librarians as a book for boys, but I am sure it is a +book for men. I dare say that a good many pairs of eyes that have +passed over the pages of Mr. John T. Trowbridge and Elijah Kellogg and +Louisa Alcott have been old enough to wear spectacles. And if Mrs. Kate +Douglas Wiggin ever thought that in “Timothy’s Quest” and “Rebecca” she +was writing books especially for the young, adult readers have long +since claimed her for their own. I have enjoyed Mr. A. S. Pier’s tales +of the boys at “St. Timothy’s,” though he planned them for younger +readers. We are told on good authority that _St. Nicholas_ and _The +Youth’s Companion_ appear in households where there are no children, +and they give a considerable portion of their space to serial stories +written for young people. Between good “juveniles” and good books for +grown persons there is not much essential difference. + +Anyone who is old enough to make out the words can safely enter +the large world of the English and American novel. The chances of +encountering the few that are unfit for the young are slight. Ruskin in +his essay “Of Queens’ Gardens,” which treats of the education of girls, +says: “Whether novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be +chosen, not for what is _out_ of them but for what is _in_ them. The +chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide itself +in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; but the +emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly degrades +her.” A novel in our language that has been read and freely talked of +for many years is as safe as a church; and there are enough such novels +to keep one happily occupied during all the hours one can give to +reading fiction to the end of one’s days. + + +LIST OF FICTION + +_Supplementary to Chapter IV_ + +The following list of novels, tales, and prose dramas is offered to the +young reader by way of suggestion and not as a “prescribed” list. Like +the other lists in this book it omits many masterpieces that will occur +immediately to the mind of the older reader, and it includes some +books that are not masterpieces. The notes, or “evaluations” as the +librarians call them, are arbitrary, indicating the private opinions +of the present Guide; they are sometimes extensive in the case of less +important writers and are omitted in the cases of the great masters. +The way to use the list is to run over it from time to time until you +form a bowing acquaintance with the names of a few authors and some of +their books. One title or another is likely to attract you or excite +your curiosity. If you follow the impulse of that aroused curiosity and +go get the book, the list will have served its purpose. + + EDMOND FRANÇOIS VALENTIN ABOUT (1828-85). _Le Roi des Montagnes._ + +Easy to read in French, and to be found translated into English. + + ÆSOP. _Fables._ + +Found in many editions, some especially selected and illustrated for +children. + + LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832-88). _An Old-Fashioned Girl._ _Little Women._ + _Little Men._ _Work._ _Jack and Jill._ _Jo’s Boys._ + +Miss Alcott has always been a favorite of young people. Her faithful +and wholesome stories of life in a New England country town entitle +her to place in the delightful company of Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne +Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, and Miss Alice Brown. + + THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907). _The Story of a Bad Boy._ _Marjorie + Daw._ + +A delicate romancer with subtle humor and a turn for paradoxical +ingenious fooling which is characteristic in one form or another of +American writers as unlike as Frank R. Stockton, Edward Everett Hale, +and Mark Twain. + + + JAMES LANE ALLEN. _Flute and Violin._ _The Blue Grass Region._ _A + Kentucky Cardinal._ _Aftermath._ + + + HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (1805-75). _Fairy Tales._ + +To be found in _Everyman’s Library_. This collection of books, +published at fifty cents the volume by E. P. Dutton & Co., is perhaps +the best ever grouped in an inexpensive edition. It will be frequently +referred to in this and succeeding lists. Most of the books in it are +worth reading and no doubt worth buying, and this is true of most +“Universal Libraries,” “Libraries of the World’s Best Literature,” +“Five-Foot Book Shelves,” etc. But for variety’s sake one would wish +not to have all the books on one’s shelves in the same style of type +and binding. And in general it is better to buy the book one wants, +distinguished by its title and author, than to take as a whole any +editor’s or publisher’s collection of “classics.” + + + RASMUS BJÖRN ANDERSON. _Norse Mythology._ + +The simplest form in which to read the stories of the Eddas and +Scandinavian myths. It is at once a lore book for students and a +wonder book for young and old. + +_Arabian Nights._ In a volume of _Everyman’s Library_. Another good +edition is that prepared by Andrew Lang. + + + JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817). _Sense and Sensibility._ _Pride and + Prejudice._ _Mansfield Park._ _Emma._ _Northanger Abbey._ _Persuasion._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850). _Atheist’s Mass._ _The Chouans._ _Christ + in Flanders._ _Eugénie Grandet._ _Old Goriot._ _The Quest of the + Absolute._ _Wild Ass’s Skin._ + +These are the works of Balzac found in translation in _Everyman’s +Library_. All the novels of Balzac have been translated into English. +Balzac is not the easiest of French novelists to read in the original, +though not very difficult. The young American who will take the +trouble, and give himself the pleasure, of reading a score of French +novels will find himself with a good reading knowledge of the language, +and school and college examinations in French will lose their terror. + + + JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE. _Auld Licht Idylls._ _A Window in Thrums._ _The + Little Minister._ _Sentimental Tommy._ _Tommy and Grizel._ + +Mr. Barrie has the most tender and whimsical imagination of living +writers in English. His later work has been largely for the stage. + + + RICHARD DODDRIDGE BLACKMORE (1825-1900). _Lorna Doone._ + + + GEORGE HENRY BORROW (1803-81). _Lavengro._ _Romany Rye._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816-55). _Jane Eyre._ + + + EMILY BRONTË (1818-48). _Wuthering Heights._ + + + ALICE BROWN. _King’s End._ _Meadow Grass._ _Tiverton Tales._ + + + JOHN BROWN (1810-82). _Rab and His Friends._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + THOMAS BULFINCH. _The Age of Chivalry, or Legends of King Arthur._ + _The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology._ _Legends of Charlemagne, + or Romance of the Middle Ages._ + +The prose storehouse of Arthurian legend in English is Thomas Mallory’s +“Morte d’Arthur,” which is in two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_. +But Mallory is not easy reading. The finest versions are those by the +poets, Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and +Iseult,” Swinburne’s “Tale of Balen.” Modern prose versions suited +to young readers are Howard Pyle’s “Story of King Arthur and his +Knights,” Sidney Lanier’s “Boy’s King Arthur” and Andrew Lang’s “Book +of Romance.” Legends allied to the Arthurian stories are found in +Lady Guest’s “Mabinogian,” which appears in one volume in _Everyman’s +Library_. See also “The Boy’s Mabinogian,” by Sidney Lanier. + +The stories of Charlemagne are found in a volume suited for young +readers edited by Alfred John Church. + +Classic mythology in its highest form is, of course, to be found in the +Greek and Roman poets, and it permeates English poetry. Prose versions +of Greek and Roman tales suited to young readers are to be found in +Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book” and “Tanglewood Tales,” Charles +Kingsley’s “The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,” and +“Stories from the Greek Tragedians,” by Alfred John Church. See also “A +Child’s Guide to Mythology,” by Helen A. Clarke. + + + HENRY CUYLUR BUNNER (1855-96). _Short Sixes._ + +Among the best American short stories. + + + JOHN BUNYAN (1628-88). _The Pilgrim’s Progress._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_ and many other cheap editions. + + + FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. _Little Lord Fauntleroy._ _Editha’s Burglar._ + _Sara Crewe._ + + + FRANCES BURNEY (Madame d’Arblay, 1752-1840). _Evelina._ + + + GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE. _Old Creole Days._ _The Grandissimes._ + + + MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA (1547-1616). _Don Quixote._ + +[Illustration: COOPER] + +In Motteux’s translation in two volumes of _Everyman’s Library_, and +other popular editions. + + + SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (“Mark Twain”). _Tom Sawyer._ _The Prince + and the Pauper._ _Huckleberry Finn._ _A Connecticut Yankee in King + Arthur’s Court._ _Pudd’nhead Wilson._ _Personal Recollections of Joan + of Arc._ _The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg._ + + + WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS (1824-89). _The Woman in White._ _The + Moonstone._ + + + JOSEPH CONRAD. _Youth._ _Falk._ _The Children of the Sea._ _Typhoon._ + +One of the most remarkable of recent writers, a Pole who adopted the +English language and has contributed to its beauties. Unsurpassed as a +writer of stories of the sea. + + + JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851). _The Spy._ _The Pilot._ _The Last + of the Mohicans._ _The Prairie._ _The Pathfinder._ _The Deerslayer._ + _The Red Rover._ + +The young reader had better plunge into Cooper before he ceases to be +a young reader; not that the adult reader cannot enjoy these virile +narratives, which have been read all over the world for nearly a +century, they will always remain important records of early American +life; but better fiction soon displaces them, growth in literary taste +makes evident the defects which Mark Twain sets forth in his witty +essay on Cooper; and to have grown beyond Cooper without having met +and enjoyed him means a genuine loss. + + + DINAH MARIA CRAIK (Mrs. Mulock, 1826-87). _John Halifax, Gentleman._ + + + FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD (1854-1909). _Mr. Isaacs._ _Dr. Claudius._ + _Saracinesca._ _Sant’ Ilario._ _A Cigarette Maker’s Romance._ + +Crawford had a vein of real genius which is obscured by the great +number of his less meritorious books. + + + GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-92). _Prue and I._ + +This pleasant, fine-hearted humorist should not be neglected by the +rising generation of Americans. + + + GEORGE CUPPLES (1822-91). _The Green Hand._ + + + RICHARD HENRY DANA (1815-82). _Two Years Before the Mast._ + +It is a happy accident that Dana’s name follows that of Cupples. Fifty +years ago in “The Green Hand” and “Two Years Before the Mast” England +and America held command of the sea in fiction. This is an appropriate +place to mention three books by the American writer, Herman Melville +(1819-91), “Omoo,” “Typee” and “Moby Dick,” which are big enough to +sail in the fleet with Cupples and Dana. Sea craft are growing larger +every year but not sea books, though Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Rudyard +Kipling, Mr. Frank Bullen and Mr. Clark Russell are taking us on good +voyages under sail and steam. + + + ALPHONSE DAUDET (1840-97). _Le Petit Chose._ _Jack._ _Tartarin of + Tarascon._ _Contes Choisis._ + +Among the easiest of French writers to read in the original. Several of +his books have been published in English. + + + RICHARD HARDING DAVIS. _Gallegher._ _Van Bibber and Others._ + +Fresh and charming short stories by a writer who has not fulfilled the +promise of his youth. + + + EDMONDO DE AMICIS. _Heart; A School Boy’s Journal._ + +A fine story of schoolboy life, to be found in English translation. + + + DANIEL DEFOE (166?-1731). _Robinson Crusoe._ + + + WILLIAM DE MORGAN. _Joseph Vance._ _Alice-for-Short._ _Somehow Good._ + + + CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70). + +No list of titles is necessary under the name of Dickens. There are +innumerable editions of his works. + + + BENJAMIN DISRAELI (Lord Beaconsfield, 1804-81). VIVIAN GREY. + CONINGSBY. LOTHAIR. SYBIL. + + + CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON (“Lewis Carroll”). _Alice’s Adventures in + Wonderland._ _Through the Looking Glass._ _Silvie and Bruno._ + +And we could not be happy without “The Hunting of the Snark” and other +verses in Lewis Carroll’s “Rhyme and Reason.” + + + ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. _Adventures of Sherlock Holmes._ _Memoirs of + Sherlock Holmes._ _Micah Clark._ _The White Company._ + +The fame of the Sherlock Holmes stories has thrown somewhat into the +background the best of Sir Conan Doyle’s work, the two historical +romances. + + + ALEXANDRE DUMAS, Père (1803-70). + +No list of titles is necessary under Dumas’s name. For though he and +his “syndicate” of assistants produced a great number of mediocre +works, those most frequently met in English are good, “The Three +Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Queen’s Necklace” and +“Twenty Years After.” + + + GEORGE DU MAURIER (1831-96). _Peter Ibbetson._ _Trilby._ + + + EDWARD EGGLESTON. _The Hoosier Schoolmaster._ _The Hoosier Schoolboy._ + + + GEORGE ELIOT (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80). + +No titles are necessary under George Eliot’s name. Several of her +novels are in _Everyman’s Library_, and there are other inexpensive +editions. + + + ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN (Emile Erckmann and Louis Alexandre Chatrian). + _Friend Fritz._ _The Blockade of Phalsburg._ _Madame Thérèse._ _The + Story of a Conscript._ _Waterloo._ + +The two last named are in _Everyman’s Library_. + + + ANATOLE FRANCE (Thibault). _Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard._ _From a + Mother of Pearl Casket._ + +All the works of this writer are being translated into English. The +title given above in English is a translated collection of some of his +short stories. + + + ALICE FRENCH (Octave Thanet). _Stories of a Western Town._ + + + ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-65). _Cranford._ + + + JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832). _Wilhelm Meister’s + Apprenticeship and Travels._ + +In Carlyle’s translation. + + + OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _The Vicar of Wakefield._ _She Stoops to + Conquer._ _The Good-Natured Man._ + + + KENNETH GRAHAME. _The Golden Age._ _Dream Days._ + + + JAKOB AND WILHELM GRIMM. _Fairy Tales._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + EDWARD EVERETT HALE (1822-1909). _The Man Without a Country._ + +The volume under this title, published by Little, Brown & Co., contains +the best of Dr. Hale’s short stories. The title story is a masterpiece +of fiction and the greatest of all sermons on patriotism. + + + LUDOVIC HALÉVY. _The Abbé Constantin._ + +A charming story in simple French, and to be found translated into +English. + + + THOMAS HARDY. _Far from the Madding Crowd._ _The Return of the + Native._ _The Mayor of Casterbridge._ _A Pair of Blue Eyes._ _Under + the Greenwood Tree._ + +Incomparably the greatest of living novelists of our race. Certain +characteristics of his later novels make them neither pleasant nor +intelligible to young readers, but any of those here mentioned is as +well adapted to the reader of any age as are George Eliot’s “Adam Bede” +and Thackeray’s “Pendennis.” + + + JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. _Uncle Remus._ _Nights with Uncle Remus._ + _Mingo._ _Free Joe._ + + + FRANCIS BRET HARTE (1839-1902). _The Luck of Roaring Camp._ + +The volume of this title, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., +contains the best of Harte’s short stories, and the best remain very +good indeed, though since they took the world by storm other writers +have given us a truer insight into the life which Harte was the first +to discover and proclaim. Harte is a capital humorist in his way, both +in his swaggering hearty short stories (see “Colonel Starbottle’s +Client”) and in his parodies (see “Condensed Novels”). + + + NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-64). + +No list of titles is necessary under Hawthorne’s name. America has no +other literary artist of his stature and perfection, and he is the one +American whose works we can say “you ought to read” entire--we dare say +it, that is, to American readers. + + + MAURICE HEWLETT. _Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay._ + +Mr. Hewlett is one of the ten or twelve important living writers of +English fiction. I have seen no book of his which is not good. I give +only one title; his brilliant and varied achievement in the past decade +makes difficult the selection of other titles for this limited list. + + + OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Elsie Venner._ _Guardian Angel._ + +Holmes’s fiction is subordinate both to his essays and his poems, and +should be postponed until the reader has become a true lover of the +Autocrat. The novels are good for the reason, if for no other, that +Holmes was one of the rare geniuses who cannot write otherwise than +with wisdom and charm. + + + ANTHONY HOPE (Hawkins). _The Prisoner of Zenda._ + +The first in point of time and excellence of a now numerous class of +historical novels in which the history and the geography as well as the +“story” are fictitious. + + + WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. _A Chance Acquaintance._ _The Lady of the + Aroostook._ _Dr. Breen’s Practice._ _A Modern Instance._ _The Rise of + Silas Lapham._ _The Minister’s Charge._ _April Hopes._ _The Flight of + Pony Baker._ + + + THOMAS HUGHES (1823-96). _Tom Brown’s Schooldays._ _Tom Brown at + Oxford._ + + + VICTOR HUGO (1812-85). _Les Miserables._ _Quatrevingt-Treize._ _Notre + Dame de Paris._ _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._ + +Hugo’s novels appear in several English translations. + + + HENRIK IBSEN. _Prose Dramas._ + +Edited and translated by William Archer and others. The reading of +Ibsen, the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century, may be +postponed until the reader has come to mature views of life. + + + WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859). _Sketch-Book._ _Tales of a Traveler._ + _Bracebridge Hall._ + + + W. W. JACOBS. _Many Cargoes._ _Light Freights._ _Dialstone Lane._ + +A teller of delightfully droll stories. Like Frank R. Stockton, a much +finer artist than the more serious-minded critics would be disposed to +admit. It is difficult to select for this list the best of the score of +talented short-story writers of the day. Perhaps this is a good place +to slip in the name of a contemporary American whose fresh and original +stories have deservedly survived their day in the magazines and been +collected in volumes--Mr. Sidney Porter, “O. Henry.” + + + HENRY JAMES. _Roderick Hudson._ _Daisy Miller._ _The American._ _The + Portrait of a Lady._ _The Princess Casamassima._ + +Young readers should beware of misleading chatter about Mr. James +which appears in columns of book gossip and newspaper comment; it +attempts to turn Mr. James into a joke and caricatures his subtlety +and obscurity; it is analogous to the flippant and derisive nonsense +through which Browning lived to reach the people at last. “Roderick +Hudson” is a great novel and is as clear, strong, and easy to read as +the work of any other thoughtful novelist you may choose for comparison. + +[Illustration: ELIOT] + + + SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909). _Country By-Ways._ _A Country Doctor._ + _A White Heron._ _Strangers and Wayfarers._ _The Country of the + Pointed Firs._ + +Stories of the better classes of New England country folk written in a +style of unblemished clarity and sweetness. + + + MARY JOHNSTON. _Lewis Rand._ + + + CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-75). _Alton Locke._ _Hypatia._ _Westward Ho!_ + + + RUDYARD KIPLING. _Plain Tales from the Hills._ _Many Inventions._ + _Wee Willie Winkie._ _Life’s Handicap._ _Soldiers Three._ _In Black + and White._ _The Story of the Gadsbys._ _The Light that Failed._ _The + Jungle Book._ _The Second Jungle Book._ _The Day’s Work._ _Captains + Courageous._ _Kim._ + +In spite of a curiously eager disposition on the part of current +writers to regard Kipling’s career as over and done, he is the foremost +living writer of short stories in English, and of no other young living +writer can it be so safely averred that he has become one of the +established classics of his race. + + + FRIEDRICH HEINRICH KARL DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ (1777-1843). _Undine._ + + + PIERRE LOTI (L. M. J. Viaud). _An Iceland Fisherman._ + +This and the autobiographical “Romance of a Child,” and several of +Loti’s books of travel are in English. + + + EDWARD G. E. L. BULWER-LYTTON (1801-72). _Harold, the Last of the + Saxon Kings._ _Last Days of Pompeii._ + +Lord Lytton is one of the Victorian novelists whose great reputation is +growing rapidly less, and deservedly so, but his historical novels are +more than worth reading. + + + GEORGE MACDONALD (1824-1905). _David Elginbrod._ _Robert Falconer._ + _Sir Gibbie._ _At the Back of the North Wind._ + +A novelist whose popularity among younger readers is probably less than +his great merits. + + + XAVIER DE MAISTRE (1764-1852). _La Jeune Sibérienne._ + + + ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1785-1873). _The Betrothed Lovers._ + +There are several English translations of this most famous of Italian +historical romances. + + + FREDERICK MARRYAT (1792-1848). _Jacob Faithful._ _Peter Simple._ _Mr. + Midshipman Easy._ _Masterman Ready._ + + + A. E. W. MASON. _The Four Feathers._ + +A story of bravery and cowardice of unusual merit. + + + GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850-93). _The Odd Number._ + +This is an English translation of some of Maupassant’s best tales. + + + GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909). _Harry Richmond._ _Beauchamp’s Career._ + _Rhoda Fleming._ _Evan Harrington._ + +At his death the foremost English man of letters. A noble poet and +a novelist who easily stands among the few greatest of the century. +A taste for Meredith grows on the individual as it has grown on the +general world of readers. The novels in this list include not all the +greatest but the best for the new reader to try first. + + + PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-70). _Colomba._ + +In easy French, and has been translated into English. + + + SILAS WEIR MITCHELL. _Hugh Wynne._ _Roland Blake._ + + + MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1786-1855). _Our Village._ + + + WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-96). _The Well at the World’s End._ + +Readers who chance to like this prose poem by a devoted apostle of +liberty and beauty will be led to his other romances in prose and verse. + + + MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (“Charles Egbert Craddock”). _In the Tennessee + Mountains._ _Down the Ravine._ _In the Clouds._ _In the Stranger + People’s Country._ + +Portrays the solitude and pathos of the life of the mountaineers of +Tennessee. In sincerity and the genuineness of the substance better +than in workmanship. + + + _Nibelungenlied._ + +The story of the Treasure of the Nibelungs is told for young readers by +A. J. Church in “Heroes of Chivalry and Romance.” It is also found in +“Wagner Opera Stories” by G. E. Barber, and in “The Wagner Story Book” +by W. H. Frost. Any critical or biographical work on Wagner will take +the reader into this great German legend. + + + FRANK NORRIS. _The Octopus._ _The Pit._ + +A serious novelist cut off in his prime before his work attained the +greatness that it seemed to promise. + + + MARGARET OLIPHANT (1828-97). _Chronicles of Carlingford._ _A + Beleaguered City._ + + + ALFRED OLLIVANT. _Bob, Son of Battle._ + +A first-rate story of a dog. + + + THOMAS NELSON PAGE. _Elsket._ _In Ole Virginia._ + +A sincere and sympathetic portrayer of old and new Virginia. As is +generally true of American fictionists, he is better in the short +story than in the novel. + + + GILBERT PARKER. _Pierre and His People._ _The Battle of the Strong._ + _Seats of the Mighty._ + + + ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. _Fourteen to One._ _A Singular Life._ + + + EDEN PHILLPOTTS. _Children of the Mist._ _The Human Boy._ _The Secret + Woman._ + +One of the distinguished living novelists of England. + + + EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49). _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque._ + +There are many single-volume editions of Poe’s short stories. An +inexpensive complete edition of Poe is published by G. P. Putnam’s +Sons. The best and final edition of Poe is that edited by Stedman and +Woodberry. + + + JANE PORTER (1776-1850). _Scottish Chiefs._ + + + HOWARD PYLE. _Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood._ _The Garden Behind + the Moon._ + +Mr. Pyle’s books are delightful for the illustrations. The competence +of his painting and his dramatic and literary imagination make him +the foremost American illustrator, and the texts which he writes +to accompany his drawings are adequate, though not in themselves +remarkable. + + + RUDOLF ERICH RASPE. _Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchausen._ + +In the translation edited by Thomas Seccombe. A selection of the +Münchausen stories for young people made by Dr. Edward Everett Hale, is +published by D. C. Heath & Co. + + + CHARLES READE (1814-84). _The Cloister and the Hearth._ _Hard Cash._ + _Put Yourself in His Place._ + + + SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761). _Clarissa Harlowe._ + +There is an abridged edition of this very long novel. + + + GEORGE SAND (A. L. A. Dupin, 1804-76). _Consuelo._ _The Little + Fadette._ _The Devil’s Pool._ _Mauprat._ + +These and others of George Sand’s novels are in English. + + + WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832). + +No list of titles is necessary under Scott’s name. + + + ERNEST THOMPSON SETON. _Biography of a Grizzly._ + +A nature writer who for the most part wisely and artistically embodies +his knowledge of animals in fiction where they are not subjected to +those acid tests of fact which have recently betrayed the base metal in +some of the other modern writers about nature. + + + ANNA SEWELL. _Black Beauty._ + +The story of a horse; a tract in the interests of kindness to animals +which proved to be more than a tract, a charming and immensely popular +piece of imaginative writing. + + + HENRYK SIENKIWICZ. _The Deluge._ _Quo Vadis._ _With Fire and Sword._ + +In the translation by Jeremiah Curtin. + + + WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806-70). _The Scout._ + +A writer historically important to Americans because he had a great +vogue in his day and accomplished much in a time when there was no +American literature south of Poe’s Richmond. Simms is an inferior +writer, but “The Scout” is a vigorous narrative and will interest young +readers. + + + RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN (1751-1816). _Dramatic Works._ + +In _Bohn’s Library_ and in one volume of _Everyman’s Library_. + + + JOSEPH HENRY SHORTHOUSE. _John Inglesant._ + + + ANNIE TRUMBULL SLOSSON. _Seven Dreamers._ _Story-Tell Lib._ + + + FRANCIS HOPKINSON SMITH. _Colonel Carter of Cartersville._ + + + ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _Treasure Island._ _Prince Otto._ + _Kidnapped._ _David Balfour._ _The Merry Men._ _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. + Hyde._ _The Black Arrow._ _The Master of Ballantrae._ _St. Ives._ + + + FRANK RICHARD STOCKTON (1834-1902). _Rudder Grange._ _The Casting Away + of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine._ _The Floating Prince and Other Fairy + Tales._ _The Lady or the Tiger?_ _A Chosen Few._ _A Story-Teller’s + Pack._ + + + HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1812-96). _Uncle Tom’s Cabin._ + + + RUTH MCENERY STUART. _The Golden Wedding._ _Sonny._ + +Perhaps the wittiest of all contemporaneous writers about southern life. + + + JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745). _Gulliver’s Travels._ + +There are several editions of “Gulliver” prepared for schools. It is to +be found in _Everyman’s Library_. The book is, of course, a satirical +essay on man; it is also a masterpiece of fictitious narrative. + + + WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63). + +No list of titles is necessary under this name. + + + LEOF NICOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. _War and Peace._ + +Advanced students of French can read the French version of this novel. +A good English version is that by Leo Wiener. + + + ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-82). _The Warden._ _Barchester Towers._ + _Framley Parsonage._ _Dr. Thorne._ _The Small House at Allington._ + _Last Chronicle of Barset._ (The foregoing six constitute the + _Chronicles of Barsetshire_.) _Can You Forgive Her?_ _Phineas Finn._ + _Phineas Redux._ _The Prime Minister._ _The Duke’s Children._ _The + Eustace Diamonds._ (The foregoing six constitute the _Parliamentary + Novels_.) _Is He Popenjoy?_ _Orley Farm._ _The Vicar of Bullhampton._ + (The last are called the _Manor House Novels_.) + +This list, disproportionately long perhaps, seems justifiable because +Trollope wrote an incredible number of novels not all of which are +equally good, and because his books are in the present quarter century +not so widely read as they should be. After Dickens, Thackeray, and +George Eliot, who are the highest peaks in the half century (we cannot +quite measure Meredith and Hardy yet), Anthony Trollope is easily +fourth. And even among the peaks the broad massive plateau of his work +seems more and more to have enduring solidity. Like Balzac in France +(though little like him, book for book), Trollope has written England’s +_comédie humaine_. With him quantity is a quality, for he is a master +in large part by virtue of his bulk; no other novelist seems to have +told so much about the daily life of his nation. The one thing lacking +to make Trollope a very great writer of fiction is that his prose is +not eloquent; though it is good, it has no moments of supreme goodness; +but few other English novelists have sustained such a level of merit +through so many volumes. + + + JOHN TOWNSEND TROWBRIDGE. _Neighbor Jackwood._ _Jack Hazard and His + Fortunes._ _A Chance for Himself._ _Doing His Best._ _Cudjo’s Cave._ + _The Tinkham Brothers’ Tidemill._ + +No other writer of equal ability has devoted himself to books for boys. + + + IVAN SERGYEVICH TURGENIEFF (1818-83). _Fathers and Children._ _Smoke._ + +Several of Turgenieff’s novels have been translated into English. The +English reader should, if possible, read Russian novels in French. + + + ALFRED DE VIGNY (1799-1863). _Cinq-Mars._ + +This great historical novel is in easy French. It has been published in +an English translation. + + + MARY ARNOLD WARD (Mrs. Humphrey Ward). _Robert Elsmere._ + +An English writer of excellent ideals and deep seriousness, overrated +by Americans who seem to think that she is giving them the “true +inwardness” of British high life. + + + ELIZABETH CHERRY WALTZ. _Pa Gladden._ + +Humorous and touching stories of a Kentucky farmer. + + + CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (1829-1900). _A Little Journey in the World._ + _The Golden House._ + + + JOHN WATSON (“Ian Maclaren”). _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush._ _The + Days of Auld Lang Syne._ + + + EDWARD NOYES WESTCOTT. _David Harum._ + +An illustration of the fact that a true humorous character will catch +the fancy of the world, no matter in how defective a plot it is +embodied. + + + KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN (Mrs. Riggs). _The Birds’ Christmas Carol._ + _Penelope’s Progress._ _The Story of Patsy._ _Timothy’s Quest._ + _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm._ + + + MARY ELEANOR WILKINS (Mrs. Freeman). _A Humble Romance._ _A New + England Nun._ _Jane Field._ _Pembroke._ _Jerome, a Poor Man._ _Silence + and Other Stories._ + + + OWEN WISTER. _The Virginian._ _Lady Baltimore._ + + + ISRAEL ZANGWILL. _Children of the Ghetto._ _Dreamers of the Ghetto._ + + + + +CHAPTER V + +THE READING OF POETRY + + +When Julia Bryant, the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, was a +child, a neighbor of the poet made her first call, and was shown into +the parlor. She found the small Julia seated on the floor with an +illustrated volume of Milton in her lap. She knew, of course, that the +pictures and not the text engaged the child’s attention, but by way of +beginning an acquaintance, she asked: + +“Reading poetry already, little girl”? + +Julia looked up and regarded her gravely. Then with an air of politely +correcting ignorance, she explained: + +“People don’t _read_ poetry. Papas write poetry, and mamas sing poetry, +and little girls learn to say poetry, but nobody reads poetry. That +isn’t what it’s for.” + +If the several members of all families were as happily accounted for as +those in Bryant’s household, the Muses would not live so remote from +this world. That mothers sing poetry and little girls say it is enough +to keep it everlastingly alive. The trouble is that few households are +blessed with papas who write poetry; and there are none too many papas +who read it. + +If we have not learned to read poetry, let us begin now. Suppose we +read and commit to memory the following stanza, and then talk a little +about it. + + Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! + No hungry generations tread thee down; + The voice I heard this passing night was heard + In ancient days by emperor and clown: + Perhaps the self-same song that found a path + Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, + She stood in tears amid the alien corn; + The same that oft-times hath + Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam + Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. + +This is from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is one of the most +musical, most magical stanzas in all English poetry; that much anyone +can tell you who has read the poets. But to tell you in what consists +its glory is beyond any critic who is not a poet; nothing of analysis +can add to the effect it is making in your ears, in your brain, now +that you have committed it to memory. One of the best of English +critics--and he was a poet, too--Matthew Arnold, in his essay, “The +Study of Poetry,” made but a dull and wordy discourse when he tried +to tell what the qualities of poetry are. Only by reading the rest of +the poem, and then the rest of Keats, and then other poets, can you +increase for yourself the delight of those wonderful lines. If they do +not tempt you to the great excursion into the poets, you have not read +them over, you have not repeated them aloud often enough. Only for the +sake of dwelling upon these lines, and because we have agreed to talk +about poetry, and not because our comment can reveal the secret, let us +go back and study the stanza. + +The nightingale’s song is the voice of immortality. It releases the +individual soul from the present hour, from the struggle of life and +makes it one with the great experiences of the race. The imagination +sweeps over all history on the wings of those first four lines, and +then carries us into the world of religious story, in the lines +recalling the Book of Ruth. And finally we are borne out of the human +world into fairyland. All this in a single stanza! + +Every poem of high quality, every one of the treasured passages from +long poems, makes such a magic flight into the realm of eternal ideas, +so that it is commonly said that poetry is “uplifting.” Life and death +and Heaven and the stars are the poet’s subjects. And the poem of +common things, in praise of simple virtues and domestic happiness, such +as have made Burns and Longfellow and Whittier so dear to the heart, +have the same kind of power in less degree; if they do not transport us +to Heaven they reveal the seed of immortality in daily circumstance. + +Keats bears the imagination over the world and beyond it in a single +stanza. All poetry of the highest rank has this power to utter eternity +in a few words. And though at first it seems a contradictory thing to +say, it is true that the long poem has the same quality of compression; +it makes long flights of idea in relatively short compass of words. +The time of reading, the time that the physical eye needs to catch +the winged sentences, is nothing. What, you say, “The Faerie Queene,” +“Paradise Lost,” “Hamlet,” the “Iliad,” the “Idylls of the King” are +compressed so that the time it takes to read them is annihilated? Just +that. The complete works of a great poet do not fill more space than +one or two long novels. Poetry is greater than prose if only because +it expresses noble ideas in fewer words; it is language at its highest +power. Its rhymes and rhythms are all a means of conveying this power. +The person who regards poetry as rhymed sentences that might as well be +put into prose, has his eye on the shell of form and has never felt the +inner virtues of poetry. Poetry has its forms because only in its forms +can it say the most. + +But what of the great lines of prose that are as eloquent and compact +with thought as any line of poetry? There is only one answer to that. +Such lines of prose are poetry too. “In my Father’s house are many +mansions” is poetry. That it looks like prose on the printed page is +a matter of typesetting, and type is only the outermost husk about +the shell. Hear that sentence from the Bible, think it and feel it, +and you will know that it has high poetic quality. The intensity of +language, the heat of high passion has made the diamond; the diamond +is more beautiful after it is cut, but cutting cannot make a diamond. +The outward form we shall enjoy, but we must look inward for the +essential quality. As our Bible is printed, the following passage from +Ecclesiastes has the appearance of prose, yet it has, too, something +like the stanzaic divisions of poetry. + + Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days + come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no + pleasure in them; + + While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars be not + darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: + + In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong + men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, + and those that look out of the windows be darkened, + + And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the + grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and + all the daughters of music shall be brought low; + + Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall + be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper + shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his + long home, and the mourners go about the streets: + + Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or + the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the + cistern; + + Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit + shall return unto God who gave it. + +Whatever else this may be, it is poetry of high power. Millions of men +have found in the Bible something which is not in other books, but that +it has in common with other great books the miracle of poetic utterance +every right view of the Bible must admit. The passage we have just +quoted is in beauty equal and not wholly dissimilar to the stanza from +Keats. The Biblical poet has into a few words condensed the tragic +symbols of death and sorrow; and from their dust and dissolution his +soul has aspired upward to the stars. + +If the stanza from Keats and the verse from the Bible are both +essentially poetic, what becomes of certain devices of arrangement +which are in Keats and not in the Bible poem, such devices as rhymes +and regularity of accent? These are but instruments of beauty; the +words and their arrangement are the result of the inward passion and +beauty of the thought, and we in reading are acted upon by that result, +and feel again the passion and idea that produced it. + +In inferior poetry cause and effect are reversed or fail altogether. +Thousands of poets have tried to make poetry by devices of rhyme and +line division, by deliberately arranging vowels and consonants into +pleasant sounds; almost any conventionally educated person can learn +to do this, just as almost anybody with practice can learn to play a +piece on the piano and carefully obey every sign on the music score. +But no music results, only an empty regularity of sound. Because there +are so many of these mechanical pianists, the sound of the piano seldom +attracts and arrests us. Because so many verses, thousands in the +monthly magazines, have merely the outward form of poetry, thousands +of persons have come to believe that poetry is an artificial trick of +words. The heart of poetry is emotion and a sense of beauty. The great +emotions, patriotism, religion, love, acting upon the poet, turn his +words into magic sequences. When the poetry is finished and arranged +on the printed page, we find, true, that it has a form, that it has +metrical excellences, that its varieties of sound are thus and so; the +poets are masters of at least as many technicalities as the little +versifiers. The test comes when we read the sequence of words cooled, +as it were, into a set form, and touched by their appeal to our inward +sense feel them start into warm life again. + +If we go far enough in our reading to study poetry, then we shall +expect to learn about the technical methods and rhetorical elements of +verse; we shall expect to learn about the lives of the poets and about +their growth in their art. Just so the lover of music will wish to +study the laws of sound, even the mechanical and physical properties +of musical instruments, mastering from a scientific point of view the +conditions and materials of the art. Such study helps us to appreciate +great music and great poetry. But it is not necessary. The orchestra +will act upon us without our knowing how it is arranged. The true poem +will act on us if we know nothing more than our own language and our +own feelings. Our pleasant task is to offer ourselves to the great poem +with attention and a desire for pleasure. + +Attention and a desire for pleasure are easily distracted in those who +have not the habit of reading poetry. And poetry is often surrounded +by unnecessary distractions. The very zeal of those who would draw our +sympathies to it leads them to stand in the light attempting to explain +what needs no explanation, what, indeed, cannot be explained. The +lecturer upon music too often talks while the orchestra is playing. +After one knows Shakespeare, a discourse on the “lessons of the +tragedies” may enlarge one’s understanding. But such disquisitions are +a forbidding introduction to any poet. We have in America many worthy +persons who lecture on the ethical beliefs of Robert Browning. Of +course any interest, any occasion that will bring in a new “convert,” +and lead him to think of Browning at all, is a gain--the principal +excuse for lectures and criticisms is that they do invite wandering +souls in to meet a poet. But it is usually true that two hours’ reading +in Browning is more delightful and more profitable than a two hours’ +lecture about him. And it is often the case that lectures about his +philosophy repel readers who might enjoy his poetry. The lesson of +poetry is beauty; the meaning of poetry is exalted emotions. The +private special beliefs of the poet are of interest, because those +beliefs raised the poet’s intelligence to a white heat, and that heat +left us verse crystals which are beautiful long after the poet’s +beliefs have passed away. Through his beliefs the poet reaches to great +passions that endure, and anyone can understand them without knowing +how the poet arrived at them. If a poet cannot deliver his message, +a critic cannot do it for him. Shelley was a worshiper of democracy; +Shakespeare was a believer in the divinity of kings. Browning was an +optimist. Omar Khayyám, as Edward Fitzgerald rendered him in English +poetry, was a kind of pessimistic fatalist. All this is interesting to +know. But the reader of poetry does not, in the immediate enjoyment of +the poets, vex himself with these diversities of faith. Hear the poets +themselves: + +Shakespeare’s unrighteous king, Macbeth, hedged round by his enemies, +dulled in feeling yet still keenly intelligent, hears of the death of +his queen. + + She should have died hereafter; + There would have been a time for such a word. + To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, + Creeps in this petty pace from day to day + To the last syllable of recorded time; + And all our yesterdays have lighted fools + The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! + Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player + That struts and frets his hour upon the stage + And then is heard no more. It is a tale + Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, + Signifying nothing. + +Shelley, the lover of human liberty and the wide freedom of nature, +chants to the West Wind: + + Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; + What if my leaves are falling like its own! + The tumult of thy mighty harmonies + + Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, + Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, + My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! + + Drive my dead thoughts over the universe + Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! + And, by the incantation of this verse, + + Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth + Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! + Be through my lips to unawakened earth + + The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, + If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? + +[Illustration: SHELLEY] + +Hear Browning, the athletic optimist: + + The year’s at the spring + And day’s at the morn; + Morning’s at seven; + The hillside’s dew-pearled; + The lark’s on the wing; + The snail’s on the thorn: + God’s in his heaven-- + All’s right with the world! + +And of himself, at the close of his life, Browning sings: + + One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, + Never doubted clouds would break, + Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, + Held we fall to rise, ere baffled to fight better, + Sleep to wake. + +Finally listen to the beauty-loving pessimist that Fitzgerald brought +out of Persia and set among the jewels in the crown of English poetry: + + So when the Angel of the darker Drink + At last shall find you by the River-brink, + And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul + Forth to your Lips to quaff--you shall not shrink. + + I sent my Soul through the Invisible, + Some letter of that After-life to spell: + And after many Days my Soul returned + And said, “Behold, Myself am Heaven and Hell.” + +Here are four poets of different generations and different beliefs; +large volumes have been written to expound each and tell us the +meaning, the philosophy, the development, the tendencies, the influence +of this poet and that. But see them together: no explanation of their +_meanings_ can divide them, for they are all poets, and no group of +men on earth are liker one to another _in purpose_ than great poets +are like to each other. They are all singing the eternal in words of +unmatchable power. They are wondrously alike in their celebration of +beauty and high feelings. + +The great poet differs not from other great poets, but from inferior +ones; he differs from his equals mainly in manner of expression. The +new poet is he who brings the old messages in ways that no other poet +has conceived, and the old poet is always new, because he has attained +to beautiful utterance of ideas that we cannot outgrow, which indeed +most of mankind have not yet reached. Prose becomes old-fashioned +(except the Bible, which has a special place in our life and is, +moreover, largely poetic in substance); the prose of Shakespeare’s +time and Milton’s is difficult to read, it seems written in an antique +language. But Shakespeare and Milton are the poetry of to-day and of +uncounted to-morrows. + +Not to read poetry is to miss the greatest ideas in the world, to +disregard the noblest and most exalted work that the human mind has +achieved. To poetry all other arts and sciences are in some way +inferior. Not music, nor painting, nor the laws of government, nor the +discoveries of mechanics, nor anything else that man has done has the +right of poetry to be called divine, except only that of which poetry +is the vehicle, which is in a sense one with it, religious prophecy +and worship. Whether religion and poetry are one, as some philosophers +hold, it is a fact of history that the great religious prophets have +had the gifts of poets, and the poets are all singers of hymns and +incantations which stir in our hearts the religious sense. We need +not go further into this question than to this simple truth, that the +man who has no poetry in him is likely to be an irreligious man, not +necessarily lacking in goodness and righteousness, but lacking the +upward aspiration of the truly religious mind. + + Come, poet, come! + A thousand laborers ply their task, + And what it tends to scarcely ask, + And trembling thinkers on the brink + Shiver and know not how to think. + To tell the purport of their pain, + And what our silly joys contain; + In lasting lineaments portray + The substance of the shadowy day; + Our real and inner deeds rehearse, + And make our meaning clear in verse: + Come, Poet, come! or but in vain + We do the work or feel the pain, + And gather up the seeming gain, + Unless before the end thou come + To take, ere they are lost, their sum. + + Come, Poet, come! + To give an utterance to the dumb, + And make vain babblers silent, come; + A thousand dupes point here and there, + Bewildered by the show and glare; + And wise men half have learned to doubt + Whether we are not best without. + Come, Poet; both but wait to see + Their error proved to them in thee. + + Come, Poet, come! + In vain I seem to call. And yet + Think not the living times forget. + Ages of heroes fought and fell + That Homer in the end might tell; + O’er groveling generations past + Upstood the Doric fane at last; + And countless hearts on countless years + Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears, + Rude laughter and unmeaning tears, + Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome + The pure perfection of her dome. + Others, I doubt not, if not we, + The issue of our toils shall see; + Young children gather as their own + The harvest that the dead had sown, + The dead forgotten and unknown. + + ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +THE READING OF POETRY--(_Continued_) + + +In almost every American household there will be some volume of poetry +through which the young reader can make his entrance into the enchanted +world; there will be a volume of Shakespeare, an old copy of “Paradise +Lost” or the works of Longfellow or Tennyson. In our day a desire to +read is seldom thwarted by lack of books. Indeed, it sometimes seems +as if the very abundance of books made us so familiar with their backs +that we do not value the treasures inside. The biographies of our +grandfathers tell us of walks of five miles to secure some coveted +volume, and a volume so secured was not skimmed or neglected; the +effort to get it made it doubly precious. + +If one is left to choose the door through which to enter the realm of +poetry, a good anthology will prove a broad approach. There is none +better than Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.” It is +inexpensive, so that anyone can save enough pennies to buy it. It is +convenient to carry in one’s pocket, a virtue that makes it preferable +to larger anthologies, to those old-fashioned “household collections” +printed in double columns. If all our men and boys had the “Golden +Treasury” in their coat pockets, what a civilization we should have at +the end of ten years! In order to keep up with us the ladies would have +to provide pockets in their dresses or carry more spacious handbags +than the tyranny of style now permits. + +The selections in Palgrave or in the four volumes of Ward’s “English +Poets,” are so rich and varied that no reader can fail to find his own +poet, and the next step will be to get a larger selection from that +poet’s works. All the English poets have been published in inexpensive +volumes of selections, many of them in the same _Golden Treasury +Series_; and as poets, like other human beings, are not always at their +best, an edition which contains only the best will save the reader +from the unfortunate experience of meeting a poet for the first time +in his inferior work. When we have learned really to like a poet, we +shall wish to have his complete works, but for the young reader most +modern poets are better for the suppression of their less admirable +passages. Only three or four--Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, our +greatest poets--wrote long poems which to be enjoyed at their fullest +must be read entire. Although it is true that poetry consists of great +lines and that a collection of short poems and passages will be enough +to nourish the soul for its whole earthly life, yet supreme poetry is +built on a mighty plan. Brief lyrics and bits of song are like jewels, +precious, complete, beautiful. Great poems, epics and dramas, are +like cathedrals in which the jewels are set in the walls and in the +windows. One might read all the fine passages from Shakespeare and yet +not feel Shakespeare’s highest, that is, his entire, poetic power. + +For the marvelous speeches and songs, however satisfying in themselves, +lose some of their meaning when taken out of the structure of which +they are a part. The stained glass window is beautiful in the artist’s +studio, but when it is set in the church and the light falls through +it, it becomes part of a beauty greater than its own. So, too, +“Macbeth” is greater than Shakespeare’s lyrics, “Paradise Lost” is +greater than all of Milton’s short poems taken together. The true +reader of poetry will pass beyond the delight of the perfect stanza to +the wider joy of the complete drama, the complete epic. + +In approaching a long poem, the modern impatient reader is discouraged +sometimes by the number of pages of solid verse which follow those +first pages into which he has plunged. It is well to remember that in +reading poetry, a little traveling of the eye takes the imagination +on long journeys, and that imagination will join for us the first +page and the last even if we have spent six months in making the +intervening journey. “Hamlet” need not be read in a day. If one reads +a few lines at a time one will soon be in the depths of it, and there +is no danger of losing one’s way. We can spend a month in the first +perusal or we can run rapidly through it in the three hours which it +is supposed to occupy on the stage. We can go backward and forward +in it, pause as long as we will on a single speech, or fly swiftly +upon the wings of the action. The sense of leisure, of independence of +hourly circumstance, is one of the spiritual uses of poetry. The poet +and our own nature will determine the time for us. When we follow the +pageant of Shakespeare’s sad histories of the death of kings, we shall +not, I hope, comport ourselves like tourists hurrying through a picture +gallery in order that we may have “done” it before our train goes. We +shall not be so misguided as to plume ourselves when we enter in our +diary: “Read two plays of Shakespeare this week.” Reading that consists +merely in passing the eye over the page is not reading at all. When we +become conscious of turning pages without any inward response, it is +time to lay the book down and do something else. When we are really +reading, we shall not be conscious of the book and we shall not know +how many pages we have read--until we wake up out of dreamland and come +back into our own world. + +Two or three plays of Shakespeare are being read every year in every +high school in America. It is a common experience of teachers that +the pupils regard Shakespeare’s plays as the hardest part of the +prescribed reading. One reason is that these dramatic poems are through +a regrettable necessity made the text of lessons in language. The +atmosphere of study and duty surrounding “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” +in the classroom takes the charm out of that fairy play. This is not +the fault of the teachers and it is not for us to criticise them; the +wisest leaders in education have not found a way to make the study of +Shakespeare in school less laborious than it is. And many of them think +that it is well that lessons should be hard nuts to crack, that the +young mind is better disciplined if its schoolday tasks are not made +too delightful and easy. Some teachers believe that the old-fashioned +hard digging at books is being in too large a measure replaced by +kindergarten methods, which are so unadvisedly extended that even a +geometry lesson is treated as a game. + +For the present we will keep our consideration of the uses and +delights of reading apart from the problems of the schools, and regard +Shakespeare as we regard Scott--a friend to enjoy in leisure hours. I +should advise, then, that pupils who are reading Shakespeare in school +select other plays than those prescribed in class and come to them as +to a novel chosen for pleasure. If the class work requires a study of +“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” let the young reader try “The Tempest” by +himself. If “Julius Cæsar” is a part of the winter’s school task, let +us in vacation time slip “Macbeth” or “Henry V” into our pockets. And +while our friends in the other hammock are reading a romance of the +hour, let us be reading a romance of the ages. When we are tired of +reading and are ready to play that game of tennis, our opponent, who +has been reading a book that he bought on the newsstand at the railroad +station, will not necessarily beat us, because we know what he does not +know, that a gift of tennis balls comes into the plot of “Henry V.” + +The Dauphin of France sends Henry the tennis balls for a mocking gift, +and Henry answers: + + When we have matched our rackets to these balls, + We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set + Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard. + Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler + That all the courts of France will be disturbed + With chaces. + +That has a spirit which your friend will not find in the excellent +story of a school game which he has been reading, “How Ralph Saved the +Day.” + +The great poems receive us on any good ground of interest which we +choose to tread. Would you have a romantic novel? Shakespeare provides +that in “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night.” Or a military adventure? +There is “Henry Fifth.” Or a love tragedy? There is “Romeo and Juliet.” +These satisfy our primitive liking for a good story. And so in some +measure do all great poems, for the great poems are epics and dramas, +that is, stories in verse. Literature finds its best structural +material in action and event, and language is best suited to the +expression of actions, perhaps because it has been made by a world of +workers and doers. The most effective means of conveying abstract ideas +is through story. The most moving sections of the Bible are narrative, +the greatest lessons are taught in parables and instances. “Paradise +Lost” is a narrative of great vigor, for all the dull debates and +arguments; and if it was not Milton’s primary intention to tell a great +story for its own sake, nevertheless he did tell a great story and we +can enjoy it for its own sake long before we have begun, and long after +we have ceased, to be interested in his theology and philosophy. + +To say that great poets, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, +are romancers as truly as are the writers of prose novels is not to +belittle poetry. The highest thoughts can be conveyed in a story. When +a great poetic story-teller ceases for too many lines to be master of +narrative, it will often be found that some other poetic qualities have +for the moment died out of him too. And when he attempts to convey +great ideas with little regard to their place in a moving sequence of +events, he pays the penalty of not being read, he loses hold of the +reader’s interest. The most titanic case of the failure of high poetic +thoughts to win their way to the common heart of man, because of the +disregard of narrative form, is Browning’s “The Ring and the Book.” +There the story, a terrible and touching story, is told over a dozen +times, and not once told well. Imbedded in its strange shapelessness +are wonderful ideas and passages of intense beauty. As a heap of poetry +it is the only production of the Victorian age that has the magnitude +of Shakespeare and the classic epics. Other poems of Browning’s, +“Clive” and “Ivan Ivanovitch,” show that he had narrative gifts. Some +scenes in his dramas are in emotional energy and narrative progression +unrivaled by any poet since Shakespeare. But in “The Ring and the +Book,” into which he put his whole heart, he would not or could not +tell his story as the experience of all ages has shown that stories +must be told: his poem does not move forward in a continuously high and +noble style. And so most of the world of readers are deprived of the +richness with which he freighted from his prodigal mind and great soul +his mighty rudderless ship that goes down in midocean. + +Shakespeare told good stories in almost all his plays. He did not +invent the stories, but he selected them from the literature of the +world and from other Elizabethan writers, and then enriched the +narrative with every kind of beauty and significance which it would +hold. On account of their excellence as narratives and their intensely +human and stirring materials, the plays of Shakespeare enjoyed some +measure of popularity even in their own time, if the scholars have +rightly informed us; and the plays have continued to hold the stage +and to interest many of the “great variety of readers” who are +addressed in one of the introductions to the first collected edition +of Shakespeare’s works. In our time the influence of the schools has +insured popular acquaintance with Shakespeare as an object of serious +study. On the other hand, the great increase in the quantity of prose +fiction, and the fact that it is easier to read thin prose than rich +poetry, have obscured for many readers the elementary delight of +Shakespeare’s plays as fictitious romances. + +One reason that the inexperienced reader regards the reading of +Shakespeare as an unusual operation of eye and brain is that we are +not accustomed to read the drama of our own time; so that we have not +the habit of following naked dialogue accompanied only by a few terse +stage directions. Since Shakespeare’s time our literature has not been +so rich in drama as in other forms. Some of our plays--those that have +succeeded on the stage and those written in conventional dramatic form +without regard to performance on the stage--are worth reading. But the +public does not encourage the printing of them. Many of our writers +shrewdly make double use of their ideas and turn them both into stage +form and into prose fiction. The large number of dramatized novels and +“novelized” dramas--Shakespeare himself dramatized novels--shows that +in England and America we regard the playbook as something for the +actor to learn and represent to us in spoken word and action. In France +the latest play is for sale in the bookshops like the latest novel. +If our stage is to return to high literary standards, there must grow +up in our public an audience of intelligent playreaders as well as +playgoers. The more intelligently we read plays, the more there will +be worth reading; we can help the stage to attain and hold a better +level of excellence by demanding of it that its productions shall be +“literary,” that is, readable. + +That Shakespeare is the single dramatist in our language whom we feel +we ought to read is regrettable. It sets him apart in a solitude which +is as artificial in its way as the attempt of some critics to group +him in a “school of playwrights.” He is solitary in greatness, quite +lonely among his many contemporaries[1] in drama, but the form he used, +narrative dialogue, ought to be as familiar to us as the novel. If ten +people read “The Vicar of Wakefield” to one that reads “She Stoops +to Conquer,” the reason is not that “The Vicar” is better work, but +that the printed play looks strange to the eyes of our reading public. +Plato put his philosophy in dramatic dialogue, apparently with the +intention of choosing a popular and readable form. And the author of +the Shakespearian drama seems to have felt that he had chosen the most +popular and practical vehicle of ideas. Perhaps, if he had known to +what a low condition Puritan prejudice, the social weaknesses of stage +life and other causes were to bring dramatic literature, he might have +turned his narrative genius into other than dramatic form. + +That we are not readers of plays is no special fault of this age. A +hundred years ago Charles and Mary Lamb found a wide audience for their +“Tales from Shakespeare.” The publisher announced in the second edition +that the “Tales,” intended primarily for children, had been found “an +acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the +state of womanhood.” If Shakespeare was to be retold for the young, it +was fortunate that Charles Lamb was selected as the emissary from the +land of poetry to those who had never made the great adventure beyond +the confines of prose. Yet it is hard to believe that Lamb’s “Tales” +are necessary to any but lovers of Lamb. There is a danger that the +young reader, for whom he designed the book as a door to Shakespeare, +will linger in the vestibule, content with the genuine riches that +are there, and will not go on to the greater riches of Shakespeare +himself. Shakespeare told the stories better than another can tell +them, and anyone who knows enough of the English language to read +Lamb’s “Tales” will find Shakespeare’s plays intelligible to read, just +as when performed on the stage they are intelligible to the people in +the gallery, even to those in the boxes. Repeated readings with some +reference to simple explanatory notes will make the deep meanings and +fine beauties ever more and more clear. + +The plays which a beginner should read are, “A Midsummer Night’s +Dream,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,” +“The Tempest,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” “Richard III,” “Romeo and +Juliet,” “Julius Cæsar,” “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and +“Macbeth.” The other plays and the poems may, for various reasons, be +reserved for the time when one no longer needs advice about reading. + +We shall have gained much of the freedom of soul which is the necessary +condition of reading poetry, if we make a New Year’s resolution not +to be frightened away from the real mysteries of Shakespeare by the +false mysteries of his editors and critics.[2] Shakespeare speaks +our language, but the scholars speak a language which they invented, +as if they intended to hold their authority by wrapping themselves in +impenetrable obscurities which common folk would not try to master. +Let us not be deceived. “The Tempest” was not written for university +professors. Let us open it with the same confident curiosity that we +should bring to “Robinson Crusoe” or “Ivanhoe.” + +And after you have read “The Tempest,” what do you remember to have +found difficult? Is it not clearer than daylight, that enchanted +island where Prospero, the exiled duke, has lived twelve years with +his daughter Miranda? Is it not a simple and sweet romance that Prince +Ferdinand should be wrecked on the island and should fall in love with +Miranda and that she should fall in love with him, the first man she +has seen except her father? Is it not clear that Prospero, a student +of magic, has gained control of the spirits of the island and has +his blithe servant, Ariel, and his brutal servant, Caliban? Did you +find any difficulty in understanding that when the wicked brother, +who cheated Prospero of his dukedom, is cast ashore upon the island, +Prospero pardons him and gets his dukedom back? What is obscure in this +wonder tale? “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty” are made of the +same stuff, and we hear them at our mothers’ knees before we are able +to read at all. + +But there is more in “The Tempest” than a childish fairy tale. Yes, +much more, but that more is insinuated into the story, it is +embroidered upon it, it comes to us without effort of ours, for the +poet is a Prospero and teaches us, as Prospero taught Miranda, by +art and nature and not by laborious counsel. You will feel as you +follow the fairy story that the spirit of nature has stolen over you +unawares, that Caliban represents the evil in the natural world and +Ariel the good, and that both are obedient to the bidding of man’s +intelligence. So much philosophy will come to you of itself; it is not +a dull lesson to knit your brows over; you need seek no lecturer to +expound it to you. A song of Ariel will linger in your ear. All that +is required of you is that your senses be wide awake and that your +fancy be free from bookish anxiety and ready to be played upon. The +miracle will be wrought for you. You need only sit, like Ferdinand, and +watch the masque which the wizard evokes--“a most majestic vision, and +harmoniously charming.” There will remain with you some speech, grave +with philosophy and luminous with imagery, such as this: + + These our actors, + As I foretold you, were all spirits, and + Are melted into air, into thin air; + And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, + The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, + The solemn temples, the great globe itself, + Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, + And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, + Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff + As dreams are made on; and our little life + Is rounded with a sleep. + +[Illustration: TENNYSON] + +It is better, perhaps, to read the comedies and histories before the +tragedies. The comedies and histories are simpler in motive, and +through lighter thoughts give one the feeling for Shakespeare’s diction +and prepare one to enter the tragedies that treat of higher matters. It +is because tragedy is concerned with greater ideas, not because it ends +unhappily, that it is greater poetry than comedy. It deals with more +important motives and more serious events, and its thought is complete; +the career of Hamlet, or of Macbeth, is finished, and the ideas of life +that informed the career and shaped the events are carried out to their +fullest. Tragedy does not consist in the piling up of corpses in the +last act; the end of the characters is nothing in itself. Shakespeare +always rounds off the conclusion with rapid strokes; having done with +the ideas and motives that lead to the end he has little interest in +the mere death of his characters. It is the “way to dusty death” that +interests him and us and makes the tragedy profound. To those readers +referred to in a previous chapter, who do not like sad endings, we can +now give another answer. They put too much thought upon the ending and +too little upon the story that leads to the end. Whoever does not like +tragedy does not like serious ideas, and whoever does not read tragedy +does not read the greatest poetry. For the greatest poetry must consist +of the most important ideas. Not only upon beauty of form and magic of +phrase, but on the heart, the content, depends the greatness of a poem. + + + +LIST OF BOOKS OF POETRY + +(_Supplementary to Chapter VI_) + + +COLLECTIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES OF POETRY + + _The English Poets_, edited by T. H. WARD, and published by Macmillan, + in four volumes, at $1 each. + +On the whole, the most satisfactory collection of English poetry. +Each of the chief poets is represented by several selections, and the +introductory criticisms are in themselves a liberal education. + + + _Little Masterpieces of Poetry_, edited by HENRY VAN DYKE, in six + volumes, and published by Doubleday, Page & Co. + +The poems are divided according to form; one volume containing ballads; +another, odes and sonnets; another, lyrics; and so on. This is a +rational, but not a practical, principle of division, for it is better +to have the selections, say, from Keats, together in one’s anthology +than to have his sonnets in one volume and his lyrics in another. A +poet and his poetry are very definite units, but the lines between +lyrics and ballads and odes are not sharp and, on the whole, not +important. + + + _Lyra Heroica_, edited by WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY, and published by + Charles Scribner’s Sons. + +Called “a book of verse for boys”; really a book of verse for +everybody, consisting of the martial, the heroic, the patriotic, from +the old English ballads to Rudyard Kipling. + + + _A Victorian Anthology_, edited by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN, and + published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. + +A remarkably adequate collection of English poems of the last seventy +years. + + + _An American Anthology_, edited by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN, and + published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. + +Not only a wise selection of the best American poetry, but a complete +survey of the poetic utterance of this country, from a biographical and +historical point of view. + + + _The Golden Treasury_, edited by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, and + published by Macmillan (see page 109 of this Guide). + + + _The Golden Treasury_, second series, edited by FRANCIS TURNER + PALGRAVE. + +This continues the first _Golden Treasury_ and includes the Victorian +poets. It is not so complete as Stedman’s _Anthology_, but costs only +half as much. + + + _The Children’s Treasury of Lyrical Poetry_, edited by FRANCIS TURNER + PALGRAVE. + + + _The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets_, edited by COVENTRY + PATMORE. + +The two foregoing are in the _Golden Treasury Series_, and published by +Macmillan. + + + _Elizabethan Lyrics_, edited by FELIX E. SCHELLING. + +An inexpensive collection, published by Ginn & Co., covering the same +period as is covered by about one sixth of the _Golden Treasury_, but +in larger type and so pleasanter to read. + + + _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, edited by FELIX E. SCHELLING. + +Continues the volume mentioned above. + + + _The Blue Poetry Book_, edited by ANDREW LANG. + +A good collection of verse intended by the editor for young people, and +selected by him wisely, but quite whimsically, from poets he happens to +like. + + + _Golden Numbers_, edited by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN AND NORA ARCHIBALD + SMITH. + +An excellent anthology intended for youth. + + + _Oxford Book of English Verse_, edited by ARTHUR T. QUILLER-COUCH. + +A handsome book which represents, in less degree than most anthologies, +the traditional standards of excellence or traditionally excellent +poets, and in rather greater degree the fine taste of the editor for +the best. + + + _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, edited by FRANCIS JAMES CHILD. + +This is a selection in a single volume from the great edition of the +ballads by Professor Child. It is equally for the student and the +reader. In the _Cambridge Poets_, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. + + + _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_, edited by CHARLES LAMB. + +Passages that pleased Lamb in the works of Shakespeare’s +contemporaries. Interesting to a reader of Elizabethan drama and to a +reader of Lamb. + + +INDIVIDUAL POETS + + + ÆSCHYLUS (525-456 B.C.). _Lyrical Dramas._ In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907). _Poems._ + +Household Edition. Aldrich was a careful editor of his own work and +this volume is complete in its inclusions and its omissions. It is one +of the few volumes of American poetry worth owning. + + + ARISTOPHANES (about 450-380 B.C.). _Comedies._ + +In two volumes of _Bohn’s Library_, translated by W. J. Hickie. + + + MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88). _Poetical Works._ + +The Globe Edition, published by Macmillan, which costs $1.75, is the +best. Most of the chief British poets can be had in this edition. +The Cambridge Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., costs a +little more the volume, but it is preferable on the whole in point of +manufacture and readability. The young reader of Arnold may begin with +the narrative poem, “Sohrab and Rustum.” + + + FRANCIS BEAUMONT (158?-1616). _Dramatic Works._ + +The best selection of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher is the two +volumes, edited by J. St. Loe Strachey in the _Mermaid Series_, +published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. In this series are, in the words +of the title page, “The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.” A taste +for Elizabethan drama is as well left undeveloped until after a fair +acquaintance has been formed with the plays of Shakespeare. + + + WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827). _Songs of Innocence._ _Songs of Experience._ + +There are several collections of Blake’s lyrics in single-volume +editions. A good one is that with an introductory essay by Lawrence +Housman. Blake’s lyrics of children and his “Tiger, Tiger, Burning +Bright” will be found in many of the anthologies. + + + THOMAS EDWARD BROWN (1830-97). _Collected Poems._ + +A remarkable English poet, but little known to the general public until +the posthumous publication of his work in 1900 by Macmillan & Co., in +the single-volume Globe Edition, which contains the works of Shelley, +Tennyson, and other great poets; Brown is worthy of that distinguished +company. + + + ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1809-61). _Poetical Works._ + +In one volume, in Macmillan’s Globe Edition. “The Sonnets from the +Portuguese” are to be found in a small volume by themselves. They are +the best of Mrs. Browning’s work. The new reader of Mrs. Browning +should begin after page 150 in the Macmillan edition and read only the +shorter poems. + + + ROBERT BROWNING (1812-89). _Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works._ + +The Cambridge Edition is the best, in one volume. The Globe Edition is +in two volumes. The two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_ contain all of +Browning’s poems written up to 1864. A good volume for the young reader +is “The Boys’ Browning,” which contains poems of action and incident. +An inexpensive volume, published by Smith, Elder & Co., called “The +Brownings for the Young,” contains a good variety of Browning, with +some selections from Mrs. Browning. + + + WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878). _Poetical Works._ + +The poems of Bryant are published in one volume by D. Appleton & Co. +Bryant’s translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are better than +most poetic versions of Homer in simplicity and dignity. The young +reader cannot do better than to meet Homer in Bryant before he learns +Greek enough to meet Homer himself. + + + ROBERT BURNS (1759-96). _Poems, Songs, and Letters._ + +The complete work of Burns in the Globe Edition (Macmillan). + + + GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON (1788-1824). _Poetry of Byron._ + +A selection by Matthew Arnold in the _Golden Treasury Series_. + + + CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY (1831-84). _Fly Leaves._ + +A taste for refined parody indicates the possession of a critical +sense. Coarse parody which implies no intimate knowledge of the poet +parodied is not worth while. The reader who appreciates Calverley’s +delicious verses will have learned to appreciate the serious modern +poets. Other writers of humorous verse, including parodies which are +delicate and witty, are J. K. Stephen, Mr. Owen Seaman, Henry Cuyler +Bunner. + + + THOMAS CAMPBELL (1777-1844). + +Enough of Campbell will be found in Ward’s Poets. + + + GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559-1634). _Dramas._ + +One volume in the _Mermaid Series_. (See pages 243-8 of this Guide.) + + + GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1340-1400). _Canterbury Tales._ + +A volume in _Everyman’s Library_ contains eighteen of the tales, +slightly simplified in spelling and vocabulary, said to be the first +successful attempt to modernize Chaucer, for the benefit of the +ordinary reader, without destroying the essential quality of the +original. But with the glossary and notes found in “The Student’s +Chaucer,” edited by W. W. Skeat, the lover of poetry will find himself +able to read Chaucer in the original form without great difficulty. + + + ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (1819-61). _Poems._ + +In the _Golden Treasury Series_. Readers of poetry who have not met +Clough have an entirely new poetical experience before them in “The +Bothie,” a narrative poem. It should be tried after Longfellow’s +“Miles Standish” and “Evangeline.” Clough was not among the greatest +Victorian poets, but there is room for him in an age like ours which is +said, whether justly or not, to be lacking in poetic voices. In this +connection readers may turn to Clough’s poem, “Come, Poet Come!” (see +page 107 of this Guide). + + + SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). _Poetical Works._ + +In the Globe Edition. The single volume in _Everyman’s Library_ is +adequate. + + + WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800). _Poetical Works._ + +In the Globe Edition. + + + DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321). _Divina Commedia._ + +Cary’s translation is in _Everyman’s Library_. The best way on the +whole for English readers to learn their Dante is through Charles +Eliot Norton’s prose translation (see page 210 of this Guide). + + +THOMAS DEKKER (157?-163?). _Dramas._ + +In the _Mermaid Series_. + + +JOHN DONNE (1573-1631). _Poems._ + +In the _Muses Library_ (Charles Scribner’s Sons). A wonderful poet, +who, perhaps, is not to be read until one’s taste for poetry has grown +certain, but a liking for whom in mature years is an almost infallible +proof of true poetic appreciation. + + +JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700). _Poetical Works._ + +In the Globe Edition and also in the Cambridge Edition. The reader +should first read Dryden’s odes and lyrical pieces; his satires may be +deferred. + + + GEORGE ELIOT (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80). _Poems._ + +In one volume, published by Doubleday, Page & Co., and to be found in +any complete edition of her works. Her reputation as a novelist has +overshadowed her excellence as a poet. “The Choir Invisible” is one of +the noble poems of the century. + + +RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-82). _Poems._ + +In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Emerson is the most +exalted spirit of our literature, and his poems condense and refine the +best ideas to be found in his prose. + + +EURIPIDES (480-406 B.C.). _Dramas._ + +In two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_. + + +_Everyman and Other Miracle Plays._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. See also “Specimens of Pre-Shakespearean +Drama,” edited by J. M. Manly (Ginn & Co.). The recent stage production +of “Everyman” has created a new popular interest in very early +English dramas. The value of most of them is historical rather than +intrinsically poetic. + + +EUGENE FIELD. _A Little Book of Western Verse._ + +Contains the familiar poems for and about children. + + +EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-83). _Translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar +Khayyám._ + +There are innumerable editions of this famous poem. An inexpensive one +is published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. + + +JOHN FLETCHER (1579-1625). _Dramas._ + +With Beaumont in the _Mermaid Series_. + + + JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832). _Dramatic and Poetic Works._ + +The dramas, translated by Walter Scott and others, are in _Bohn’s +Library_. American readers will be interested in Bayard Taylor’s poetic +version of “Faust.” + + + OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _Poems, etc._ + +Goldsmith’s few poems are to be found in a good edition of his works in +one volume, published by Crowell & Co. + + + THOMAS GRAY (1716-71). _Poetical Works._ + +In one volume, in the Aldine Edition (Macmillan). Readers of the +familiar “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” need only to be told that a +half dozen of Gray’s other poems are equally fine; and they should not +overlook the delightful “Ode on the Death of Mr. Walpole’s Cat.” + + + KATE GREENAWAY. _Marigold Garden._ _Under the Window._ + +Miss Greenaway’s delightful pictures of children would entitle her to a +place among the poets, even if she had not done the little rhymes that +go with her drawings. + + + FRANCIS BRET HARTE (1839-1902). _Poetical Works._ + +In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. + + + HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856). _Poems._ + +Heine’s lyrics have tempted the talents of many translators. The finest +collection of verses from Heine in English is that by Emma Lazarus, +herself a true poet. + + + WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY. _Poems._ + +Henley’s one volume of poems, a slender volume, published by Scribner, +places him high among the secondary poets of nineteenth century England. + + + GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1633). _Poems._ + +Herbert’s poems with his “Life” by Izaak Walton, are published by +Walter Scott, in one volume in the _Canterbury Poets_, and also, in a +single volume, by Crowell & Co. Herbert is the finest of the religious +lyric poets of the seventeenth century. + + + ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674). _Poems._ + +A fine selection, with an introduction by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, is +published in one volume by the Century Co. Herrick is to be found also +in the _Canterbury Poets_, in one volume, and in _Morley’s Universal +Library_, published by George Rutledge & Sons. + + + THOMAS HEYWOOD (158?-164?). _Dramatic Works._ + +In the _Mermaid Series_. + + + OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition. + + + HOMER. _The Iliad._ _The Odyssey._ + +See pages 211-12 of this Guide. + + + THOMAS HOOD (1799-1845). _Poems._ + +Hood’s humorous poems are found in a pleasantly illustrated volume, +published by Macmillan. His serious poems, “Eugene Aram,” “The Bridge +of Sighs,” “The Song of the Shirt,” are well known, and are in many +anthologies. + + + HORACE. _Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles._ + +Selected translations from the best English poets and scholars in one +volume of the _Chandos Classics_, published by Frederick Warne & Co. + +[Illustration: LONGFELLOW] + + + BEN JONSON (1573-1637). _Plays._ + +In the _Mermaid Series_. Jonson’s fine lyrics, including the perfect +song “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” should be looked for in the +anthologies. + + + JOHN KEATS (1795-1821). _Poems._ + +The best edition of Keats is that edited by Buxton Forman. Good +editions are those in _Everyman’s Library_ and in the _Golden Treasury +Series_. + + + RUDYARD KIPLING. _Barrack-Room Ballads._ _The Seven Seas._ + + + SIDNEY LANIER (1842-81). _Poems._ + +In one volume, published by Scribner. An inspired poet, if ever one was +born in America. + + + WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864). _Poems, Imaginary Conversations, + etc._ + +A volume of selections from the prose and verse of Landor is to be +found in the _Golden Treasury Series_. + + + HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-82). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition. A good selection from Longfellow appears in +the _Golden Treasury Series_. + + + JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-91). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition. + + + MAURICE MAETERLINCK. _Plays._ + +Translated by Richard Hovey. + + + CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-93). _Plays._ + +In the _Mermaid Series_. + + + GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909). _Poems._ + +Published in one volume by Scribner. Meredith’s poems of nature should +be read first. + + + JOHN MILTON (1608-74). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition and also in the Globe Edition. There are many +texts of Milton prepared for use in schools. The young reader will be +fortunate if he can read and enjoy the shorter poems and two or three +books of “Paradise Lost,” before he comes to the study of them in +school. + + + MOLIÈRE (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-73). _Dramatic Works._ + +There are many English versions of Molière, some prepared for the +stage. The edition in three volumes in _Bohn’s Library_ is practically +complete. + + + THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852). _Irish Melodies._ + +The complete poems of Moore are published in an inexpensive volume by +T. Y. Crowell & Co. Moore’s songs are his best work and many of them +retain a sure place in the popular balladry of our race. + + + WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-96). _The Defence of Guinevere._ _Life and Death + of Jason._ + +The great fluency of Morris’s poetry makes his longer narratives +remarkably easy to read. Although he is a poet known and cherished by +the few, his stories in verse are singularly well adapted to young +readers. + + + EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +The best edition is that edited by Stedman and Woodberry. There are +several other single-volume editions. The dozen best poems of Poe +should be known to every young American, and Mr. Andrew Lang is right +in saying (preface to the “Blue Poetry Book”) that the youngest ear +will be delighted by the beauty of the words. + + + ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition. A century that began with Keats and Shelley +and ended with Swinburne and Meredith does not accord Pope the high +place he enjoyed in his own century, but places him at best among the +most brilliant of the comic poets. The “Rape of the Lock” is a humorous +masterpiece. A surprisingly good anthology of Pope is the section +given to him in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”; the large number +of lines from his work is sure proof of his place in our literature; +only Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible contribute so much that is +“familiar.” + + + JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. _Old-Fashioned Roses._ + +A natural and joyous singer about common things, deservedly popular in +America and a truer poet than many critics suspect. + + + CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI (1830-94). _Poems._ + +Published in one volume by Little, Brown & Co. Among English women only +Mrs. Browning is so fine a poet as Christina Rossetti. + + + DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-82). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In two volumes, published by Little, Brown & Co. The young reader +should begin with Rossetti’s songs, ballads, and simpler poems, “The +Blessed Damosel” and “My Sister’s Sleep.” The sonnet sequence, “The +House of Life,” is for mature readers. + + + JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759-1805). _Dramatic Works + and Poems._ + +In several volumes of _Bohn’s Library_, translated by Coleridge and +others. + + + WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition. Scott’s narrative poems are preëminently +adapted to the taste and understanding of young readers. There are many +school editions of Scott’s poetry, and innumerable reprints attest his +continued popularity. + + + WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. + +The best one-volume edition of Shakespeare is the Cambridge Edition. +The best edition in many volumes is the Cambridge Shakespeare, +published by Macmillan & Co. It gives the readings of the Elizabethan +texts so that the reader can distinguish (and accept or reject) +the emendations of scholars. A pocket edition such as the Temple +(Macmillan), or the Ariel (Putnam), will prove a good friend. + + + PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition or the Globe. In two volumes in _Everyman’s +Library_. Selected poems in the _Golden Treasury Series_. + + + PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-86). _Lyric Poems._ + +In a small attractive volume, published by Macmillan. + + + SOPHOCLES (495-406 B.C.) _Plays._ + +In the English translation of R. C. Jebb. The volume in _Everyman’s +Library_ contains translations by Young. Professor G. H. Palmer’s +“Antigone” is as remarkable as his “Odyssey.” + + + ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843). _Poems._ + +Selected poems in the _Golden Treasury Series_. + + + EDMUND SPENSER (1552-99). _Complete Poems._ + +In the Globe Edition. Called the poet’s poet; a source of inspiration +to other poets. If we do not read “The Faerie Queene” at length, it is +because we have so many poets since Spenser. Yet if the reader had only +Spenser he would have an inexhaustible river of English poetry. + + + ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _A Child’s Garden of Verses._ + +Published by Scribner, in one volume, which contains Stevenson’s +other verse. “The Child’s Garden” celebrates childhood in a way that +touches the grown imagination, like the poems about children by Blake, +Swinburne, and Francis Thompson, but it appeals also to children of all +ages. + + + ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837-1909). _Selected Poems._ + +Edited by R. H. Stoddard and published by Crowell. The young reader +should approach Swinburne first in “Atalanta,” poems about children, +poems about other poets, and poems of liberty, notably “The Litany of +Nations.” He is a noble poet, frequently misrepresented by friendly and +unfriendly wafters of current literary opinion. + + + JOHN B. TABB. _Poems._ + +In two or three small volumes, published by Small, Maynard & Co. The +purest note among living American poets. + + + ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-92). _Poetic and Dramatic Works._ + +Complete in one volume in the Cambridge Edition and also in the Globe. + +Of all modern poets preëminently the one for young and old readers to +know entire (with the possible exception of his dramas). + + + THEOCRITUS. _Idylls._ + +In English prose, together with translations from Bion and Moschus, by +Andrew Lang, in the _Golden Treasury Series_. Theocritus is translated +into excellent English verse by the poet, C. S. Calverley. + + + JAMES THOMSON (1700-48). _The Castle of Indolence._ _The Seasons._ + +Dimmed but not displaced by later poets of nature. Thomson may be read +first in the anthologies, from which now and again a sincere admirer +will be sent to his complete works. + + + JAMES THOMSON (1834-82). _The City of Dreadful Night._ + +A remarkable poet, easily among those whom we think of as next to the +greatest poets. Professor William James calls “The City of Dreadful +Night” “that pathetic book,” “which I think is less well known than it +should be for its literary beauty, simply because men are afraid to +quote its words--they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere.” + + + FRANCIS THOMPSON (1859-1907). _The Hound of Heaven._ + +This poet, lately dead, has surely taken his place among the true +voices of English poetry. + + + HENRY VAUGHAN (1622-95). _Poems._ + +In the Aldine Edition (Macmillan). + + + VERGIL (70-19 B.C.). _Eclogues._ _Georgics._ _Æneid._ + +In Conington’s prose translation. The poetic version of William Morris +is spirited and fluent. + + + JOHN WEBSTER (lived in the Elizabethan age). _Dramas._ + +In the _Mermaid Series_. + + + WALT WHITMAN (1819-92). _Leaves of Grass._ + +Whitman’s poetry is complete in one volume, published by Small, Maynard +& Co. The most powerful of American poets. The young reader should +begin with the patriotic pieces and the poems of nature in the sections +entitled “Sea-Drift,” “By the Roadside,” “Drum Taps,” “Memories of +President Lincoln,” “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” + + + JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-92). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Cambridge Edition. Widely loved in America for his popular +ballads and songs of common things. In his poems of liberty and in +poems of religious sympathy and faith, the true passion of the poet +overcomes the technical limitations of his verse and results in pure +poetry. + + + WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850). _Complete Poetical Works._ + +In the Globe Edition. The true Wordsworthian believes with Robert +Southey that “a greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been +nor ever will be.” A serene voice that swelled increasingly through +a troubled century, and is more and more felt to have uttered the +essential ideas needed in these hundred years. Yet much of Wordsworth +is less than poetic, and the new reader should seek him first in the +selections edited by Matthew Arnold in the _Golden Treasury Series_. + +[Illustration: WORDSWORTH] + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[1] See page 56. + +[2] See pages 251-4. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE READING OF HISTORY + + +The plays of Shakespeare which are based upon the chronicles of +English kings are grouped in the Folio edition of the dramatic works +as “Histories.” It will not surprise any reader, who happens not to +have thought of it before, to learn that the episodes in “Henry IV” and +“Henry V” do not follow the actual course of events in the reigns of +the real kings; we take it for granted that Shakespeare meant to write +historical fiction, and we read the plays as creations of the poetic +imagination. But many readers will be surprised to hear that most works +which we call historic are likewise figments of the imagination, and +that we should read many of them in somewhat the same spirit as we +read the historical plays of Shakespeare or good historical novels. +Not only do we get the most pleasure out of the great historians by +regarding their works as pieces of artistic writing, but we save +ourselves from the error of accepting their narratives as fact. For +it is generally true that the more glowing, the more imaginative, the +more architectural a work of history, the more it is open to suspicion +that it is not an exact account of true events. In taking this +position we are not appropriating to the uses of literary enjoyment +works of information that should be left among the dictionaries and +encyclopedias; we are only obeying the best critical historians, who +warn us not to believe the accepted masterpieces of history, but allow +us to enjoy them. And enjoyment is what we seek and value. + +The conception of history as the work of the imagination was held by +all the older historians. Bacon said that poetry is “feigned history.” +That is, he conceived that the methods of poetry and history are the +same and that the difference lies in the material, the poet inventing +the substance of his story, the historian finding his substance in the +recorded events of the past. This view of history obtained up to the +nineteenth century. Macaulay said that history is a compound of poetry +and philosophy. And Carlyle thought it proper to designate as a history +his “French Revolution,” a work based on certain facts in history but +consisting in large part of dramatic fiction, philosophic reflection, +and political argument. In the last hundred years there has grown up a +view of history as a science, the purpose of which is to examine the +evidences of the past in human life as the geologist studies the past +of the physical globe on which we live. The new school of history is +comparatively so young that it has not produced many writers of high +rank in eloquence and literary power, whereas poetic history is as +old as literature and includes the work of many great masters. These +masters live by their eloquence; for it is eloquence rather than mere +truth to fact that gives a work a permanent place in literature. So +our knowledge of historic events must come to us, the world of general +readers, in large part from historians who were great artists rather +than accurate scholars. And scientific history, and also scientific +biography, will for another century be a voice crying in the beautiful +wilderness of legend, myth, philosophical opinion, political prejudice, +and patriotic enthusiasm. + +We can cheerfully leave this scientific history where it belongs, +in the hands of historians and special students. The better for us +as readers if we can read the great histories with the same delight +and somewhat the same kind of interest that we bring to the reading +of romances. There will be enough truth in them to give us a fairly +just view of former ages. The culture and humanity will be there. +Shakespeare’s stories of English kings give us the spirit of England. +Carlyle’s “French Revolution” will never cease to be a splendid work +of art. Bancroft’s “History of the United States” will remain a noble +celebration of democracy, even though he was not strict in his use of +documents. + +In school we expect to learn true lessons in history, to get our dates +right and keep our judgments impartial. Out of school we shall read +history for pleasure and like it the better if it is informed with the +eloquence, the prejudice, the philosophy, in short the personality of a +great writer. + +There are certain books that occur immediately as introductions to +the various departments of literature. We agreed that Palgrave’s +“Golden Treasury” is the best book to put into the hands of one +knocking for the first time at the door of poetry. Boswell’s “Life of +Johnson” is a perfect biography to win the new reader’s liking for +biographical literature and memoirs. And so there is one volume of +history that seems the best of all books in which English-speaking +youth may read the great story of the race, Green’s “Short History of +the English People.” One might wish from patriotic motives that there +were an American history equally good, but there is none, so far as I +know--none which covers our national life as a whole. We can, however, +be content with Green, for the American cannot know his own history or +his own literature and traditions without knowing those of England. Our +literature is English literature and must be for centuries to come, +and in most of our reading of poetry and fiction we shall find that +the history of England is involved more deeply than the history of our +country. + +The merits of Green’s History, the literary merits, are its clear +arrangements, the fine lucidity of the writing, its condensation +of national movements into rich chapters where, as from a peak one +overlooks the great epochs of disaster and progress. These are the +opening sentences: + +“For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from +England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the +one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the +Engleland lay in the district which we now call Sleswick, a district +in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the northern +seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim +little townships, looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but +a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless +woodland, broken here and there by meadows which crept down to the +marshes and the sea.” + +Could any historic novel, we may say could any _other_ historic +romance, open more enticingly? Here is rich promise, promise of +the picturesque, promise of the eloquent phrase, promise of a +sympathetic history of a people who are delvers in the soil, dwellers +in homesteads, and no mere pawns in the game of kings. This is to +be a history of a people. We shall learn of their great common +characteristics; we shall understand them as we understand a family, +and every adventure from King Alfred’s burning of the cakes to Clive’s +conquest of India will spring like the episodes in a great plot from +the character of the English race. + +From Green’s History, as a whole, we shall learn what are the +important things in the history of any people. His admirable sense +of the relative values of events and persons informs his work with a +philosophy of life that is just, wholesome, and salutary for a young +person to be imbued with who must look out on the daily struggle about +him, read the endless hodge-podge of newspaper chronicle, and weigh +the day’s events wisely. Green fulfils the ideal which he sets forth +in the preface: “It is the reproach of historians that they have too +often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their +fellow men. But war plays a small part in the real history of European +nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any.... +If I have said little of the glories of Cressy, it is because I have +dwelt much on the wrong and misery which prompted the verse of Longland +and the preaching of Ball. But on the other hand, I have never shrunk +from telling at length of the triumphs of peace. I have restored to +their place among the achievements of Englishmen the ‘Faerie Queene’ +and the ‘Novum Organum.’ I have set Shakespeare among the heroes of +the Elizabethan age.... I have had to find a place for figures little +heeded in common history--the figures of the missionary, the poet, the +printer, the merchant, the philosopher.” + +One of the practical merits of Green’s England as an introduction to +the reading of historic literature is that at the head of each chapter +he gives the works from which he has drawn. And as his nature and +ideals of history led him to the most fertile and interesting of other +historians, his lists contain the titles of readable books rather than +dry and obscure sources. So that if a reader finds one part of the +story of England especially fascinating he can turn aside to those +historians who have treated it more fully, to the authorities whom +Green read and enjoyed. For instance, see the wealth of books which +Green mentions at the head of the chapter that most concerns us, The +Independence of America. There are Lord Stanhope’s “History of England +from the Peace of Utrecht,” Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” +Massey’s “History of England from the Accession of George the Third,” +Lecky’s “History of England in the Eighteenth Century”; the letters +and memoirs of individuals who witnessed the struggle, or took part +in it, such as the “Letters” of Junius, “Life and Correspondence of +Charles James Fox,” Burke’s speeches and pamphlets. And we should add +the newest important authority on the conflict, Trevelyan’s “American +Revolution.” + +These books in turn will lead to others as far as the reader cares +to go. Indeed it is one of the delights and excitements of reading +that one book suggests another, and the eager reader, who is under no +obligation to go along a definite course, finds himself in a glorious +tangle of bypaths. A book like Green’s may lead into any corner of +literature; one may follow, as it were, over the intellectual ground +where he got his education. We may begin with Gibbon’s “Rome” which +he read at sixteen (other boys of sixteen can read it with as much +pleasure as he found in it, even if they do not become historians), +and we can go on through his early studies of the English church. If +one reads only the poets and men of letters to whom he gives a place +in his chronicle of English life one will be, before one knows it, a +cultivated man--even a learned man. + +Let us dwell a moment on this aspect of leadership in books. No two +persons will ever follow the same course of reading; no list will +prove good for everybody; but any book which has interested you, and +which you have reason to think the product of a great mind, will +constitute itself a guide to reading;[3] it will throw out a hundred +clues, far-leading and profitable to take up, clues which show what +has been the reading of the author whose work suggests them. And there +must always be safety in following where a great man has gone in his +literary pilgrimages. + +If there is no history of America comparable in scope and style to +Green’s “Short History of the English People,” there are several +American historians of high rank. Perhaps because they were endowed +with dramatic imagination, or were influenced by the literary rather +than the scientific masterpieces of history, American historians of +genius have applied their talents to romantic periods in the story of +foreign nations, or to those early navigations and settlements which +resulted in the founding of our nation. Washington Irving began in +his “Life of Columbus” and “The Conquest of Granada” the brilliant +stories of Spanish chivalry and adventure, which were continued by +William Hickling Prescott in “The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and +Isabella,” “The Conquest of Mexico” and “The Conquest of Peru.” The +writings of Prescott and Irving have a kind of antique gorgeousness +in which the modern historian does not allow himself to indulge. The +history of the French and the Indians and the pioneers appealed to +the genius of Francis Parkman. The beginner may settle down to any +book of Parkman’s with the happy certainty of finding a brilliant +and thrilling story. John Lothrop Motley, in “The Rise of the Dutch +Republic” and “The United Netherlands,” treats of a people whose story +the American reader may learn in youth or may postpone until after +he has become acquainted with some books on English and American +history. The colonial history of America is best read in the work +of John Fiske, whose gifts of style and philosophic outlook on life +place him among the great historians. The history of America from the +beginning to modern times must be read in books by various authors, +who deal with limited sections and periods. It is especially true of +recent periods that no one historian is adequate. Partisanship and +our closeness to the Civil War have prevented the American historian +from seeing the conflict clearly in its relations to the rest of our +national story, and for a just impression of the struggle between +the states, the reader should go to the documents and the memoirs of +the time. The reminiscences of the political leaders, the biography +of Lincoln, and the excellent narratives of Union and Confederate +generals--Grant, Alexander, Longstreet, Gordon, Sherman, Sheridan, and +others--constitute a history of the period. There is peculiar validity +in the reminiscences of the contemporary witnesses of historical +events. The writer of autobiography and memoirs is not expected to +give final judgments, and we unconsciously allow for his personal +limitation. The professional historian, on the other hand, is obliged +to make sweeping decisions, and we are likely too often to accept his +decisions as final, unless we are trained and critical students of +history. If one reads several memoirs of the same period, one gradually +forms an historical judgment about it and comes to a position midway +between the points of view of the various writers. + +The young man beginning to read history now, as Green began Gibbon at +sixteen, may consider whether he will devote himself to the task of +writing the history of the American people. Even if his ambitions are +not so high, he may be sure that as a citizen of the Republic he can +never know too much about the history of his nation and of the men who +helped to make it. + +As aids to historical reading, it is well to have some books of bare +facts, a short history of America, a dictionary of dates, and a compact +general encyclopedia of events, such as Ploetz’s “Epitome.” But these +are for reference and not for entertainment. As a rule, text books +of history prepared for schools, however excellent they may be for +the purposes of study, are not entertaining to read. They have not +space for all the elaborate plots, political intrigues, biographical +interludes, accounts of popular movements of thought, which appeal to +the imagination of the leisurely reader. Our school teachers will +take care that we learn the salient facts which everyone must know. +By ourselves we shall dip into Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe” or +Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico” or Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” In +reading these masterpieces for pleasure, we shall be supplementing our +work in school and making our daily lessons easier. + + +LIST OF WORKS OF HISTORY + +_Supplementary to Chapter VII_ + +The following list of titles is not intended to outline an adequate +reference library for the student of history. It includes principally +books that have taken their place in literature by virtue of their +readability and their imaginative power, and may therefore be supposed +to interest the general reader. A few books are included which deal +with current historical problems and politics. + + +AMERICAN HISTORY + + + HENRY ADAMS. _History of the United States._ + +Covers exhaustively the period immediately following the Revolution. + + + GEORGE BANCROFT (1800-91). _History of the United States from the + Discovery of the Continent to 1789._ + + + JAMES BRYCE. _The American Commonwealth._ + +The recognized authority on American political institutions. + + + EDWARD CHANNING. _Students’ History of the United States._ + +Said to be the best of the one-volume histories of this country. + + + JOHN FISKE (1842-1901). _Discovery of America, with Some Account + of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest._ _New France and New + England._ _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors._ _The Beginnings of New + England._ _The Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and + Religious Liberty._ _Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America._ _American + Revolution._ _Critical Period of American History (1783-89)._ _War + of Independence._ _Mississippi Valley in the Civil War._ _Civil + Government in the United States._ + + + JOHN BROWN GORDON. _Reminiscences of the Civil War._ + + + ALBERT BUSHNELL HART (and collaborators). _American History Told by + Contemporaries._ + +Four volumes of extracts from diaries and writers who lived in the +epochs under consideration. A rich source of information and enjoyment, +as are also the following books: + + _How Our Grandfathers Lived._ _Colonial Children._ _Camps and + Firesides of the Revolution._ _Romance of the Civil War._ + + + WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. _American Revolution._ + +Selected from his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century.” This +with Trevelyan’s “American Revolution” will give American readers the +history of the conflict from a British point of view. + + + JAMES LONGSTREET. _From Manassas to Appomattox._ + +To be read in conjunction with the Memoirs by Grant, Porter, Sherman, +Gordon, Alexander, and other Union and Confederate generals. + + + FRANCIS PARKMAN (1823-93). _The Oregon Trail._ _France and England in + North America._ + +“France and England in North America” is divided into seven parts under +the following titles: + + _Pioneers of France in the New World_; _The Jesuits in North America + in the Seventeenth Century_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great + West_; _The Old Régime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France + under Louis XIV_; _A Half Century of Conflict_; _Montcalm and Wolfe_. + + + JAMES FORD RHODES. _History of the United States from the Compromise + of 1850._ + + + THEODORE ROOSEVELT. _American Ideals._ _The Naval War of 1812._ _The + Winning of the West._ + + + ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE. _American History and Its Geographic + Conditions._ + + + GOLDWIN SMITH. _Canada and the Canadian Question._ _The United States, + an Outline of Political History._ + + + GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN. _American Revolution._ + + + WOODROW WILSON. _Congressional Government: a Study in American + Politics._ _History of the American People._ + +The second work, in five volumes, covers the history of the country +from the beginnings to the present time; both readable and trustworthy. + + +GREAT BRITAIN + + + FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). _History of the Reign of Henry VII._ + +The first great piece of critical history in our language. + + + HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. _History of Civilization in England._ + + + THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with + Elucidations._ + + + EARL OF CLARENDON (1608-74). _History of the Great Rebellion._ + +A vivid account of the Cromwellian wars by a royalist. Interesting to +read in connection with Carlyle’s “Elucidations” of the letters and +speeches of Cromwell. + + + MANDELL CREIGHTON. _Age of Elizabeth._ + + + EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN (1823-92). _History of the Norman Conquest._ + _William the Conquerer._ _Growth of the English Constitution from the + Earliest Times._ + + + JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE (1818-94). _History of England from the Fall of + Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada._ + + + SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER. _A Student’s History of England._ _History of + England from the Accession of James to the Outbreak of the Civil War._ + _History of the Great Civil War._ _History of the Commonwealth and the + Protectorate._ + +The three histories last named constitute a continuous work of eighteen +volumes. Gardiner is not the easiest historian to read, but his work +is indispensable to anyone who would get a true view of a period which +more than any other in English history has been discolored by brilliant +biased historians, from Clarendon to Carlyle and Macaulay. + + + JOHN RICHARD GREEN (1837-83). _A Short History of the English People._ + _The Making of England._ _The Conquest of England._ _A History of the + English People._ + +The “History” is a longer, though, perhaps, not a “greater,” book than +the “Short History.” + + + RICHARD HAKLUYT (1553-1616). _The Principal Navigations, Voyages and + Discoveries of the English Nation._ + +In eight volumes of _Everyman’s Library_. + + + HENRY HALLAM (1777-1859). _Constitutional History of England._ + + + DAVID HUME (1711-76). _History of England._ + +Almost displaced as a historian by later writers, but still interesting +because of his philosophic and literary genius. + + + ANDREW LANG. _History of Scotland._ + + + WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. _History of England in the Eighteenth + Century._ + + + THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-59). _History of England from James + II._ + +In three volumes in _Everyman’s Library_. + + + GOLDWIN SMITH. _The United Kingdom._ + + + JACQUES NICOLAS AUGUSTIN THIERRY. _History of the Norman Conquest of + England._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + +FRANCE + + + EDMUND BURKE (1729-97). _Reflections on the Revolution in France._ + + + THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _The French Revolution._ + + + VICTOR DURUY. _History of France._ + +English translation, published by Crowell & Co. + + + FRANÇOIS PIERRE GUILLAUME GUIZOT. _History of France from the Earliest + Times to 1848._ + + + VICTOR HUGO. _History of a Crime._ + +Deals with the Coup d’etat of 1851, of which Hugo was a witness. +Vivid, powerful writing, easy to read in the French. + + + HENRY MORSE STEPHENS. _History of the French Revolution._ + +The work of a modern scientific historian, may be read after Carlyle’s +“French Revolution” as a corrective and for the sake of comparing two +historical methods. + + + HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. _The Ancient Régime._ _The French + Revolution._ _The Modern Régime._ + +The application to French history of somewhat the same philosophic +methods and principles that inform his “History of English Literature.” + + +GERMANY + + SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER. _The Thirty Years’ War._ + + + ERNEST FLAGG HENDERSON. _A Short History of Germany._ + + + HELMUTH KARL BERNHARD VON MOLTKE. _The Franco-German War._ + + +ANCIENT GREECE + + ALFRED JOHN CHURCH. _Pictures from Greek Life and Story._ + +Especially adapted to young readers. + + + ERNST CURTIUS. _History of Greece._ + +A monumental German work to be found in a readable translation. + + + THOMAS DAVIDSON. _Education of the Greek People and its Influence on + Civilization._ + + + GEORGE FINLAY. _Greece Under the Romans._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + GEORGE GROTE. _History of Greece._ + +The standard English work in Greek history. In twelve volumes of +_Everyman’s Library_. + + + HERODOTUS. _Stories of the East from Herodotus._ + +Extracts retold by Alfred John Church, especially for young readers. + + + JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY. _Greek Life and Thought from the Age of + Alexander to the Roman Conquest._ _A Survey of Greek Civilization._ + + +ANCIENT ROME + + SAMUEL DILL. _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire._ + + + EDWARD GIBBON (1737-94). _History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman + Empire._ + +The supreme contribution of England to historical literature, in its +combination of distinguished style and scientific method. + + + THEODOR MOMMSEN. _History of Rome._ + +A great German work, in five volumes, to be found in a readable English +translation. + + +OTHER HISTORIES + + + _Cambridge Modern History._ + +Of this great History planned by the late Lord Acton, ten volumes have +been published. It is the work of many writers and will be a storehouse +of the most competent historical writing of our time. + + + JAMES BRYCE. _Holy Roman Empire._ + +Readers of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” will seek this other +excellent work. + + + JEAN FROISSART. _Chronicles._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + +There are several translations and condensations of Froissart’s +“Chronicles,” notably “The Boy’s Froissart,” edited by the American +poet, Sidney Lanier. + + + MARY HENRIETTA KINGSLEY. _The Story of West Africa._ + + + HENRY HART MILMAN (1791-1868). _History of Latin Christianity._ + + + ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble + in Samoa._ + +A fine piece of historical writing showing that Stevenson had the gifts +of the historian as well as the gifts of the poet and romancer. + + + WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT (1796-1859). _Conquest of Mexico._ _Conquest + of Peru._ _Reign of Philip Second._ _Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella._ + + + JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY (1814-77). _Rise of the Dutch Republic._ _History + of the United Netherlands._ + + + ARCHIBALD FORBES. _The Afghan Wars._ + +A mixture of history and vivid reporting by a great war correspondent. + + + PIERRE LOTI. _Last Days of Pekin._ + + + WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859). _Knickerbocker’s History of New York._ + _The Conquest of Granada._ + +These books demonstrate the wide range of Irving’s genius from +burlesque, mingled with genuine study of racial characteristics, to +sober and poetic history. + + + FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET (VOLTAIRE). _History of Charles XII of Sweden._ + +Accompanied in the English translation by the critical essays of +Macaulay and Carlyle. Easy to read in the French. + + + JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS (1840-93). _Renaissance in Italy._ + +A work of rare beauty on the men, the history, and the art of Italy. + + + WALTER RALEIGH (1552-1618). _The Discovery of the Empire of Guiana._ + _A History of the World._ + +Raleigh’s “History of the World” is not so large as it sounds in scope, +but in imagination it almost lives up to its title. Thoreau says: “He +is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. There is a natural +emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space +between his sentences.” + + + FREDERIC HARRISON. _The Meaning of History._ + +An excellent guide to the reading of history. + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[3] See also page 244 of this Guide. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY + + +Since literature is, broadly, the written record of human life, +biography, the life story of real men, lies at the core and center of +literature. On one side biography is allied to history, which is the +collective biography of many men. On the other side it is related to +fiction. + +In our discussion of “History” we found that there are two ideals or +methods of writing it: one the picturesque, the other the scientific. +The scientific historian accuses the picturesque historian of +falsifications and disproportions. Scientific history is new and +aggressive and it accentuates its differences from the old ideals. +Yet there is no essential opposition between fact and an imaginative +representation of fact. Gibbon is picturesque, yet he is one of the +first great historians to make exhaustive study and accurate use of +documents. Carlyle can be as eloquent when he is telling the truth +as when he is misled by his love of color and his partisan passions. +The great historian of the future will not falsify or distort facts +except as human nature must always intervene before the facts +which it presents in human language. The true historian will have +great imagination, great vision, and yet have scrupulous care to +precisions of truth. For the present, history is recovering from its +traditional eloquence and trying to learn to present facts honestly +and clearly. Never again will the spirit of history and historical +criticism tolerate such a magnificent fabrication as the end of De +Quincey’s “Flight of a Tartar Tribe,” in which he gives, with all the +paraphernalia of a learned note, the inscription carved on the columns +of granite and brass to commemorate the migration of the Kalmucks. The +columns are a structure of De Quincey’s fancy, and the inscription +is in such prose as he alone among white men or Chinamen knew how +to write! In De Quincey’s time it was not considered an ethical +aberration to invent facts. In a ponderous article which he wrote for +the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on Shakespeare, he quoted the poet from +memory and spun some of the biography from his own fancy. The pious and +learned President of Harvard College, Jared Sparks, for the greater +glory of America and its founder, “improved” the style of Washington’s +private papers and ably defended the emendations. And Weems, an early +biographer of the man who seems nobler the more truly we know him and +who needs no legend to dignify him, wrote his life of Washington with +the deliberate purpose, indicated on the title page, of inculcating +patriotic and moral lessons in the young. Hence the cherry-tree story. + +History has improved in its morals, if not in its manners, and +scientific biography is making some headway. But biography is still +in a hazy state of legend and myth. Approach any man you choose, +especially among men of letters who have been written about by +other men of letters, and you find a mass of conjecture and legend +masquerading as fact. Sometimes there is an added garment of disguise, +the dignified gown of science and scholarship. + +No great writer has suffered from credulous and weak-principled +biographers so much as the greatest of all--Shakespeare. Most of the +lives of him are gigantic myths, built on hardly as many known facts +as would fill two pages of this book. Of late historians and men +of science have begun to laugh at literary biographers for making +such confusion of the institution of Shakespeare biography. It is +well enough for the young reader to learn carefully the biographical +notes prefixed to the school editions of Shakespeare, for the better +the young reader learns school exercises and the notes in the text +books, the better basis he has for reading and thinking for himself. +I may say, however, that there are at present, so far as I know, +only two books on the life of Shakespeare which are trustworthy, +Halliwell-Phillips’s “Outlines,” which gives all the documents, and +a recent masterly discussion of the documents by George G. Greenwood +called “The Shakespeare Problem Restated.” It is a problem and not +one for us to go into here except that it illustrates what we are +saying about scientific and fanciful biography. I should not wonder +if another generation were more interested than our fathers have been +in the poetic achievements, whatever they are, of the man whose +youthful portrait is on the cover of this book--Francis Bacon. One +thing is certain: the rising generation had better learn early to +approach with caution and tolerant scepticism books bearing such titles +as “Shakespeare, Man, Player and Poet,” “Shakespeare, His Life, His +Mind and His Art.” We had better bend our attentions to the plays +themselves, and when we wish to read _about_ Shakespeare, turn not +to the so-called biographies and “studies in Shakespeare” by college +professors, but to the great critics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, De +Quincey, Pater. + +As we said that we, mere readers, should leave scientific history in +the hands of specialists, so we may leave the problems of literary +biography to expert investigators. We are interested rather in that +kind of biography which is as old as the earliest legends of heroes, +that which celebrates the great ones of the earth. If it is true to +fact so much the better; but since biographers are likely to be the +friends, kinsmen, admirers of their subjects, biography will be the +last division of history to be informed with the scientific spirit. And +so far as it is an art, it will err on the right side, like fiction and +poetry, by presenting an ennobled view of human nature. + +That biography is an art is proved by the admittedly great examples. +The novelist who creates a fictitious biography has no more difficult +and delicate task than the biographer who finds in a real life story +the true character of a man, and gives to the events which produced +the character artistic form, unity, and movement. Boswell’s “Life +of Samuel Johnson” and Robert Southey’s “Life of Lord Nelson” are +as beautifully designed as the best novels. Boswell’s masterpiece +resembles a realistic novel and Southey’s “Nelson” is like a romantic +tale of chivalry and heroism. + +Benjamin Jowett, the great professor of Greek at Oxford, said that +biography is the best material for ethical teaching. In many ways it +is the best material for all kinds of teaching. For everything that +human beings have done and thought is to be found in the life stories +of interesting individuals, so that biography opens the way to every +subject. In our discussion of history we said that the directest +path to the heart of an historical epoch is through the biography of +an important figure or a wise observer of that epoch. There is no +better political history of America during the Civil War than Nicolay +and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln.” Grant’s “Memoirs” contains all that an +ordinary reader needs to know of the movements of the Northern armies +after Grant took command. The memoirs and reminiscences of Davis and +Confederate generals give us an adequate account of the civil and +military movements of the Southern side. Carlyle’s “Cromwell,” no +matter how biased and overwrought it seems to discriminating students, +will open the seventeenth century for those of us who cannot be +specialists in history. Bourrienne’s “Memoirs of Napoleon,” in the +English translation, is a good introduction to the history of Europe +during the Napoleonic wars (and it makes little difference to us that +the book was largely rewritten and augmented by the French editor). +Morley’s “Life of Gladstone” is a history of Victorian England. The +life of Luther is the heart of the Protestant Reformation. + +The layman who would know something of the tendencies of modern science +cannot do better than to read the biographies of men of science in +which sympathetic pupils have told in a style more simple than the +masters’ treatises the intellectual principles and human conditions +of the masters’ work. Such biographies are the “Life and Letters” of +Darwin, of Huxley, of Agassiz. The “Life of Pasteur” by Valery-Radot, +which has been translated into English, is a clear account of the main +tendencies of modern medicine, the subject that all the world is so +much interested in. Anyone who reads it will know better how to make +his way through the masses of popular articles on medicine and public +health in the current magazines. + +Since literary men are the most interesting of all heroes to other +makers of books, it is natural that the lives of the masters of +literature should have been written in greater abundance and usually +with greater skill and charm than the lives of any other class of +men. A good way, perhaps the best way, to study literature is to +read the lives of a dozen or a score of great writers. An ambitious +youth, determined to lay the foundations of a knowledge of literature, +might begin to read in any order the biographies in the series called +_English Men of Letters_. From that series I should cross out William +Black’s “Goldsmith” and substitute Forster’s or Washington Irving’s +“Life of Goldsmith”; I should also omit Leslie Stephen’s “George Eliot” +and read instead the “Life and Letters” by J. W. Cross. It would be as +well to pass by Mr. Henry James’s “Hawthorne” in favor of the biography +by Mr. George E. Woodberry in _American Men of Letters_. + +It will not be wise even for the enthusiastic reader of literature to +confine his reading in biography to the lives of men of letters. There +is such a thing as being too much interested in bookish persons. Men +of action have led more eventful lives than most writers, and their +biographers are likely therefore to have more of a story to tell. +Whenever you find yourself interested in any man, when some reference +to him rouses your curiosity, read his biography. In general it is +better to read about him in a complete “Life,” even if it is a bulky +one in a forbidding number of volumes. You are not obliged to read it +all. It is better to roam for half an hour through Boswell than to read +a short life of Johnson. This is a day of pellet books, handy volumes, +and popular compendiums; we need to learn again the use and delight +of a little reading in big books, in which we can dwell for long or +short periods. We need, also, to get over the idea that only learned +persons and special students can go to original documents. A boy of +fifteen will have more fun turning over the state papers and letters +and addresses of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln than in reading +a short encyclopedia article on one of those great men. Just try it +the next time you happen to be wandering aimlessly in a public library +and see if you do not stumble on something interesting. The whole +“Dictionary of National Biography” is not so much worth owning and, +except for purposes of reference, not so much worth reading as half as +many volumes of first-hand biography. + +The first of all original documentary biography is autobiography. A +man knows more about his own life than anyone else and he is quite as +likely to tell the truth about it as his official biographer. “The +Story of My Life” is always an attractive title, no matter who the hero +is. If an autobiography has continued to find readers for a number of +years, it is likely to be worth looking at. Sometimes men who are not +entitled to be called great have written great autobiographies. The +“Autobiography” of Joseph Jefferson is full of delightful humor and +sweetness. At a time when the theater is not an institution of which we +are proud and actors as they appear in the public prints are usually +bores and vulgarians, Jefferson’s “Autobiography” will give the reader +a new sense of the potential dignity of the stage and of the humanity +of the actor’s profession. Among the great men who have written +autobiographies we have mentioned Mill and Franklin and Grant. Others +who have written delightful volumes of self-portraiture are Goethe, +Gibbon, Trollope, Mrs. Oliphant. As a working rule, I should suggest +that when you are interested in a man, you should first read his +autobiography if he wrote one. If he did not, turn to the most complete +story of his life, the one that contains whatever letters and documents +have survived. And as a third choice try to find a life of him by some +writer who was intimate with him during his life, or who is an expert +in the subject to which his life was devoted, or who is a master in the +art of biography. + + +LIST OF BIOGRAPHIES + +_Supplementary to Chapter VIII_ + +This list of biographies does not constitute a catalogue of great men. +It merely gives some biographies that have literary quality or some +other quality that makes them important. The subject of the biography +is given first whenever the person written about would naturally come +into the mind before the author of the book; thus: Samuel Johnson; +“Life” by James Boswell. In other cases the author comes first; thus: +Plutarch; Lives. + + + JOHN AND ABIGAIL ADAMS. _Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, + Abigail Adams, During the Revolution._ + + + JOSEPH ADDISON. _Life_, by William John Courthope. + +In _English Men of Letters_. + + + THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. _Life_, by Ferris Greenslet. + + + ALFRED THE GREAT. _Life_, by Walter Besant. + + + HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL. _Journal_, translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. + + + AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS. _Confessions of St. Augustine._ + +A remarkable autobiography. Pusey’s translation is in _Everyman’s +Library_. + + + FRANCIS BACON. _Life and Letters_, edited by James Spedding. + + + JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE. _Margaret Ogilvy._ + +Barrie’s life of his mother; a delicious book. + + + GEORGE HENRY BORROW. _The Bible in Spain._ + +The subtitle defines this interesting book: “The journeys, adventures, +and imprisonments of an Englishman in an attempt to circulate the +Scriptures in the peninsula.” Readers of Borrow (see page 75 of this +Guide) will be interested in his “Life and Letters,” edited by William +I. Knapp. + + + ROBERT BROWNING. _Life and Letters_, by Alexandra Leighton Orr. + + + JAMES BRYCE. _Studies in Contemporary Biography._ + + + EDMUND BURKE. _Life_, by John Morley. + +In _English Men of Letters_. + + + ROBERT BURNS. _Life_, by John Gibson Lockhart. + + + JULIUS CÆSAR. _Life_, by James Anthony Froude. _Commentaries on the + Gallic and Civil Wars._ + + + THOMAS CARLYLE AND MRS. CARLYLE. _Life and Letters_, by James Anthony + Froude. + + + THOMAS DE QUINCEY. _Autobiographic Sketches._ _Confessions of an + English Opium-Eater._ _Reminiscences of the Lake Poets._ + + + CHARLES DICKENS. _Life_, by John Forster. + +In the edition abridged and revised by the English novelist, the late +George Gissing. + + + GEORGE ELIOT. _Letters and Journals_, edited by John Walter Cross. + + + RALPH WALDO EMERSON. _Life_, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. + +In _American Men of Letters_. See also Emerson’s letters to Carlyle and +John Sterling. + + + FRANCIS OF ASSISI. _Life_, by Paul Sabatier. + +In the English translation. + + + BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. _Autobiography._ + + + WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. _Life_, by John Morley. + + + JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE. _Autobiography._ + +Translated in _Bohn’s Library_. + + + OLIVER GOLDSMITH. _Life_, by Austin Dobson. See also the biographies + by John Forster and Washington Irving. + + + ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT. _Personal Memoirs._ _Life_, by Owen Wister (in + the _Beacon Biographies_). + + + THOMAS GRAY. _Letters_, edited with a biographical sketch by Henry + Milnor Rideout. + + + ALEXANDER HAMILTON. _Life_, by Henry Cabot Lodge. + +In _American Statesmen_. + + + NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. _Hawthorne and His Circle_, by Julian Hawthorne. + _Life_, by George Edward Woodberry (in _American Men of Letters_). + + + OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. _Life and Letters_, edited by John Torrey + Morse, Jr. + + + THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. _Life and Letters_, edited by Leonard Huxley. + + + WASHINGTON IRVING. _Life and Letters_, edited by Pierre Munroe Irving. + _Life_, by Charles Dudley Warner (in _American Men of Letters_). + + + JEANNE D’ARC. _Life_, by Francis Cabot Lowell. _Life_, by Andrew + Lang. _Condemnation and Rehabilitation of Jeanne d’Arc_, by J. E. J. + Quicherat (in the English translation). + + + SAMUEL JOHNSON. _Lives of the Poets_, selected by Matthew Arnold. + _Life of Johnson_, by James Boswell (in two volumes in _Everyman’s + Library_). + + + JOHN KEATS. _Life_, by Sidney Colvin. + +In _English Men of Letters_. + + + CHARLES LAMB. _Letters_, edited by Alfred Ainger. + + + ROBERT EDWARD LEE. _Life_, by Philip Alexander Bruce. _Life and + Letters_, by John William Jones. _Recollections and Letters_, by R. E. + Lee, Jr. _Life_, by Thomas Nelson Page. + + + ABRAHAM LINCOLN. _Life_, by John George Nicolay and John Hay. _A Short + Life of Abraham Lincoln_, by John George Nicolay. _Lincoln, Master of + Men_, by Alonzo Rothschild. + + + DAVID LIVINGSTONE. _Last Journals in Central Africa. How I Found + Livingstone_, by Henry Morton Stanley. + + + HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. _Life and Letters_, edited by Samuel + Longfellow. + + + THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. _Life and Letters_, by George Otto + Trevelyan. + + + JOHN STUART MILL. _Autobiography._ + + + JOHN MILTON. _Life_, by Mark Pattison. + +In _English Men of Letters_. + + + Napoleon. _Life_, by John Gibson Lockhart. _Life_, by William Milligan + Sloane. _Memoirs of L. A. F. de Bourrienne._ _Life_, by John Holland + Rose. + + + MARGARET OLIPHANT. _Autobiography and Letters._ + + + CHARLES WILLIAM CHADWICK OMAN. _Seven Roman Statesmen of the Later + Republic: the Gracchi, Sulla, Crassus, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar._ + + + SAMUEL PEPYS. _Diary._ + +Two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_. + + + PLUTARCH. _Lives._ + +In the Elizabethan translation by Thomas North, or the modern +translation by Arthur Hugh Clough. An abridged edition of this is +published for schools by Ginn & Co. + + + JACOB AUGUST RIIS. _The Making of an American._ + + + WALTER SCOTT. _Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott_, by John + Gibson Lockhart. + +There is an abridged edition of Lockhart, edited by J. M. Sloan. + + + WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, by George G. + Greenwood. _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, by James Orchard + Halliwell-Phillips. + +At the present time the most reliable works on Shakespeare’s life. + + + WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN. _Memoirs. Home Letters of General Sherman_, + edited by M. A. DeWolf Howe. + + + ROBERT SOUTHEY. _Life of Nelson._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + ANTHONY TROLLOPE. _Autobiography._ + + + IZAAK WALTON. _Lives_ of John Donne, George Herbert and Richard Hooker. + + + GEORGE WASHINGTON. _Life of Washington_, by Washington Irving. _The + Seven Ages of Washington_, by Owen Wister. _Life_, by Woodrow Wilson. + + + JOHN WESLEY. _The Heart of Wesley’s Journal_, with an essay by + Augustine Birrell, published by Fleming-Revell Co. + +The journal is found in four volumes of _Everyman’s Library_. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +THE READING OF ESSAYS + + +All literature consists of the written opinions and ideas, the +knowledge and experience, of individuals; it is a chorus of human +voices. Often the individuality of the creative artist is lost in the +magnitude of the work. It is present, necessarily, in every line, but +in the highest forms of literature, epic and dramatic poetry, the +personal lineaments are dissolved. Shakespeare, sincerest of poets, did +not in his dramas reveal his heart or directly utter a single belief +that we can feel sure was the private conviction of the author, and +the attempts to associate lines from Shakespeare with the personal +experiences of the actor of Stratford are invariably grotesque. Homer, +who, according to Mr. Kipling, “smote his bloomin’ lyre” and “winked +back” at us, was no such living man; it is likely that even if there +was a Homer, a poet who made the nucleus of “Iliad,” many hands during +several centuries produced the Greek epics, “The Iliad” and “The +Odyssey,” as we have them. Although Dante writes in the first person, +his adventures in worlds beyond the earth are those of a disembodied +spirit, a universal soul seeing visions in regions where he must put +off something of his personality before he can enter. In the places +where his prejudices and local enmities creep into his immense epic +of the heavens, his work is least poetic; it is precipitated from the +ideal to a kind of ghostly guide book, and the voices of the angels and +the winds of the under world for the moment become still. + +The novelist at his best disappears from his work. There is no greater +shock than when at the end of “The Newcomes,” Thackeray abruptly +wrenches us from the deathbed of Colonel Newcome and says that he, W. +M. Thackeray, has just written a story and that it is now fading away +into Fableland. A device of printing would save us from the shock; +the epilogue ought to begin on a new page, and a large “Finis” should +follow Colonel Newcome’s death. The person who makes a work of art has +the privilege of talking about himself in a preface; after that he must +stand back and let the stage fill with characters. + +Even in great art, however, we do feel the presence of a man and we are +willing to let him step in front of his stage sometimes and talk in his +own person. The best English novelists, Fielding, Thackeray, George +Eliot, Meredith, are essayists for pages at a time, and most of us do +not resent their intrusion. We like writers who use the capital I. + +So we take peculiar delight in that kind of literature which is +avowedly a talk, a monologue in which an author discourses, not through +poetic forms, or through fiction in which other characters are the +speakers, but directly to us as in a private letter or a spoken +lecture. This kind of discourse is called an essay. The man who talks +may pretend to be something that he is not, and the essayist is often a +writer of fiction portraying only one character. Such was Lamb when he +pretended to be Elia; such was Swift in many of his pamphlets; such was +the “_Spectator_,” a multiple personality whose wig Addison and Steele +and their friends could put on at will. + +Whether it is a real or a fictitious person who addresses us through +the essay, the form of the essay is the same, a direct communication +from a “me” to a “you.” + +The essay may have for its subject anything under the sun. It may be +a short biography with critical comment, as in Macaulay’s essays on +Addison, on Chatham, on Clive, and Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott. +Other essays by Macaulay and Carlyle are on a framework of historical +narrative. Oliver Wendell Holmes invented an essay form all his own in +“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” in which the opinions of the +autocrat are linked together by a pleasant boarding-house romance. And +he achieved an unusual triumph when he continued the form in other +books, “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” and “The Professor at the +Breakfast Table,” and did not suffer the disaster that usually befalls +a writer’s effort to repeat a success. + +Most of the written philosophy of the modern world is in the form of +essays. In Emerson we have philosophy in short eloquent discourses, +many of them like sermons. Political arguments and orations, if they +have literary quality, like those of Burke and Webster, properly come +under the head of essay. And almost all of the important body of +literature called criticism is in essay form. + +To say that every kind of writing seems to be essay which is not +something else is, like some other Hibernian statements, a short way of +expressing the truth. To be an artistic essay, to be really worthy the +name, a composition must have in it a living personality. Personality +is the soul of the essay. We do not admit under the term, essay, broad +as it is, the discourse which has only utility to recommend it. An +article on “How Our Presidents are Elected” may be instructive, it may +be more necessary to the education of the young citizen than Leigh +Hunt’s chat about stage-coaches. But Hunt’s chat is an essay: the other +is not. A present-day indication of the difference between the essay +and the unliterary form of exposition is the habit of our magazines of +classifying all prose pieces that tell us “how” and “what” as “special +articles,” whereas “essays”--the editors do not print essays if they +can help it! If a modern writer has an idea that would make an essay +he is tempted to disguise it under some more acceptable shape. But the +editors would retort--and with justice--that they would gladly print +essays if they could get good ones. + +There is something frank and immediate in the appeal of an essay; +the writer of it must be able to talk continuously well; he has +no surprises of plot to fall back on to wake the interest of an +inattentive auditor; he stands before us on a bare platform with no +stage lights or scenery to help him. When he succeeds, his reward is +a kind of personal victory, he finds not only readers but friends. +This is especially true of those essayists who discourse of “things +in general,” the true essayists, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh +Hunt, Montaigne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver +Goldsmith. The true essayist, like the Walrus in “Alice in Wonderland,” +advises us that the time has come + + To talk of many things: + Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax-- + Of cabbages--and kings-- + And why the sea is burning hot-- + And whether pigs have wings. + +And he proceeds, subject to no obligation in the world except the great +obligation never to be dull. The obligation upon the essayist not to +be dull imposes a peculiar obligation upon the reader that he shall be +keen-witted. A stupid person may be stirred to attention by a novel or +a play, but no stupid person can enjoy an essay. Indeed a taste for +essays is a pretty sure sign of a reader who appreciates the literary +spirit in itself. + +Just as the essay form is a kind of test of appreciation, so certain +writers are touchstones by which the taste of the reader may be judged. +One such touchstone is Charles Lamb, the prince of English essayists. +Whoever likes Lamb with unfeigned enthusiasm has passed the frontier +of reading and is at home in the universe of books. The reader who +hopes to care for the best in Lamb will not do well, I think, to begin +with the most familiar of his essays “A Dissertation on Roast Pig”; +certainly he will not stop with that, for it has not Elia’s finest +smile nor even his jolliest fooling. And of course it has not his +wisdom and pathos. The young reader can in an hour read a half dozen of +Lamb’s essays, “Old China,” “The Superannuated Man,” “Dream Children,” +“Imperfect Sympathies,” “The Sanity of True Genius” and “A Chapter +on Ears,” and get a taste of his sweet variety. Lamb is one of the +easiest of writers to read entire. His attempts at fiction and even his +verse may be disregarded. The true Lamb, the Lamb of the essays and +the letters, which are as good as essays, can be contained in a couple +of volumes of moderate size. The essays of Elia are printed in many +cheap editions; I have seen a book seller’s counter stacked high with +copies at twenty-five cents. As late as 1864, the editor of the first +complete edition of Lamb thought that the public at large knew him but +little, though his fame and popularity had increased since his death. I +believe that since 1864 his popularity has increased still more--those +twenty-five cent editions seem to show that in his own phrase, he has +become “endenizened” in the heart of the English-speaking nations. + +Perhaps the beginner will be a little perplexed at first by the +obscurity of Lamb’s allusions to literature, for though he says that +he could “read almost anything,” he has a special liking for the +quaint, and half the books that he mentions will be unfamiliar to the +modern reader. But any book that pleased him will be worth looking at, +and there is so much of common humanity in him that one can pass over +his obscure references and still understand and enjoy him. So that if I +recommend as the best possible short guide to literature his “Detached +Thoughts on Books and Reading,” I do not forget that the beginner will +not recognize all the book titles and authors that Lamb touches with +affectionate familiarity. Yet the thoughts are clear enough and have +more of the true spirit of reading packed into them than is to be found +in many a thick volume of literary criticism. The essays that touch the +heart of the simplest reader, such as “Dream Children,” may be read +first, and they will lead to the literary essays, which are the best of +all criticisms in the English language. Knowledge of Lamb is knowledge +of literature. He opens the way not only to the choicest old books, but +to the finest of his contemporaries. No man knew better than he the +value of those friends of his whom we have set high in literature; he +measured their altitude while they were swinging into place among the +poetic stars. + +As the chief master of literary ceremonies of his time, Lamb will be +found at his best not only in his essays but in his letters. His essays +have the informality of letters, and his letters have much of the +choiceness of phrase, the original turn of thought that distinguish +his essays. In his friendly letters you can meet almost everybody worth +knowing in that great period of English literature. Lamb is among the +fine few whose correspondence is a work of literary art. + +The literature of private letters stands somewhere between essays +and biography and partakes of the interest of both. The good letter +writer is as rare in printed books as in the mail bags that are now +hurrying over the world; and the delight of reading good printed +letters by a distinguished man is somewhat like the delight of reading +a well-written letter from a friend. To be sure, a book of letters is +not a masterwork of art, but it often brings pleasure when the reader +is not just in mood for the artistic masterpiece, for the great poem or +novel. I can recommend for a place in a library even of very limited +dimensions such a collection of letters as Mr. E. V. Lucas’s “The +Gentlest Art,” or Scoones’s “English Letters.” + +It is said that the modern modes of communication, the telegraph, the +telephone, the unpardonable post card, have caused or accompanied a +decline in the art of letter writing. But the mail of the day has not +yet been sorted; there may be great letter writers even now sending to +their friends epistles that we shall some day wish to read in print. +It hardly seems as if the world could be growing so unfriendly that it +will let polite correspondence go the way of some other old-fashioned +graces. Certainly the young man and the young woman can do nothing +better for the pleasure of friends and family, and nothing better for +their own self-cultivation, than to develop the habit of careful and +courteous letter writing. Better than most school courses in literature +and composition would be the daily practice of writing to some brother, +sister or friend. One of the most remarkable young writers of the +present day owes much of her purity of style, much of her education, to +the practice of writing--no, of _rewriting_ letters to her many friends. + +Our friendly letters need not be stiff compositions written with the +nose to the paper and the tongue squeezed painfully between the lips. +But they should be written with care. A rewritten letter need not be an +artificial thing. Why should we not take pains in phrasing a message to +a friend? Neither sincerity nor “naturalness” enjoins us to send off +the first blotted drafts of our communications, any more than freedom +and “naturalness” oblige us to go out in public hastily dressed. Candor +and spontaneity do not suffer from a care for our phrases and some +thought in grooming our style. + +If the courtly letter and the well-bred essay are not the +characteristic literary form of our generation, we have some writers of +satire and of literary and political opinions who deserve to be ranked +among the essayists. Mr. F. P. Dunne would have been a pamphleteer in +Swift’s time, a writer of the chatty essay in the days of Lamb and +Hunt. Since he was born to bless our time, he finds a wider audience +by putting his wit and wisdom, his Celtic blend of irony and humanity, +into the mouth of “Mr. Dooley.” Another essayist of great power, +though he is probably not called an “essayist” in the encyclopedias, +is Mark Twain. He promises us an interminable Autobiography, some +parts of which have been published. It is to be different from all +other autobiographies, for the principle of its construction is that +it is to have no order; he will talk about anything that happens to +interest him, talk about it until he is tired of it and then talk about +something else. This unprincipled willfulness of order and subject +is the essayist’s special privilege. No man since Elia has succeeded +better than Mark Twain in keeping up the interest of discursive +monologue about things in general. Our public does not yet know how +great a writer is this master of the American joke, and there are +critics who will cry out that the mention of Mark Twain and Charles +Lamb in the same breath is a violation of good sense. Yet Charles +Lamb’s “Autobiography” is, except in its brevity, as like to the +fragments of Mark Twain as the work of two men can be. + +“Below the middle stature,” says Elia of himself, “cast of face +slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion; +stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his +occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than +in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libeled as a person +always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow that charged +him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. A small eater, +but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the +juniper berry; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to +a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then an occasional puff.... +He died ----, 18--, much lamented.” The footnote to the last sentence +reads: “To anybody.--Please to fill up these blanks.” That is about as +near to Mark Twain’s manner of fooling as anything in literature. All +the genial essayists are given to jest and quibble and folly. And when +you come upon a writer whose fantastic whimsies and nonsensical abandon +are charming, be sure to turn the page, for you will invariably find +wisdom and pathos and greatness of heart. + +In one class of essay Mark Twain is past master, the essay of travel. +In “A Tramp Abroad” and “Following the Equator,” not to speak of that +satire on foolish American tourists, “Innocents Abroad,” we have not +only some of the best of Mark Twain’s writing, but examples of a kind +of essay in which very few authors have succeeded. The traveler who +can see things with his own eye and make the reader see them, with a +tramp’s independence of what guide books, geographies, and histories +say, is the rarest of companions. A good essay in travel looks easy +when it is done, but is very seldom met with because the independent +eye is so seldom placed in a human head. Moreover, until recent times +of cheap transit, most men of letters have been obliged to stay at +home and make literature of domestic materials or what the great world +sent them in books. Though literature of travel is very old, going back +to the time when the first educated man visited a neighboring tribe +and lived to return home and tell the tale, yet the personal essay of +travel is, in its abundance, the product of the nineteenth century, +when authors ceased to be poor and could circumnavigate the globe. + +The English historian, Kinglake, is remembered not for his “Crimean +War” but for his “Eothen,” published in 1844. It was so strange and +fresh a book of travel that several London publishers rejected it. An +account of a journey in the East that omitted information about many +great landmarks of Palestine and had not a word of statistics--how +could a publisher recommend it to the British people? One secret of the +book is that Kinglake, having tried to write his travels in various +forms and having failed, hit on the plan of addressing his account to a +friend, and the feeling of freedom which this gave him prevented him, +he says, “from robing my thoughts in the grave and decorous style which +I should have maintained if I had professed to lecture to the public. +Whilst I feigned to myself that you, and only you, were listening, +I could not by any possibility speak very solemnly. Heaven forbid +that I should talk to my genial friend as though he were a great and +enlightened Community, or any other respectable Aggregate.” Thus it +came about that Kinglake, aiming at one friend, reached the community, +the “Aggregate,” and found in it a host of friends. + +In the same year that saw the publication of “Eothen,” Thackeray began +his “Journey from Cornhill to Cairo,” another book of travel that +stands like a green tree in a world of guide posts. Among American +writers, besides Mark Twain, who have made delightful books of their +journeys abroad, are Aldrich, Howells, and Charles Dudley Warner. + +These touring essayists are usually more interested in living people +than in monuments of the dead; and they take more pleasure in their +own opinions and experiences than in encyclopedic facts. They are good +traveling companions because they are stored with wisdom and sympathy +before they set sail, and in the presence of strange sights and scenes +they give play to their fancy. So they are akin not so much to the +professional traveler, the geographer and student of social conditions, +as to the essayist who is good company at home. + +That is what the essayist must be, above all other writers--unfailing +good company. He may be philosopher, historian, or critic, but if he +is to be numbered among the choice company of essayists, his pages +must be lighted by the glow of friendliness, enlivened by the voice +of comradeship. Sometimes this friendliness takes terribly unfriendly +forms, as in the stinging irony of Swift or the hot thunder and +lightning of Carlyle; these preachers seem not to love their audience, +but at heart they have sympathy even for us whom they browbeat, and it +is not we, but the heavy thoughts with which their souls are burdened, +that have banished the smile from their faces. + + +LIST OF ESSAYS + +_Supplementary to Chapter VIII_ + + + JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719). _Selections from the Spectator._ + +Edited by Thomas Arnold in the _Clarendon Press Series_. There are many +school editions of the De Coverley papers. A sense of unity rather +than of excellence has singled out the De Coverley papers for school +reading and has made them, consequently, the best known of Addison’s +(and Steele’s) work. But only about a third of the De Coverley papers +are among the fifty best essays from the _Spectator_. Owing to the +weight of eighteenth-century tradition, under which criticism is still +laboring, Addison’s reputation is greater among professional writers +about literature than many modern readers, coming with fresh mind to +the _Spectator_, can quite sincerely feel is justified. Only the mature +reader who has some historical understanding of Addison’s time can +appreciate his cool wit and somewhat pallid humor, and feel how nearly +perfect is the adaptation of his style to his purpose and his limited +thoughts. + + + MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88). _Essays in Criticism._ _Culture and Anarchy._ + +Arnold’s essays on books and writers are among the very best, for he +combines deep knowledge of literature with the charm of the true +essayist. His essays on “Culture,” like many of the literary sermons +of Carlyle and Ruskin, propound with great earnestness what every +well-bred person takes more or less for granted. But one reason we +take the need of culture for granted, one reason that such sermons are +becoming obsolete, is because Carlyle and Ruskin and Arnold made their +ideas, through their writings and the hosts of writers they influenced, +part of the common current thought of our time. + + + FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). _Essays._ _Wisdom of the Ancients._ _The + Advancement of Learning._ + +There are many inexpensive editions of the “Essays,” and good texts of +Bacon’s other work in English prose have been prepared for students. +Owing to their brevity the “Essays” are the best known of Bacon’s prose +work. But compared with the longer works of Bacon, they are scarcely +more than _tours de force_, experiments in epigrammatic condensation. +Not the young reader, but the mature reader who would know the +Elizabethan age, its noblest thinker and the most eloquent prose +contemporary with the King James Bible, will wish to read Bacon’s life +and works in Spedding’s edition. + + + THOMAS BROWNE (1605-82). _Religio Medici._ _Urn Burial._ _Enquiries + into Vulgar Errors._ + +The three or four small books of this very great essayist are to be +found in a volume of the _Golden Treasury Series_, and also in the +fine little Dent edition. + + + EDMUND BURKE (1729-97). _Speech on American Taxation._ _Speech on + Conciliation with America._ _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol._ + +A good edition of Burke’s principal speeches is that edited by F. G. +Selby and published by Macmillan. The prescriptions of the schools +have made the “Speech on Conciliation” familiar as a difficult thing +to analyze rather than as a magnificent essay (for essay it is, though +delivered as a speech). Burke’s other philosophic and political essays +are among the great prose of his century and should be sought both by +the student of history and by the reader of literature. + + + JOHN BURROUGHS. _Birds and Poets._ _Locusts and Wild Honey._ + _Wake-Robin._ + +After Thoreau Mr. Burroughs is the most distinguished of modern writers +on nature and out-of-door life. + + + THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _Sartor Resartus._ _Heroes and + Hero-Worship._ _Past and Present._ _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays._ + +“Heroes and Hero-Worship” is, for the beginner, the best, because the +clearest, of Carlyle’s work. Carlyle’s opinions become of less and +less consequence as time passes, and he remains great by virtue of the +superbly eloquent passages in which the poet overcomes the preacher. He +is an illustrious example of the fact that nothing passes so rapidly +as the beliefs of a day which a preacher hurls at the world about +him--and at posterity,--and also of the fact that eloquence and beauty +survive the original burning question which gave them life and which +later generations are interested in only from a biographic and historic +point of view. The essay carries in it the journalistic bacteria that +make for its speedy dissolution, but the poetic thought, whatever the +occasion of its utterance, outlives circumstance and changes of ideas +and taste. + + + CICERO. _Letters and Orations._ + +In English, in _Everyman’s Library_. + + + SAMUEL MCCHORD CROTHERS. _The Gentle Reader._ + +The most charming and humorously wise of living American essayists. + + + SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). _Biographia Literaria._ _Lectures + on Shakespeare._ + +Both in _Bohn’s Library_ and in _Everyman’s Library_. Coleridge’s +detached opinions on books are golden fragments of criticism. His +“Lectures on Shakespeare” are, for a reader with imagination, the most +inspiring notes on Shakespeare that we have, though the many and patent +inaccuracies make his comments distasteful to modern scholars, who +prefer to commit their own inaccuracies. + + + WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800). _Letters._ + +In the _Golden Treasury Series_. + + + DANIEL DEFOE (1661-1731). _Essay on Projects._ _The Shortest Way with + the Dissenters._ + +Defoe was a journalist and pamphleteer who lacked the charm of the true +essayist, but whose prose in essay form is worth reading for its vigor +and variety of idea. + + + THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859). _Selections._ + +In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. “The Confessions +of an English Opium-Eater” is in _Everyman’s Library_, and also the +“Reminiscences of the Lake Poets.” De Quincey’s beautiful poetic prose +is unlike anything before or since. The “Opium-Eater” belongs perhaps +under “Biography,” but may stand here. Its somewhat sensational subject +has secured for it, fortunately, a wide reading and so kept De Quincey +from passing into the shadowy company of distinguished writers known +only to the few. His essays fill many volumes. Those in the inexpensive +volume in the _Camelot Series_, published by Walter Scott, include some +of the best and should be read, perhaps, before the “Opium-Eater.” + + + JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700). + +There are collections of Dryden’s prose, but the best way to become +acquainted with “the father of modern English prose” is to run through +his complete works and read the remarkable prefaces to his plays and +poems. In them English criticism, for all the merit of some essays +earlier in the seventeenth century, really begins. + +[Illustration: EMERSON] + + + FINLEY PETER DUNNE. _Mr. Dooley in Peace and War._ _Mr. Dooley in the + Hearts of His Countrymen._ _Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy._ + + + RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-82). _Essays._ _Representative Men._ _The + Conduct of Life._ _Society and Solitude._ + +Emerson’s essays, including “The American Scholar” (which is as fresh +and pertinent to our time as if written yesterday), have been printed +in inexpensive editions by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The volumes named +above should be owned in American households. More than Carlyle or +Ruskin or any other of the preaching essayists of the nineteenth +century, Emerson emerges as the prophetic, visionary spirit who seized +and phrased the best moral and spiritual ideas that his time had to +offer to future times. + + + JOHN FLORIO (1550-1625). _Translation of Montaigne’s Essays._ + +There are several handy editions, notably the pocket edition, published +by Dent, of this famous translation whereby Montaigne became an English +classic. + + + OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _The Citizen of the World._ + +Among the lighter satirical essays of the eighteenth century “The +Citizen of the World” is second only to the _Spectator_, if not equal +to it. + + + WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830). _Essays._ + +A good selection appears in the _Camelot Series_. “Though we are mighty +fine fellows nowadays,” says Stevenson, “we cannot write like Hazlitt.” +(See Hazlitt’s “English Comic Writers” and “Lectures on the English +Poets” for his studies of Shakespeare). + + + LAFCADIO HEARN. _Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan._ _Kokoro: Hints and + Echoes of Japanese Inner Life._ + + + OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table._ + _Professor at the Breakfast Table._ _Poet at the Breakfast Table._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_ and in inexpensive editions, published by +Houghton, Mifflin & Co. A wise, witty, beautifully lucid mind. Holmes +snatched philosophy from the library and brought it to the breakfast +table so that the poorest boarder goes to his day’s work from the +company of an immortal who has met him halfway and talked to him +without condescension. + + + JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859). _Essays._ + +One volume of selections in the _Camelot Series_. Also in two volumes +with his poems in the _Temple Classics_ (Dent & Co.). Young readers who +will look at Hunt’s essay “On Getting Up on Cold Mornings” will not +need to be urged further into his delightful society. + + + RICHARD JEFFERIES (1848-87). _An English Village._ _Field and + Hedgerow._ _The Open Air._ _The Story of My Heart._ + + + SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-84). _Lives of the Poets._ + +Students of literature will wish to read one or two of Johnson’s +criticisms. He was a much greater man than writer, better as a talker +and letter writer than as an essayist. A good selection from the “Lives +of the Poets” is edited by Matthew Arnold. + + + CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). _Essays of Elia._ + +See pages 183-6 of this Guide. + + + ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-65). _Letters and Speeches._ + +To be found in the complete works, edited by Nicolay and Hay, and in +several small volumes of selections; the volume in _Everyman’s Library_ +has an introduction by James Bryce. + + + JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-91). _Among My Books._ _My Study Windows._ + _Democracy and Other Addresses._ _Political Essays._ _Letters._ + +The foremost American critic. Interest in the bookish and literary side +of Lowell should not lead us to overlook his ringing political essays, +notably that on Lincoln, written during the war and remarkable as +having phrased at the moment the judgment of the next generation. + + + THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-59). _Essays._ + +There are many editions of the more familiar essays of Macaulay, +especially those that have formed a part of school and college reading +courses. The essay on Milton, unfortunately prescribed in college +preparatory work, is one of the poorest. Those on Clive and Hastings, +also often prescribed, are among the best. It is the prevailing fashion +to underrate Macaulay as a critic, as it was perhaps in his lifetime +the fashion to overrate him. He is lastingly powerful and invigorating, +a great essayist, if only because he knows so well what he wishes to +say and knows precisely how to say it. He is not subtle, not poetic, +but his clear large intellect is still a bright light through the +many-hued mists of Victorian criticism. + + + JOHN MILTON (1608-74). _Areopagitica, etc._ + +Milton’s prose is difficult to read and only a little of it is worth +reading except by the student of Milton and the student of history. +The noblest passages of Milton’s prose have been collected in a single +volume, edited by Ernest Myers, and published by Kegan Paul, Trench & +Co. + + + JOHN MUIR. _The Mountains of California._ _Our National Parks._ + + + JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-90). _Idea of a University._ _Apologia pro + Vita Sua._ + +An admirable volume of selections, edited by Lewis E. Gates, is +published by Henry Holt & Co. Newman’s “Apologia” belongs properly in +our list of Biography, but it is really an essay in defense of certain +of his ideas. Owing to the fact that Newman’s work is largely religious +controversy and discourse directed to practical rather than artistic +ends, his literary power and the beauty of his prose have not won him +so many readers as he deserves. + + + BLAISE PASCAL (1623-62). _Provincial Letters._ + +In the English translation of Thomas M’Crie. + + + WALTER HORATIO PATER (1839-94). _The Renaissance._ _Appreciations._ + +The finest English critic of his generation. Contrary to a current +impression that Pater is for the “ultra-literary,” most of his work is +clear and simple; the essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge are the best +to which a reader of those poets can turn. + + + JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900). _Sesame and Lilies._ _Crown of Wild Olive._ + _Queen of the Air._ _Frondes Agrestes._ + +There are fourteen volumes of Ruskin in _Everyman’s Library_. “Sesame +and Lilies” and “Frondes Agrestes” (selected passages from “Modern +Painters”) have been often reprinted. The best of Ruskin’s prose is +very beautiful, the worst is tediously prolix. He regretted that his +eloquence took attention from his subject matter, but like Carlyle, +he lives by his eloquence and poetry rather than by his opinions and +teachings. + + + SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845). _The Peter Plymley Letters._ _Essays._ + +In one volume, published by Ward, Lock & Co. After Swift, perhaps the +wittiest English essayist who used his keen weapons in the interests of +justice. + + + RICHARD STEELE (1671-1729). _Essays_ from the _Tatler_ and the + _Spectator_. + +Steele is usually found with Addison in selections from the _Spectator_. + + + ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _Familiar Studies of Men and Books._ + _Memories and Portraits._ _An Inland Voyage._ _Travels with a Donkey._ + +The best thoughts of this romancer and some of the best of his writing +are in his essays. + + + JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745). _Selected Prose._ + +Selections from his prose writings are to be found in a volume of the +_Camelot Series_ and also in a small volume published by D. Appleton & +Co. Not until the reader is familiar with “Gulliver’s Travels” and has +some understanding of Swift’s life and the historical background of +his work, can he feel the genius of the satirical essays and political +lampoons. Swift is often repellent to those who only half understand +him, but he grows in power and dignity to those who appreciate his +underlying righteousness. + + + WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63). _Book of Snobs._ _Roundabout + Papers._ _From Cornhill to Cairo._ _English Humorists._ + +Thackeray is an essayist by temperament and shows it in his novels. +His satirical and literary essays may be reserved until after one has +read his novels, but they will not be overlooked by anyone who likes +Thackeray or who likes good essays. + + + HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-62). _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac + Rivers._ _Walden._ _Excursions._ _The Maine Woods._ _Cape Cod._ + _Spring._ _Summer._ _Winter._ _Autumn._ + +Thoreau’s work is one long autobiographical journal ranging from brief +diary notes on nature to full rounded essays. A prose poet of nature, +and second to Emerson only as a philosophic essayist on nature and +society. His greatness becomes more and more evident in an age when +“nature writers” are popular. + + + IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). _The Complete Angler._ In _Everyman’s + Library_. + + + CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (1829-1900). _In the Wilderness._ _As We Go._ + _Backlog Studies._ _In the Levant._ + +A charming essayist, a humorous lover of books and nature. His +reputation has waned somewhat during the past twenty years, but +Americans cannot afford to lose sight of him. + + + DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852). _Speeches and Orations._ + +In one volume, published by Little, Brown & Co. The literary quality of +Webster’s orations entitles them to a place among American essays. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS + + +Since there is not time in the short life of man to read all the good +books written in one language, the young reader, or even the person +who has formed the habit of reading, may feel that he need never go +beyond the books of his own race. In a sense this is true. Perhaps +it is especially true for us who are born to the English language. +For the English people, however insular they may be in some respects, +have always been great explorers of the lands and the thoughts of +other races. They have plundered the literature of their neighbors and +loaded the borrowed riches into their own books. In the Elizabethan age +some writers seem to have regarded it as a patriotic duty to render +for their countrymen the choicest literature of France and Italy and +Spain. While they were robbing their neighbors across the channel, they +were also building English classics out of the literary monuments of +“insolent Greece and haughty Rome.” And for many generations English +writers, like those of other modern countries, have been brought up on +the classics. + +So we find incorporated in English literature the culture of the +entire ancient and modern world, and one who should read only English +books could still have a full mind and a cultivated spirit. We cannot +say, therefore, that it is necessary, in order to realize the true +purpose of reading, to make excursions into the literature of foreign +countries. But we can point out the advantage of such excursions, and +I would insist on the ease with which the ordinary person, who has +enjoyed only a limited formal education, can make himself acquainted +with foreign languages and literatures if he will. + +In our time we have schools to teach everything known to man from +advertising to zoölogy. It is well that our schools are broadening in +interest and that every kind of knowledge is being organized so that +it can be imparted. But there is a danger that we may get into the +habit of leaving too much for the schools, that we may come to think +that the schools monopolize all knowledge, or at least all the methods +of teaching. This would be a great pity in a nation that is proud of +self-made men. We, of all peoples, must remember what Walter Scott +said, that the best part of a man’s education is that which he gives +himself. Schools and universities only start us in a methodical way, on +a short well-surveyed path, into the world of knowledge. Most of the +learning of educated men and women is acquired after they have left the +college gates, and anyone may set out on the road to knowledge with +little direct assistance from the schools. The better, the easier for +us, if we can go to college; but if we cannot have the advantage of +formal education we need not resign ourselves to ignorance.[4] + +Most young people, however, will think of Greek, Latin, French, and +German as difficult and “learned” mysteries accessible only to the +fortunate who can go to the higher schools, and of use only to those +who intend to enter scientific and literary professions. If I say +that with no knowledge of any language but English you can teach +yourself any other language well enough to read it, I hope you will +not shake your head and say that such self-teaching is possible only +to extraordinary intellects. Many commonplace persons have learned +languages by reading them, with no equipment but a lexicon, a short +grammar, and an interesting text. Perhaps it is not fair on top of that +statement to cite the case of Elihu Burritt, for he was an exceptional +man. But as readers will learn from his excellent “Autobiography,” he +began his studies under very difficult circumstances; so that, taking +all things together, talent and conditions, many a young man can start +where he began and under no greater disadvantages. Burritt would have +gone some way on the road to learning even if his endowments had been +small. And with no genius but the genius of industry we can follow for +a little distance his democratic course. + +Burritt was a blacksmith by trade. He had only such education as he +could get in a country academy, where his brother was the master. In +his leisure he studied mathematics and languages, and before he died +he had acquired a reading knowledge of fifty tongues and dialects, +ancient and modern. Yet he was not a self-absorbed man who shut himself +up in profitless culture. He became a world-wide apostle of peace. +The study of languages taught him that all men are brothers. If he +could learn fifty foreign languages, any of us can learn one, and +through that one we too shall understand that we are not an isolated +people, not the only people in the world. We shall meet in their native +tongue some great group of our brothers, the Germans, the French, the +Italians, learn their ideals and broaden our own. It is impossible to +learn Greek and Latin and not to feel how close we are to the peoples +of two thousand years ago. It is impossible to learn French or German +and keep in our hearts any of that contempt for “foreigners” which +ignorant and provincial people so stupidly cherish. + +We shall arrive, too, through knowledge of another language at a +finer appreciation of our own language, its shades and distinctions, +its variety and power. We shall understand better the great English +writers, many of whom have known something of foreign literature and +refer in a familiar way to French and German and ancient classics, as +if they took for granted in their readers an acquaintance with the +literature of other nations. + +How shall we go to work to learn foreign languages? The answer is as +simple as the prescription for reading English. Open a book written +in the foreign language and take each word in order through a whole +sentence. Then read that same sentence in a good translation. Then +write down all the words that seem to be nouns and all the words that +seem to be verbs. After that read the sections in the grammar about +verbs and nouns. The other parts of speech will take care of themselves +for a while. Then try another sentence. I know one young person who +read through a French book and got at its meaning by guessing at the +words and then returning over those which appeared oftenest and which, +of course, were the commonest. It is possible by a comparison of the +many uses of the same word to squeeze some meaning out of it. The +dictionary and the grammar will give the rest. + +The foreign book stores, the publishers of text books, and the +purveyors of home teaching methods that are advertised in the more +reputable journals offer language books that are of real assistance. +The scope of this Guide does not admit any detailed instruction in +the methods of learning foreign languages. I can only insist that +with a few books and perseverance anyone can learn, not to speak, +perhaps not to write, but to read a strange tongue. And I say to the +boy or the girl who is going to the high school that not to take the +courses in Greek, Latin, French and German is to throw away a precious +opportunity. Upon the grounding of those few years in school, the +young receptive years, what a knowledge of languages one can build! +The notion, all too prevalent, that foreign languages, especially +Greek and Latin, are of no use to the boy or the girl who is going +“right into business,” is one of the dullest fallacies with which a +hard-working practical people ever blinded its soul. Playing the piano +and learning to sing, nay, even going to church, are of no use in +business. But who will be so foolish as to devote his whole life to +business? Burritt, the blacksmith boy, taught himself languages. The +high-school boy who is going to be a blacksmith can begin to study +languages before he picks up the tools of his bread-winning labor. If +this seems like the vain idealism of a bookish person, let me make an +appeal to your patriotism. Do you know that this land of opportunity +and prosperity is not developing so many fundamentally educated +men and women as we should expect from our vast system of public +schools and our many universities? One reason is that we have so many +bread-and-butter Americans who allow their boys and girls to stay away +from those classes in Greek and Latin and French and German which our +high schools provide at such great cost to the generous taxpayer. All +we lack in America is the will to use the good things we have provided +for us. + +Well, we who are interested in the reading of good books will +make up our minds to get by hook or crook a little taste of some +language besides English. If we truly care for poetry we shall try +to read Vergil and Homer and Dante and Goethe. To become gradually +familiar with one great foreign poet, so that we know him as we know +Shakespeare, is to conquer a whole new world. + +The easiest books to read in a foreign tongue are prose fictions, in +which the interest of the story spurs the reader on and makes him eager +for the meanings of the words. Text-book publishers issue inexpensive +editions of modern French and German fictions, which are, of course, +selected by the editors with a view to their fitness for young readers. +The French or German book which has become a recognized classic in +its native land and is considered by editors of school books to be a +good classroom text is likely to have universal literary qualities, +simplicity, purity of style, and right-mindedness. I find in admirable +inexpensive texts representative stories by Dumas, Zola, George Sand, +Halévy, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Balzac, Hugo, About, and other French +masters, and by Freytag, Baumbach, Sudermann, and Heyse among modern +German writers. French and German drama and history lie but a step +beyond. I, for one, have read more of these school editions of foreign +classics since I left school than when they were part of school-day +duty, and I am still grateful for the convenient notes and lists of +hard words. As one with only an imperfect reading knowledge of foreign +languages, I can testify with the right degree of authority to the +pleasure of the ordinary person in reading unfamiliar tongues. If one +has a fair grounding of Latin, the exploration of Italian and Spanish +is a tour through a cleared and easy country. With Professor Norton’s +wonderful prose translation and with the text of Dante in the _Temple +Classics_, where the English version faces the Italian, page for page, +one can read Dante as one would read Chaucer. And there could be no +better way to learn the difference between prose and poetry than to +turn now and again to Longfellow’s truly poetic translation and feel +how his verse lifts in places to something that the prose cannot quite +attain. + +If we are not persuaded that our soul’s good depends on a knowledge +of foreign languages, we can make the acquaintance of the classics of +other nations in the best English renderings. Our greatest book, the +King James Bible, is a translation, so great a translation that in +point of style it is said by some critical scholars to be better than +its Greek and Hebrew originals. In general it is true that translation +falls below the original or radically changes its character. Until +the nineteenth century, when the scholars of our race began to give +us literal translations of the classics, which although “literal” +are still idiomatic English, translators in our tongue have been, as +a rule, willful conquerors who dominated the native spirit of their +originals with the overwhelming power of the English language and +spirit. They anglicized the foreign masterpiece so that its own father +would not recognize it. The result was often, as in Pope’s “Iliad,” a +new English classic but not a good pathway to the house of the foreign +poet. + +Pope’s “Iliad” is a “classic” but it is poor Homer and not the best of +Pope. His genius is much better expressed in “The Rape of the Lock.” +And Homer’s genius is much better preserved for us in the simple prose +of Leaf, Myers, Butcher, and Lang. Professor G. H. Palmer’s “Odyssey” +is so good that no translator hereafter has a right to plead as excuse +for the failure of his version of any classic that “the English +language will not do it.” Matthew Arnold’s essay “On Translating Homer” +will stimulate the reader’s interest in the art of translation and help +bring him near to the Greek spirit. But this essay goes into subtleties +which may baffle the beginner. Any beginner, old enough to read at all, +can read Professor Palmer’s “Odyssey.” Many books of Greek stories and +legends of the heroes have been prepared for young readers. “Old Greek +Stories” by C. H. Hanson, or A. J. Church’s books of Greek life and +story, together with Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable,” will initiate one into +the Homeric mysteries.[5] + +After the reader has advanced far enough to be interested in +philosophy, he will wish to read Epictetus and Plato. Jowett’s “Plato” +is one of the great translations of the nineteenth century. The reader +of Browning will not omit his noble, if somewhat difficult translation +of the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus. From the early Elizabethans to the +late Victorians the works of the English poets are starred with bits +from the Latin and Greek poets. One of the finest of translations from +the Greek is the “Theocritus” of Charles Stuart Calverley, the English +poet, who loved all things beautiful and enjoyed all things absurd. +Calverley’s translations from the classics and his delicious burlesques +and parodies will give one a new sense of how close together the +different moods of literature may lie in the same heart, both the heart +of the poet and the heart of the reader. + +If an artistic translation of a foreign work has not been made or is +not easily accessible, a literal translation is of great service to the +casual reader. Even in the preparation of lessons in Latin and Greek +a literal translation, honestly used, helps one to learn the original +language and extends one’s English vocabulary. The reason there is a +ban upon the “pony” in school is that people ride it too hard and do +not learn to walk on their own feet. Out of school we can get much from +literal renderings of the classics, such as are to be found in the +cheap series of _Handy Literal Translations_, published by Hinds & Co. +Their fault is that they are printed in tryingly small type, but this +is a defect due to their merits of compactness and low cost. + +The best translation of Vergil is Conington’s prose version, which has +become an English classic. The introduction is one of the best essays +on translating. There are several renderings of Vergil into English +verse. Dryden’s is the best known, and is of interest to the reader +of English principally because Dryden did it. He brought to Vergil +somewhat the same ideals of translation and the same kind of skill that +Pope brought to the “Iliad.” William Morris’s version is probably the +most fluent and poetic of modern translations of Vergil into English +verse. + +The Latin poet who has been most often translated, and by the greatest +variety of talent, is Horace, whom our forefathers thought that every +gentleman should be able to quote. The accomplished translator likes +to match his skill against the clever Roman, to render his light +philosophy, his keen phrase, his beautiful brevity. The American will +like the free and joyous “Echoes from the Sabine Farm,” by the late +Eugene Field and his brother, Mr. Roswell Field, a book that must have +made the shade of Horace inquire appreciatively in what part of the +world Chicago is “located.” + +Modern literature in all countries has attracted the readers of other +countries, and the work of translation is going on continuously. Not +only the great foreign classics of the last three hundred years, but a +host of lesser writers on the continent of Europe have made their way +into English. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a +new interest in German literature and philosophy--indeed, there was a +new German literature. Goethe was translated by Sir Walter Scott and +others. Coleridge translated Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Carlyle made +a number of translations from German romance, among them a glowing +version of Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister,” which, in part, suggested his +own strange masterpiece, “Sartor Resartus.” Bayard Taylor’s poetic +version of “Faust” is of interest to the American reader and is no mean +representation of the original. + +Hugo and Dumas are as well known to us as Scott and Dickens. Who +has not read “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and +“The Toilers of the Sea”; “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three +Musketeers”? “The Devil’s Pool,” “Mauprat” and “The Little Fadette” by +George Sand have been English literature these many years. So, too, +have “Eugénie Grandet” and “Le Père Goriot” by Balzac, the first of the +great French realists whose work has come to us directly in translation +and indirectly through the English and American writers whom they have +influenced. + +As for later French fiction we can trust to the taste of English +translators, as we can to the judgment of the editors of the school +texts, to give us the best, that is, the best for us. The finest of +Maupassant comes to us politely introduced by Mr. Henry James in “The +Odd Number.” Bourget, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Mérimée, Halévy, the great +Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, who belongs to French literature, Anatole +France in his beautiful story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” the +poet Rostand--these and others we have naturalized in English. It is +to France that we turn for the best criticism, and the reader who gets +far enough to be interested in that branch of literature will find that +many of the critics of our race have been pupils of the French critics +from Sainte-Beuve to Brunetière and Hennequin. + +Other countries besides France, Germany, and England have produced +literature which has crossed the boundaries of the nations and become +the possession of the world. The Russian novel is, perhaps, the most +powerful that the nineteenth century has seen, but the American reader +may as well leave it until he has read a great deal of English +fiction. Then he will find that Turgenieff, Tolstoi, Dostoevski are +giants in a giant nation. Poland has one writer who is known to English +readers, Sienkiewicz, whose “Quo Vadis” and “With Fire and Sword” are +among the great novels of our age. I should recommend that admirers +of “Ben Hur” read “Quo Vadis” and get a lesson in the difference +between a masterpiece and a pleasant book that is very much less than a +masterpiece. Readers who think there is some special virtue in American +humor--and no doubt there is--ought to know at least one of the great +books of Spain, “Don Quixote.” Spanish has become an important language +to us who are learning about our neighbors, “the other Americans,” +and are trying to wake up our lagging trade relations with them and +our backward sympathies. The young man going into business will find +some good chances open to him if he knows Spanish, and, what is +perhaps quite as important, he will find that Spain, too, has a modern +literature. + +We cannot know all foreign literatures, but we can know at least one. +Whether we visit in spirit Italy or Norway or Spain or Russia, we shall +be learning the great lesson of literature, that our brothers the world +over are doing and thinking and hoping the same things that we are. +Reading foreign books[6] is the cheapest and perhaps the wisest kind of +travel, for the body rests while the mind goes abroad. + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[4] See also page 241. + +[5] See also the discussion of Chapman, pp. 245-8 of this Guide. + +[6] Books in foreign languages and English translations will be found +in their proper place in the lists of fiction, poetry, etc. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +THE PRESS OF TO-DAY + + +If we were guiding an intelligent stranger from another planet through +our busy world, before what institution should we pause with greatest +anxiety to explain to our alien comrade its meaning, its value? +Perhaps before the church, yet when we remembered that the Bible and +other works of religion and poetry are in our homes, we could not +bring ourselves to tell our companion that the church is the heart, +the indispensable fountain of our religious life. The school then? +Maybe that, yet Knowledge spends in the school but relatively few +hours of her day-long ministrations. We might wax eloquent before the +hospitals, but they are only repairing some of the damages which man +and nature have inflicted upon a small part of the race, and it is +the healthy major portion of humanity that carries on the life of the +world and does whatever is worth doing. It would be simple to explain +the thundering factories whose din drowns the voice of the expositor, +to tell how in yonder building are made the machines that cut and +thresh the wheat that feeds the world, and how in the building beyond +are made the cars that bring the wheat from the fields to the teeming +towns. All these institutions are wonderful, all are essential in our +life. Yet greater than any, more difficult to explain, inspiring and +disheartening, grinding good and evil, is the press, from which our +visitor could see streaming forth thousands of tons of paper blackened +with the imprint of little types. + +The stranger could see that. We should have to make it clear to him +that those types are turning over once a year almost all that man has +ever known and thought. The contemporary press is engaged in three +kinds of activity: the reprinting of old books, the printing of new +ones, and the printing of the magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and +other communications relating to the conduct of daily business. + +The first activity, the printing of old books, is an unmixed blessing. +Every book, great or small, that the world has found worth preserving +is continuously revived and redistributed to our generation. Never +before were the classics of the ages so cheap, so accessible to the +common man. + +Toward the second product of the whirling presses, the books of to-day, +our attitude may easily become too censorious or too complacent. It is +the fashion to slander the productions of one’s own age and recall with +a sigh the good old days when there were giants. But in those good old +days it was fashionable, too, to underrate or ignore the living and +praise the dead. When the Elizabethan age was waning but not vanished, +Ben Jonson wrote: “Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and +eloquence grows backward.” And yet Milton, the greatest poet after +Shakespeare, was even then a young man and had not done his noblest +work. A century later Pope wrote: + + Be thou the first true merit to befriend; + His praise is lost who stays till all commend. + Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes, + And ’tis but just to let them live betimes. + No longer now the golden age appears + When Patriarch-wits surviv’d a thousand years: + Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, + And bare three score is all even that can boast; + Our sons their fathers’ failing language see, + And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be. + +But Chaucer is more alive now than he was in Pope’s day, and both +Dryden and Pope are brightly modern in diction if not in thought. +Pope’s idea is not so much that his contemporaries are unworthy of +long life as that changes in taste and language will soon make their +work obsolete. He pleads for his contemporaries, yet like many another +critic he is _laudator temporis acti_, a praiser of times past and +done. His injunction that we befriend and commend our neighbor’s merit +before it speedily perishes is generous but fails to recognize that +merit, true merit, does not die. This is certainly true in our time +when books are so easily manifolded and come into so many hands that +there is little likelihood of a real poet’s work being accidentally +annihilated, or failing to find a reader somewhere in the world. + +In the nineteenth century pessimism about current literary productions +was almost chronic, at least among professional critics. The Edinburgh +Reviewers and the other Scotch terrier, Thomas Carlyle, set the whole +century to growling at itself. Thoreau, with a humorous parenthesis to +the effect that it is permissible to slander one’s own time, says that +Elizabethan writers--and he seems to be speaking not of the poets but +the prose writers--have a greater vigor and naturalness than the more +modern, and that a quotation from an Elizabethan in a modern writer is +like a green bough laid across the page. Stevenson says we are fine +fellows but cannot write like Hazlitt (there is no reason why we should +write like Hazlitt, or like anybody else in particular). Emerson, +tolerant and generous toward his contemporaries, looks askance at new +books, implies with an ambiguous “if” that “our times are sterile +in genius,” and lays down as a practical rule, “Never read any book +that is not a year old,”--which being translated means, “Encourage +literature by starving your authors.” + +As we have said, most of the great authors are dead because most of +the people ever born in this world are dead. And it is natural for +bookmen to glance about their libraries, review the dignified backs of +a hundred classics, and then, looking the modern world in the face, +say, “Can any of you fellows do as well as these great ones?” To be +sure, one age cannot rival the selected achievements of a hundred ages. +But the Spirit of Literature is abroad in our garish modern times; she +has been continuously occupied for at least three centuries in every +civilized country in the world. And, as Pope pleads, let us welcome the +labors of those whom the Spirit of Literature brushes with her wing. + +So far as one can judge, a very small part of contemporaneous writing +has literary excellence in any degree. But a similarly small portion +of the writing of any age has had lasting excellence; and more men and +women, more kinds of men and women, are to-day expressing themselves in +print than ever in the world before. Since no one person has to read +many books, the world is not unduly burdened with them; it can read, +classify, and reject or preserve all that the presses are capable of +putting forth. “The trash with which the press now groans” was foolish +cant a hundred years ago, when Jane Austen satirically quoted it.[7] +And it is more threadbare now than it was then. There are alive to-day +a goodly company of competent writers of novels; I could name ten. I +believe, too, that there are genuine poets, though we do not dare name +young poets until they are dead. History and biography are, regarded +as a collective institution, in flourishing state, though, to be sure, +the work of art in those departments of literature as in poetry and +fiction, appears none too frequently. It is our part to join in the +work of that great critic, the World, encourage the good and discourage +the bad, and help make the best book the “best seller.” + +It would be foolish to hope for that ideal condition in which only +authors of ability should write books. “Were angels to write, I fancy +we should have but few folios.” But writing is a human affair, and +human labor is necessarily wasteful. We have to endure the printing of +a hundred poor books and we have to support a score of inferior writers +in order to get one good book and give one talented writer a part of +his living. Thousands of machines are built and thrown away before +the Wrights make one that will fly, and they could not make theirs if +other men had not tried and in large part failed, bequeathing them a +little experience. A hundred men for a hundred years contributed to the +making of Bell’s telephone. We do not grudge the wasted machines, the +broken apparatus in the laboratory. So, too, when hundreds of minor +poets print their little books and suffer heartache and disappointment +for the sake of the one volume of verse that shows genius, we need +not groan amid the whir of the presses; we need only contemplate with +sympathy and understanding the pathetic losses and brave gains of human +endeavor. Numberless books must be born and die in order that the one +or two may live. We shall try to ignore the minor versifier as gently +as possible, to suppress the cheap novelist as firmly as we can, and +give our dollar for the good book when we think we have found it. + +The third part of the printed matter published from day to day, +periodicals and magazines and newspapers, presents a complex problem. +It is in place for us to say a word about it, for this is avowedly +a guide to reading and not a guide to literature, and most of us +spend, properly, a good third of our reading time over magazines and +newspapers. Much depends on our making ourselves not only intelligent +readers of books but intelligent readers of periodicals and papers. + +The magazine industry in America is colossal, and its chief support is +that amazing business institution, American advertising. The public +pays a big tax on flour, shoes, clothes, paint, and every other +commodity in order that advertisers may pay for space in periodicals +and newspapers. The periodicals and newspapers, in turn, pay writers +from a fiftieth to a twentieth of the income from advertising in order +to make the advertising medium interesting enough for people to buy it. + +In this the magazine manufacturers are on the whole successful. +Perhaps there are sages and seers who can live content with bound +books and prefer that those books should be at least fifty years old. +I know of one man, a constant reader of poetry and philosophy, who +tried the experiment of retiring to his library and stopping all his +subscriptions to the current periodicals. The experiment was an utter +failure, because he was a man of active intelligence, and because, +in truth, the magazines, many of them, are very good. No less a +philosopher than Professor William James said in a recent article: +“_McClure’s Magazine_, _The American Magazine_, _Collier’s Weekly_ +and in its fashion, _The World’s Work_, constitute together a real +popular university.... It would be a pity if any future historian were +to have to write words like these: ‘By the middle of the twentieth +century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence +over public opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising +the tone of democracy which they had proved themselves so lamentably +unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted +with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and +for the clarification of their human preferences, the people at large +acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain +private literary ventures, commonly designated in the market by the +affectionate name of ten-cent magazines.’ Must not we of the colleges +see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this?” + +The possible failure, here implied, of universities to lead in the +subjects which they profess to study has already become actual in the +departments of English literature. Of this we shall say something in +the next chapter. + +It is, however, the other side of the matter that is important. Our +best magazines are vital: they are enlisting the services of every kind +of thinker and teacher and man of experience, and they are printing +as good fiction and verse as they can get; certainly they are not +willfully printing inferior work. But it is not the fiction or the +verse in the magazines that is of greatest moment, even when it is +good. The value of the magazine lies in the miscellaneous contributions +on science, politics, medicine, and current affairs, which seem to me +of continuously good substance from month to month. And the literary +quality of these articles (the words I quoted from Professor James are +from a fine article printed in a popular magazine, _McClure’s_) is, on +the whole, just as high as the average in the old _Edinburgh Review_, +through which Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, and others, with stinging and +brilliant essays, helped to reform that terribly brutal England of the +early nineteenth century. + +It is easy to find fault with the magazines. You may say that the +_Atlantic Monthly_ is pseudo-literary and seems to be living on +the sweepings of a New England culture of which all the important +representatives died twenty years ago. You may say that the _Nation_ +often sounds as if it were written by the more narrow-minded sort of +college professor. You may say that the _Outlook_ is permeated by +a weak religiosity. All the same, if you see on a man’s table the +_Atlantic Monthly_, the _Nation_, and the _Outlook_, and the copies +look as if they had been read, you may be reasonably sure that that man +appreciates good writing and has a just-minded view of public questions. + +Of the lighter, more “entertaining” magazines there are, from an +ideal point of view, too many, and the large circulation of some of +the sillier ones indicates what we all know and need not moralize +about--that there are millions of uneducated people who want something +to read. It is, however, a matter for congratulation that some of the +best magazines, _McClure’s_, _Collier’s_, _The Youth’s Companion, +Everybody’s_, have large circulations, and that our respectable and +well-bred old friends, _Scribner’s_, _Harper’s_, the _Century_, are +national institutions.[8] + +It is difficult to understand how the American magazine and the +American newspaper are products of the same nation; the magazine is +so honest and so able, the newspaper so dishonest and so ignorant +except in its genius for making money and sending chills up the back. +We will not waste our time by turning the rest of this chapter into +an article demanding a “reform” of the newspapers, but in the spirit +of a conscientious guide of young readers we will make two or three +observations. + +The advertising departments of the American newspaper, with few +exceptions, differ from the advertising departments of all reputable +magazines, in that the newspaper proprietors take no responsibility +for the character of the advertisements. The magazines reject all +advertisements that the managers know to be fraudulent. The newspapers +do not reject them. Let the reader draw his own conclusions as to +the trustworthiness of his daily paper as a business institution and +a purveyor of the truth. When we have a generation of Americans who +understand the business dishonesty of the newspaper and what it implies +about the character of the news and the editorials, the newspapers will +be better in all departments. Meanwhile, all our writing about the low +quality of our daily press will have little effect. + +In the matter of journalistic honesty in the news and editorial +departments, let us understand this: With few exceptions, American +newspapers are so irresponsible that no unsupported statement appearing +in them is to be counted on as the truth or as a fair expression of +what the men in the editorial offices believe to be the truth. Of +course, much of every daily paper is true, because the proprietors +have no motive in most cases for telling anything untrue. In order +to give some weight to these opinions I may say that for a number of +years I was an exchange editor and read newspapers from all parts of +America. Also, for a number of years I acted as private secretary to a +distinguished person whose name is often in the newspapers, and whose +position is such that no editor can have any motive, except the desire +to print a “story,” for connecting the name with any untrue idea. From +a collection of fifty clippings made from American newspapers in a +period of two years I find over thirty that are mainly incorrect and +contain ideas invented at the reporter’s or the editor’s desk; more +than ten that are entire fabrications; and five that are not only +untrue, but damaging to the peace of mind of the subject and other +interested persons. And under all this is not a touch of malice, for +toward that person the entire press and public are friendly. Imagine +the lies that are told about a person to whom the editors (or, rather, +the owners) are indifferent or unfriendly! + +When one considers the energy and enterprise of the newspaper, it is +difficult to understand why there is not more literary ability, at +least of the humbler kind, in the news columns, the reviews and the +editorial comments. One reason is, perhaps, that the magazines take all +the best journalistic ability, so far as that ability consists in skill +in the use of language; any journalist or writer on special subjects +prints his work in the magazines if he can, and the newspapers get what +is left. Editorial writing is at such a low pitch that there are only +two or three real editorial pages in the daily press of the nation. +The reporting is often clever and quite as often without conscience. +The machinery for gathering world news is amazingly well organized. +Other kinds of ability are abundant in the newspaper office; and it +is a natural economic fact that the most debased papers, making the +most money, can hire the most talented men--and debauch them; while +the more conscientious paper, struggling in competition with its rich +and dishonest rivals, cannot afford to pay for the best editors and +reporters. + +If the rising generation will understand this and grow up with an +increasing distrust of the newspaper, the newspaper will reform in +obedience to the demand of the public, the silent demand expressed by +the greater circulation of good papers and the failure of these that +are degrading and degraded. + +We called in the opinions of one philosopher, Professor James, to +support our view of the American magazine. Let us summon another +philosopher to corroborate in part our view of the newspapers, to show +that the foregoing opinions are not (as some newspapers would probably +affirm if they noticed the matter at all), the complaints of a crank +who does not understand “practical” newspaper work. Our philosopher +will confirm, too, the belief of this Guide that the ethics of the +newspaper is of importance to the young reader. The newspaper is ours. +We must have it; it renders indispensable service to all departments of +our life, business, education, philanthropy, politics. We cannot turn +our backs on it; we cannot in lofty scorn reject the newsboy at the +door. It is for us to understand the constitution and methods of the +daily press and not be duped by its grosser treacheries as our fathers +have been. I quote from _The Outlook_ a letter from Professor George +Herbert Palmer, whose name will be found elsewhere in this book as +philosopher and translator of the “Odyssey.” + + “_To the Editor of ‘The Outlook’_: + + “SIR: May I make use of your columns for a personal explanation + and also to set forth certain traits in our press and people which + manifest themselves, I believe, in an equal degree in no other country? + + “The personal facts are these: On June 16th I delivered a Commencement + address at a girls’ college in Boston, taking for my subject the + common objections to the higher education of women, objections + generally rather felt than formulated by hesitating mothers. Five were + mentioned: the danger to health, to manners, to marriage, to religion, + and to companionship with parents in the home. These I described from + the parents’ point of view, and then pointed out the misconceptions + on which I believed them to rest. In speaking of manners, I said that + a mother often fears that attention to study may make her daughter + awkward, keep her unfamiliar with the general world, and leave her + unfit for mixed society. To which I replied that in the rare cases + where intellectual interests do for a time overshadow the social, we + may well bear in mind the relative difficulties of subsequent repair. + A girl who has had only social interests before twenty-one does not + usually gain intellectual ones afterwards; while the ways of the world + are rapidly acquired by any young woman of brains. To illustrate, I + told of a strong student of Radcliffe who had lived much withdrawn + during her course there, alarming her uncollegiate parents by her + slender interest in social functions. At graduation they pressed her + to devote a year to balls and dinners and to what they regarded as the + occult art of manners. She came to me for counsel, and I advised her + to accede to their wishes. ‘Flirt hard, M.,’ said I, ‘and show that a + college girl is equal to whatever is required of her.’ This was the + only allusion to the naughty topic which my speech, an hour in length, + contained. + + “That evening one of the ‘yellowest’ of the Boston papers printed a + report of my ‘Address on Flirtation,’ and the next day a reporter came + from the same paper requesting an interview. The interview I refused, + saying that I had given no such address and I wished my name kept + altogether out of print. The following Sunday, however, the bubble + was fully blown, the paper printing a column of pretended interview, + generously adorned with headlines and quotation marks, setting forth + in gay colors my ‘advocacy of flirtation.’ + + “And now the dirty bubble began to float. Not being a constant reader + of this particular paper, I knew nothing of its mischief until a week + had gone by. Then remonstrances began to be sent to me from all parts + of the country, denouncing my hoary frivolity. From half the states + of the Union they came, and in such numbers that few days of the past + month have been free from a morning insult. My mail has been crowded + with solemn or derisive editorials, with distressed letters, abusive + postal cards, and occasionally the leaflet of some society for the + prevention of vice, its significant passages marked. During all this + hullabaloo I have been silent. The story was already widespread when + my attention was first called to it. It struck me then as merely a + gigantic piece of summer silliness, arguing emptiness of the editorial + mind. I felt, too, how easily a man makes himself ridiculous in + attempting to prove that he is not a fit subject for ridicule, and + how in the long run character is its own best vindication. I should + accordingly prefer to remain silent still; but the story, like all + that touches on questions of sex, has shown a strange persistency. My + friends are disquieted. Harvard is defamed. Reports of my depravity + have lately been sent to me from English and French papers, and in a + recent number of _Life_ I appear in a capital cartoon, my utterance + being reckoned one of the principal events of the month. Perhaps, + then, it is as well to say that no such incident has occurred, and + that now, when all of us have had our laugh, the racket had better + cease. + + “But such persistent pursuit of an unoffending person throws into + strong relief four defects in our newspapers, and especially in the + attitude of our people toward them. In the first place, the plan of + reporting practiced here is a mistaken one, and is adopted, so far + as I know, nowhere else on earth. Our papers rarely try to give an + ordered outline of an address. They either report verbatim, or more + usually the reporter is expected to gather a lot of taking phrases, + regardless of connection. While these may occasionally amuse, I + believe that readers turn less and less to printed reports of + addresses. Serious reporting of public speech is coming to an end. It + would be well if it ended altogether, so impossible is it already to + learn from the newspapers what a man has been saying. + + “Of the indifference to truth in the lower class of our papers, + their vulgarity, intrusions into private life, and eagerness at all + hazards to print something startling, I say little, because these + characteristics are widely known and deplored. It apparently did not + occur to any of my abusers to look up the evidence of my folly. + I dare say it was the very unlikelihood of the tale which gave it + currency. I was in general known to be a quiet person, with no liking + for notoriety, a teacher of one of the gravest subjects in a dignified + university. I had just published a largely circulated biography, + presenting an exalted ideal of marriage. It struck the press of the + country as a diverting thing to reverse all this in a day, to picture + me as favoring loose relations of the sexes, and to attribute to me + buffoonery from which every decent man recoils. + + “Again, our people seem growing incapable of taking a joke--or rather + of taking anything else. The line which parts lightness from reality + is becoming blurred. My lively remark has served as the subject for + portentous sermonizing, while the earnest appeal made later in my + address to look upon marriage seriously, as that which gives life its + best meaning, has been either passed by in silence or mentioned as + giving additional point to my nonsense. The passion for facetiousness + is taking the heart out of our people and killing true merriment. The + ‘funny column’ has so long used marriage and its accompaniments as + a standing jest that it is becoming difficult to think of it in any + other way, and the divorce court appears as merely the natural end of + the comedy. + + “The part of this affair, however, which should give us gravest + concern is the lazy credulity of the public. They know the + recklessness of journalism as clearly as do I, on whom its dirty + water has been poured. Yet readers trust, and journal copies journal, + as securely as if the authorities were quite above suspicion. Once + started by the sensational press, my enormities were taken up with + amazing swiftness by the respectable and religious papers, and by many + thousands of their readers. It is this easy trust on the part of the + public which perpetuates newspaper mendacity. What inducement has a + paper to criticise its statements when it knows they will never be + criticised by its readers? Nothing in all this curious business has + surprised me more than the ease with which the American people can be + hoaxed. One would expect decent persons to put two and two together, + and not to let a story gain acceptance from them unless it had some + relation to the character of him of whom it was told. I please myself + with thinking that if a piece of profanity were reported of President + Taft I should think no worse of President Taft, but very badly and + loudly of that paper. But, perhaps I, too, am an American. Perhaps I, + too, might rest satisfied with saying, ‘I saw it in print.’ Only then + I should be unreasonable to complain of bad newspapers. + + “G. H. PALMER.” + + +FOOTNOTES: + +[7] See page 42. + +[8] They seem to be international institutions if one is to believe the +story of the English lady who, comparing the United States unfavorably +with her own country, said to an American: “You have nothing equal to +_our_ _Century_, _Harper’s_, and _Scribner’s_.” Those magazines publish +English editions. + + + + +CHAPTER XII + +THE STUDY OF LITERATURE + + +In our age of free libraries and cheap editions of good books anyone +who has time and disposition may become not merely a reader of +literature, but a student of literature. The difference is not great, +perhaps not important; it seems to be only a matter of attitude and +method. The reader opens any book that falls in his way or to which +he is led for any reason, tries a page or two of it, and continues or +not, at pleasure. The student opens a book which he has deliberately +sought and brings to it not only the tastes and moods of the ordinary +reader, but a determination to know the book, however much or little +it may please him. He is impelled not only to know the book, with his +critical faculties more or less consciously awake, but to know the +circumstances under which the book was written, and its relation to +other books. One may read “Hamlet” ten times and know much of it by +heart and still not be a _student_ of “Hamlet,” much less a student of +Shakespeare. The student feels it necessary to know the other plays +of Shakespeare, some of the other Elizabethan dramatists, a little of +the history and biography of Shakespeare’s time, and something, too, +of the best critical literature that “Hamlet” has inspired in the +past two centuries. The study of literature implies order and method +in the selection of books, and orderly reading in turn implies enough +seriousness and willful application to turn the act of reading, in +part, from play to work. + +Well, then, it is better to be a student of literature than a mere +reader. Ideally that is true; if there were years enough in a human +life we should like to be students of everything under the sun. But the +conditions of life limit the mere reader on one side and the student +on the other, and it is a question which one is ultimately richer in +mind. A mere reader will read “Hamlet” until he can almost imagine +himself standing on the stage able to speak the lines of any part. The +student of literature will read “Hamlet” thoroughly, investigate its +real or supposed relation to the rest of the Shakespearian plays, toil +through a large volume of learned notes and opinions, read fifty other +Elizabethan tragedies and a half dozen volumes on the life and works +of Shakespeare. He is on the way to becoming a student of Shakespeare. +But while he is struggling with the learned notes, the mere reader +is reading, say, Henley’s poems; while the student is reading the +lesser plays of Shakespeare, the mere reader is enjoying Browning’s +tragedies; while the student of “Hamlet” is making the acquaintance of +fifty tragedies by Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Marlowe, +Webster--less than ten of which are masterpieces--the idle reader is +wandering through Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” ten modern novels, the +seventh book of “Paradise Lost” (that noble Chant of Creation), a +beautiful new edition of the poems of George Herbert, and some quite +unrelated bits of prose and verse that happen to attract his eye. Which +of the two has pursued the happier, wiser course? Each has spent his +time well, and each, if there were more time, might profitably follow +the other’s course in addition to his own. Intensive, orderly reading, +like that of the _student_, tends to make the mind methodical and +certainly furnishes it with a coherent body of related ideas on which +to meditate. Extensive reading, such as we assume the _reader’s_ will +be, seems to engender superficiality, and yet such is the nature of +books and human thought that scattered reading may disclose unexpected +and vital relations of idea. Greater effort of will is required to keep +the student on his narrower course, and effort of will is profitable +to the spirit. On the other hand, the mind is likely to have keener +appetite for what it meets on a discursive course, and it assimilates +and absorbs more exhaustively what it approaches with natural, unforced +interest. “It is better,” says Johnson, “when a man reads from +immediate inclination.” + +It would be educational anarchy to depreciate orderly intensive +study of any subject, and we shall presently consider some helpful +introductions to the methodical study of literature. But I believe that +human nature and human conditions favor the unmethodical reader, and +that he, on the whole, discovers the best uses of books in the world +as it is. For in the world as it is, we have in adult life thirty, +forty, fifty years in which to read books. If we consider everything a +book from the little volume which occupies half an hour to the Bible +which cannot be read through once intelligently in under six months, +we see that three books a week is a liberal number for an assiduous +reader. So that in a lifetime one cannot expect to know more than five +or six thousand books. Five thousand, or two thousand, or one thousand +are plenty for a life of wisdom and enjoyment. The five thousand or +the one thousand books of the discursive reader are likely to be at +least as good a collection as the five thousand or the one thousand of +the student of literature. Reader and student are both restricted to +a small picking from the vineyard of books. The ordinary reader will +have spent a third of his reading hours on books that have meant little +to him. The student will have spent a third of his time in digging +through sapless, fiberless volumes. But the free wandering reader is +not disturbed by the number of books he has read in vain or by the vast +number of interesting books he has not read at all; whereas the student +of literature is lured by his ideal of exhaustive knowledge to hurry +through books that he “ought to know,” and in desperation is tempted to +insincere pretensions. + +In no class of readers does the tendency to unwarranted assumptions of +knowledge show more comically than in those advanced students of books +who are called Professors of English Literature. Properly speaking, +no one is a professor of literature except the man who can produce +something worth reading. But as the term is used it defines a class +of teachers who have spent much time and study, not as writers but as +readers of books, and who then set themselves up, or are set up in +spite of individual modesty by the artificial university systems, to +“teach” literature. The professional teacher of literature can know +only a limited number of books. And while he has been reading his +kind, his unprofessional neighbors, even his students, are reading +their kind. He knows some literature that they do not; they know some +literature that he does not. The chances are that the professor and +not the lay reader will have departed the farther from the true uses +of literature. It is possible to read a number of good books while the +professor is studying what another professor says in reply to a third +professor’s opinions about what Shakespeare meant in a certain passage. +The professor of literature seems to regard Shakespeare and other poets +as inspired children who need a grown person to interpret their baby +talk; whereas the lay reader takes it for granted that Shakespeare had +more or less definite ideas about what he wished to say and succeeded +in saying it with admirable clarity. + +To be sure, a professor here and there may be found who is a live and +virile reader of poetry like the rest of us, and the faults of pedantry +and pretentious authority are not inevitable faults of the profession +as a whole. There is, however, one universal fault of the professional +teacher of literature which is imposed by the conditions of employment +in our universities and is subversive of the true purpose of colleges +and the true purposes of literature. One fundamental idea of a college +is to afford a certain number of scholarly men the means of livelihood +from college endowments in order that they may have time to devote to +books. The modern professor of literature seems to have so many duties +of administration and discipline that he has little time to read for +the sake of reading--which is the chief reason for reading at all. The +old idea of a university as a place where the few educated members of +society could retire for study and intellectual communion has passed +away, and the professor of literature is rather at a disadvantage in +the modern world where there are more educated persons outside the +universities than in them, and where the cultivated person of leisure, +reading literature by himself, can easily outstrip the professor. + +Professor of literature? As well might there be a professor of Life, +or a professor of Love, or a professor of Wisdom. Literature is too +vast for anyone to profess it, excepting always him who can contribute +to it. Even if our professors of literature were a more capable class +of men, they would still be anomalous members of society, for they are +trying to do an anomalous thing, maintain themselves in authority on a +subject which is open to everybody in a world of books and libraries. +And they are working under conditions not only not helpful, but +distinctly unfavorable to a true knowledge and enjoyment of literature, +as compared with the conditions of the person of equal intelligence +outside the college. + +My purpose is not so much to dispraise the literary departments +of universities as to praise a world which has grown so rich in +opportunities that the universities are no longer the unique leaders +in literature or the seats of the best knowledge about it. Our masters +are on the shelves and not in the colleges. (Carlyle, Emerson, and +Ruskin all said that, and it was said before them.) Without going to +college we can become students of literature, professors of literature, +if we have the talent and the will. I do not say or mean that we +should not go to college if we can. I mean that we can stay away from +college if we must and still be as wise and happy readers of books +as those bachelors of arts who have sat for four years or more under +“professors of literature.” If my advice were sought on this point, I +should advise every boy and girl to go to college if possible, but to +take few courses in English literature and English composition. One +great advantage of a college course is that it offers four years of +comparative leisure, of freedom from the day’s work of the breadwinner; +and in those four years the student, with a good library at hand, +can read for himself. I should advise the student to take courses in +foreign languages, history, economics, and the sciences, things which +can be taught in classrooms and laboratories and are usually taught by +experts. There is no need of listening to a professor of English who +discourses about Walter Scott and Shakespeare; we can read them without +assistance. Literature is a universal possession among people of +general intelligence. It is made, fostered, and enjoyed by men who are +not professors of literature in the meaningless sense; it is written +for and addressed to people who are not professors of literature; and +it is understood and appreciated, I dare affirm, by no intelligent, +cultivated class in the world less certainly, less directly, less +profitably than by professors of literature in the modern American +college. + +Well, we may leave our little declaration of independence from those +who are supposed to be authorities in literature, and turning from +them not too disrespectfully, go our own way. Let us be readers +of literature. The study of literature will take care of itself. +We cannot expect to know as much about the sources of “Hamlet” as +Professor Puppendorf thinks he knows. Neither can we hope to bring as +much imagination to our reading as Lamb brought to his. But of the +two masters we shall follow Lamb, who was not a professor, nor even, +it seems, a student of literature, but only a reader. If we happen +to be interested in Professor Smith’s ideas of Milton, we can in +three or four hours read his handbook on the subject, or, better, the +other handbook from which he got his ideas. For the professors do not +keep their wisdom for their students in class; they live, in spite +of themselves, in a modern world and publish for the general reader +all the knowledge they have--and a little more. We can follow the +professors, if we choose, in the libraries. But probably there will be +more wisdom and happiness in following Lamb or Stevenson, or some other +reader who was not a professor; they tread a broader highway and never +forget what books are made for. We may well follow Dr. S. M. Crothers, +“The Gentle Reader,” who seems to have been enjoying books all his +life and still enjoys them, though he lives near a great university. +Another genial guide and counselor, whose company the younger +generation might well seek often, is Mr. Howells. He is a professor +of literature in the real sense, because he makes it. He is also a +reader whose enthusiasms are fresh and individual. Many of his recorded +impressions of contemporaneous books are buried in an obscure magazine, +and his reticence has its disadvantages in an age when too many inept +voices chatter about books. But he reads books and writes about them +because he likes them, and so his accounts of his reading are rich in +suggestion. + +Most of the authentic professors of literature, that is, the men who +have produced literature, have been readers rather than students of +books. Keats, I am quite sure, had neither opportunity nor inclination +to make a formal study of books, even of the old poets from whom his +genius drew its sustenance. He seems not to have studied Homer or the +English translation by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman. He calls +his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” You see, he only +read it, only “looked into” it, just like an ordinary reader. But he +was not ordinary, he was a poet, and so he could write this of his +experience as a reader: + + Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold, + And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; + Round many western islands have I been, + Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. + Oft of one wide expanse had I been told, + That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; + Yet never did I breathe its pure serene + Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: + + Then felt I like some watcher of the skies + When a new planet swims into his ken; + Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes + He stared at the Pacific--and all his men + Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- + Silent, upon a peak in Darien. + +Something like that experience ambushes the road of any reader, the +most commonplace of us. We, too, can travel in the realms of gold. +Only three or four men are born in a century who could express the +experience so finely as that. But the breathless adventure can be ours, +even if we cannot write about it. + +The great writers themselves are the best guides to one another, +for they have kept the reader’s point of view--they had too much +imagination, as a rule, to descend to any other point of view. +We conjecture that Shakespeare was an omnivorous reader. And so, +certainly, were Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Shelley, Carlyle, George +Eliot, Macaulay. Nearly all the great writers have been, of course, +life-long, assiduous students of the technical characteristics of +certain kinds of literature from which they were learning their art. +The poet must study the poets; the novelist must study the novelists. +But the creative artist is usually far from being a scientific or +methodical student of literature as it is laid out (suggestive words!), +in handbooks and courses. The nature of literature and the experience +of the makers of it seem to confirm us in the belief that books are to +be read, to be understood and enjoyed as they come to one’s hands, and +not jammed into text-book diagrams of periods and cycles and schools. +The great writers of our race, those obviously who know most about +literature, seem to have taken their books as they took life, just as +they happened to come. They were wanderers, not tourists. And though we +shall never see as much by the way as they did and have not the power +to travel so far, we can roam through “many goodly states and kingdoms” +and be sure of inspiring encounters, if only a small corner of our +nature is capable of being inspired. + +But as travelers in lands of beauty and adventure may profitably spend +an hour a day in searching the guide books for facts about what they +have seen and directions for finding the most interesting places, so +the reader, without sacrificing his spirit of freedom, may well equip +himself with a few handbooks of literature. Suppose that Keats has +interested us in Chapman’s Homer. Let us find out who Chapman was and +when he lived. A fairly reliable book in which to seek for him is +Professor George Saintsbury’s “History of Elizabethan Literature.” It +is one of a series of histories in which the volume on “Early English +Literature” is by Mr. Stopford Brooke, and the volume on “English +Literature of the Eighteenth Century” is by Mr. Edmund Gosse. We find +in Saintsbury’s handbook ten pages of biography and criticism of +Chapman and extracts from his poetry. This is enough to give a little +notion of Chapman’s place in literature and to suggest to the ordinary +reader whether Chapman is a writer he will wish to know more fully. We +find among Mr. Saintsbury’s comments on Chapman the following: + +“The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his +work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in +the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne’s has done, for the first +time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious +and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. +Minto’s identifies him with the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. +But these are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to +such deduction is the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman +who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to +originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once +the English tendency to lack of scholarship, and to ignorance of +contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal +Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has +been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has +left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of +work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country.” + +Here, in this paragraph, we stand neck-deep in the study of +literature, its exhilarating eddies of opinion, its mind-strengthening +difficulties, and also, we must confess, its harmless dangers and +absurdities. Let us run over Mr. Saintsbury’s sentences again and see +whither they take us. + +Keats’s sonnet--we have just read that--which Mr. Saintsbury says, +testifies to the influence of Chapman for a long time on Englishmen who +could not read Greek, really does nothing of the sort. It testifies +only that Keats met Chapman, and the momentous meeting took place, in +point of fact, at a time when the interest in Elizabethan poetry was +reviving after a century that preferred Pope’s “Iliad” to Chapman’s. +Handbook makers sometimes go to sleep and make statements like that, +and it is just as well that they do, for their noddings tumble them +from their Olympian elevations to our level and help to make them +intelligible to the common run of mortals. The mention of Swinburne’s +essay is an interesting clue to follow. His recent death (1909) has +occasioned much talk about him, and at least his name is familiar, +and the fact that he was a great poet. It is interesting to discover +that he was also a critic of Elizabethan poetry. We are thus led to +an important modern critic and poet as a result of having struck from +a side path into a history of Elizabethan literature. Mr. Minto’s +conjecture that Chapman was the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets +is valuable because it will take us to those sonnets, and will give us +our first taste of the great hodge-podge of conjectures and ingenious +guesses which constitute a large part of the “study of literature” and +are so delightful and stimulating to lose oneself in. After you have +read Shakespeare’s sonnets and a biography of Shakespeare and the whole +of Mr. Saintsbury’s book, you can pick out some other Elizabethan poet +and conjecture that _he_ is the rival to whom Shakespeare enigmatically +alludes. Neither you nor anyone else will ever be sure who has guessed +right. But that matters little. The value of the game, whatever +its foolish aspects, is that interest in a problem of literature +or literary biography cultivates your mind, keeps you reading, so +entangles you in books and the things relating to books that, like +Mr. Kipling’s hero, you can’t drop it if you tried. The rewards of +such an interest are lifelong and satisfying, even if the solution is +unattainable or not really worth attaining. The literary problem is a +changeful wind that keeps one forever sailing the sea of books. + +The rest of Mr. Saintsbury’s remarks, those about English character, +have this significance for us: One cannot read books, or study literary +problems, without studying the people who produced them. The study of +literature is the study of national characteristics. The reason we +Americans know so much more about the English than the English know +about us, is that we have been brought up on English literature, while +the Englishman has only begun to read our literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s +reflections on the Philistinism of the English open at once to the +reader large questions, philosophic in their nature, but not too +philosophic for any ordinary person to think about, the question of +the relation of English literature to Continental literature, and the +question whether the English, who have produced the greatest of all +modern poetry, are in comparison with their neighbors a notably poetic +race. One of the best works on English literature for the student to +read and possess, that by the Frenchman Taine (the English translation +is excellent), is based on a philosophic inquiry into the nature of +the English people. There is, so far as I know, no analogous study +of American literature, though Professor Barrett Wendell’s “Literary +History of America” might have developed into such a book if the author +had taken pains to think out some of his clever, fugitive suggestions. +The best books on the literature of our country which I have seen +are Professor Charles F. Richardson’s “American Literature” and the +“Manual,” edited by Mr. Theodore Stanton for the German Tauchnitz +edition of British and American authors, and published in this country +by the Putnams. + +Well, we have entered the classroom in which Mr. Saintsbury is +discoursing of Elizabethan literature, we have entered, so to speak, +by the side door. If our nature is at all shaped to receive profit and +enjoyment from the study of books, we shall be curious to see from +reading the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book what has led up to Chapman +and what writers succeed him. Of the various ways in which authors +may be grouped for analysis the historical is the best for the young +student; and it is on the historical scheme of division that most +studies of literature are based. A very useful series of books has been +begun under the editorship of Professor William A. Neilson in which +each volume deals with a class of literature, one with the essay, one +with the drama, one with ballads, and so on. This series, intended for +advanced students, will probably not be the best for the beginner, +though it is often true that works intended for advanced readers are +the very best for the young, and that books for young readers entirely +fail as introductions to more thorough studies. The reader who is +really interested in tracing out the relations between writers will +in good time wish to read studies of literature made on the historic +plan and also some which survey generic divisions of literature. +The two methods intersect at right angles. The main thoroughfare of +literary study which runs from the early story-tellers through Fielding +and Thackeray to Hardy and George Meredith, crosses the other great +thoroughfares: the one which follows the relations between Fielding, +Gray, Johnson, and Burke and other great men of that age; the one +which makes its way through the age of Wordsworth and passes from +Burns’s cottage to Scott’s Abbottsford; and the one through the age of +Victoria. This has been surveyed as far as George Meredith, and the +critics are busily putting up the fences and the sign posts. + +In view of the limitations which mere time imposes on the number of +books which any individual may study, we shall resolve early not to +attempt the impossible, not to try to study with great intimacy the +entire range of literature. The thing to do is to select, or to allow +our natural drift of mind to select for us, one period of literature, +or one group, or one writer in a period. In ten years of leisurely but +thoughtful reading, after the day’s work is done, one can know, so +far as one’s given capacity will admit, as much about Shakespeare as +any Shakespeare scholar, that is, as much that is essential and worth +knowing. Not that ten years will exhaust Shakespeare or any other +great poet, but they will suffice for the laying of a foundation of +knowledge complete and adequate for the individual reader, and on that +foundation the individual can build his personal knowledge of the poet, +a structure in which the materials furnished by other students become +of decreasing importance. + +There is a story of a French scholar who made up his mind to write a +great book on Shakespeare. In preparation he resolved to read all that +had been written about the poet. He found that the accumulation of +books on Shakespeare in the Paris libraries was a quarry which he could +not excavate in a lifetime, and more appalling still, contemporary +scholars and critics were producing books faster than he could read +them. This story should console and instruct us. We cannot read all +that has been written about Shakespeare; neither can the professional +Shakespearians. But we can all read enough. Two or three books a year +for ten years will, I am sure, put any student in possession of the +best thought of the world on Shakespeare or any other writer. The +multitude of works are repetitious, one volume repeats the best of +a hundred others, and most of them are waste matter, even for the +specialist who vainly strives to digest them. + +The thing for us to learn early is not to be appalled by the miles of +shelves full of books, but to regard them in a cheerful spirit, to +look at them as an interminable supply of spiritual food and drink, +a comforting abundance that shall not tempt us to be gourmands. I +am convinced that young people are often deterred from the study of +books by professional students who preside over the long shelves in +the twilight of libraries--blinking high priests of literature who +seem to say: “Ah! young seeker of knowledge, here is the mystery of +mysteries, where only a few of us after long and blinding study are +qualified to dwell. For five and forty years I have been studying +Shakespeare--whisper the name in reverence, not for him, but for +me--and I have found that in the ‘Winter’s Tale’ a certain comma has +been misplaced by preceding high priests, and the line should read +thus and so.” Well, if you go inside and open a few windows to let the +light and air in, you are likely to find, sitting in one of the airiest +recesses, an acquaintance of yours, quite an ordinary person, who has +read the “Winter’s Tale” for only five years, has not bothered his head +about that blessed comma, can tell you things about the play that the +high priest would not find out in a million years, and is using the +high priest’s latest disquisition for a paper weight. + +So approach your Shakespeare, if he be the poet you select for special +study in the next ten years, in a light-hearted and confident spirit. +He _is_ a mystery, but he is not past finding out, and the elements of +mystery that baffle, that deserve respect, are those which he chose to +wrap about himself and his work. The mysteries which others have hung +about him are moth-eaten hangings or modern slazy draperies that tear +at a vigorous touch. If you hear learned literary muttering behind the +arras and plunge your sword through, you will kill, not the king, but a +commentator Polonius. + +Anyone in the leisure of his evenings, or of his days, if he is +fortunate enough to have unoccupied sunlit hours, may master any poet +in the language to which we have been born. Nothing is necessary to +this study but a literate, intelligent mind, the text of the poet and +such books as one can get in the libraries or with one’s pin money. +And in selecting the books one has only to begin at random and follow +the lead of the books themselves. Any text of “Macbeth” will give +references to all the critical works that anyone needs and they in turn +will point to all the rest. You do not need a laboratory course in +philology in order to read your poet and to know him, to know him at +least as well as the philologist knows him, to know him better, if you +have a spark of poetic imagination. There is no democracy so natural, +so real, and so increasingly populous as the democracy of studious +readers. We acknowledge divinity in man, in our poet above all, and we +see flickerings of divinity in the rare reader who is a critic. But we +do not acknowledge the divine right of Shakespearian scholars or of any +other self-constituted authorities in books. In our literary state the +scholars are not our masters but our servants. We rejoice that they are +at work and now and again turn up for us a useful piece of knowledge. +But they cannot monopolize knowledge of the poets. That is open to any +of us, and it is attainable with far less labor than the scholars have +led us to believe. + +The selection of a single writer for special study, a selection open to +us all, should not be made in haste. It should be a “natural selection” +determined gradually and unawares. It will not do to say: “I will now +begin to study Shakespeare for ten years.” That New Year’s resolution +will not survive the first of February. But as you browse among books +you may find yourself especially drawn to some one of the poets or +prose writers. Follow your master when you find him. + +In the meantime you can get a general idea of the development of +English literature and the place of the chief writers. A good method +is to read selections from English prose and poetry grouped in +historical sequence. The volumes of prose edited by Henry Craik +and Ward’s “English Poets” afford an adequate survey of British +literature. Carpenter’s “American Prose” and Stedman’s “American +Anthology” constitute an excellent introduction to the branch of +English literature produced on this side of the water. The volumes +of selections may be accompanied by the historical handbooks already +mentioned, which deal with literary periods, or by one of the histories +which cover all the centuries of English authors, such as Saintsbury’s +“Short History,” or Stopford Brooke’s “English Literature.” The student +should guard against spending too large a portion of his time reading +about literature instead of reading the literature itself. But a +systematic review of the history of a national literature has great +value, apart from the enjoyment of literature; it is, if nothing more, +a course in history and biography. I have found that the study of a +handbook of a foreign literature in which I could not hope to read +extensively was in effect a study of the development of the foreign +nation. I never read a better history of Rome than J. W. Mackail’s +“Latin Literature.” The student who can read French will receive +pleasure and profit from Petit de Julleville’s “Littérature Française” +or from the shorter “Petit Histoire” of M. Delphine Duval. + +Everyone will study literature in his own way, keep the attitude which +his own nature determines, and for that matter the nature of the +individual will determine whether he shall study literature at all. I +would make one last suggestion to the eager student: Let your study be +diligent and as serious as may be, but do not let it be solemn. I once +attended a lecture on literature given to a mixed audience, that is, +an audience composed mainly of ladies. The lecture was not bad in its +way; it contained a good deal of useful information, but at times it +reminded me of the discourses on “terewth” by Mr. Chadband in “Bleak +House.” It was the audience that was oppressive. The ladies were not, +so far as I could see, entertained, but they had paid their money +for a dose of light, literature and culture and they meant to have +it. So they sat with looks of solemn determination devotedly taking +in every word. Two ladies near me were not solemn; they concealed +their restiveness and maintained a respectful but not quite attentive +demeanor. As I followed them out, I heard one of them say, “Would not +Falstaff have roared to hear himself talked about that way”? I once +heard a class rebuked for laughing aloud at something funny in Chaucer. +The classroom was a serious place and the professor was working. +But Chaucer did not intend to be serious at that moment. On another +occasion the professor remarked that it was well that Chaucer had not +subjected his genius to the deadening effect of the universities of +his time, and it occurred to me then that he would have fared about as +well in a medieval university as his poems were faring in a modern one. +Of course we take literature seriously; by a kind of paradox we take +humorous literature seriously. But solemnity is seldom in place when +one is reading or studying books. The hours of hard work and deliberate +application which are necessary to a study of literature should be +joyous hours, and the only appropriate solemnity is that directly +inspired by the poets and prose writers when they are solemn. + + +LIST OF WORKS ON LITERATURE + +_Supplementary to Chapter XII_ + +Below are given the titles of a few books helpful to the student of +literature and literary history. + + + HIRAM CORSON. _Aims of Literary Study._ + + + FREDERIC HARRISON. _Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces._ + + + GEORGE EDWARD B. SAINTSBURY. _A Short History of English Literature._ + + + STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE. _English Literature._ + + + WILLIAM MINTO. _Manual of English Prose Literature._ + + + WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY AND ROBERT MORSS LOVETT. _History of English + Literature._ + +Remarkable among books for schools on account of its excellent literary +style. + + + HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. _History of English Literature._ + +Philosophical criticism for advanced readers. + + + STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE. _Early English Literature._ + + + GEORGE EDWARD B. SAINTSBURY. _Elizabethan Literature._ + + + JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. _Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English + Drama._ + + + GEORGE G. GREENWOOD. _The Shakespeare Problem Restated._ + +This work gives a trustworthy appraisal of many modern works on +Shakespeare. (See page 166 of this Guide.) + + + JOHN CHURTON COLLINS. _Studies in Shakespeare._ + + + EDMUND WILLIAM GOSSE. _Jacobean Poets._ _From Shakespeare to Pope._ _A + History of Eighteenth Century Literature._ + + + FRANCIS B. GUMMERE. _Handbook of Poetics._ + + + THOMAS SECCOMBE. _The Age of Johnson._ + + + WALTER BAGEHOT. _Literary Studies._ + + + CHARLES FRANCIS RICHARDSON. _American Literature._ + +In one volume, in the popular edition. + + + THEODORE STANTON (and others). _Manual of American Literature._ + + + EDWARD DOWDEN. _History of French Literature._ + + + FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE. _Manual of the History of French Literature._ + +In the English translation. + + + DELPHINE DUVAL. _Petite Histoire de la Littérature Française._ + +In Heath’s _Modern Language Series_. + + + PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Littérature Française._ + +Both the foregoing works are in easy French. + + + RENÉ DOUMIC. _Contemporary French Novelists._ + +In the English translation. + + + HENRY JAMES. _French Poets and Novelists._ + + + KUNO FRANCKE. _History of German Literature._ + + + GILBERT MURRAY. _History of Ancient Greek Literature._ + + + JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY. _History of Classical Greek Literature._ + + + JOHN WILLIAM MACKAIL. _Latin Literature._ + + + + +CHAPTER XIII + +SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY + + +If there is one central idea which it is hoped a young reader might +find in the foregoing pages, it is this: that literature is for +everyone, young or old, who has the capacity to enjoy it, that no +special fitness is required but the gift of a little imagination, +that no particular training can prepare us for the reading of books +except the very act of reading. For literature is addressed to the +imagination; that is, a work which touches the imagination becomes +Literature as distinguished from all other printed things. By virtue +of its imagination it becomes permanent, it remains intelligible +to the human being of every race and age, the only conditions of +intelligibility being that the reader shall be literate and that the +book shall be in the language in which the reader has been brought up +or in a foreign tongue which he has learned to read. We have insisted +on a kind of liberty, equality, and union in the world of writers +and readers, and have, perhaps needlessly, made a declaration of +independence against all scholars, philosophers, and theorists who try +to put obstacles in our way and arrogate to themselves exclusive rights +and privileges, special understandings of the world’s literature. +We believe that literature is intended for everybody and that it is +addressed to everybody by the creative mind of art. We believe that +all readers are equal in the presence of a book or work of art, but +we hastily qualify this, as we must qualify the political doctrine of +equality. No two men are really equal, no two persons will get the +same pleasure and benefit from any book. But the inequalities are +natural and not artificial. Of a thousand persons of all ages who read +the “Iliad,” the hundred who get the most out of it will include men, +women, and children, some who have “higher” education and some who +have not, well-informed men and uninformed boys. The hundred will be +those who have the most imagination. The boy of fourteen who has an +active intelligence can understand Shakespeare better than the least +imaginative of those who have taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy +in English at our universities. The man of imagination, even if he has +taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, will find deeper delight +and wisdom in Shakespeare than the uninformed boy. Readers differ +in individual capacities and in the extent of their experience in +intellectual matters. But class differences, especially school-made +differences, are swept away by the power of literature, which abhors +inessential distinctions and goes direct to the human intelligence. + +The direct appeal of literature to the human intelligence and human +emotions is what we mean by our principle of union. Nothing can divorce +us from the poet if we have a spark of poetry in us. The contact of +mind between poet and reader is immediate, and is effected without any +go-between, any intercessor or critical negotiator. + +Now, what happens to the principles of our declaration of independence +and the constitution of our democracy of readers when we open to a +page of one of Darwin’s works on biology, or a page of the philosopher +Plato, and find that we do not get the sense of it at all? We can +understand the “Iliad,” the “Book of Job,” “Macbeth,” “Faust”; +they mean _something_ to us, even if we do not receive their whole +import. But here, in two great thinkers who have influenced the whole +intellectual world, Plato and Darwin, we come upon pages that to us +mean absolutely nothing. The works of Plato and Darwin are certainly +literature. But they are something else besides: they are science, and +the understanding of them depends on a knowledge of the science that +went before the particular pages that are so meaningless to us. Here +is a kind of literature, the mere reading of which requires special +training. + +We may call this the Literature of Information as distinguished from +the Literature of Imagination. The distinction is not sharp; a book +leans to one side or the other of the line, but it does not fall clear +of the line. A work of imagination, a poem, a novel, or an essay, may +contain abundant information, may be loaded with facts; on the other +hand, the greatest of those who have discovered and expounded facts, +Darwin, Gibbon, Huxley, have had literary power and imagination. But +most great works of imagination deal with universal experiences, they +treat human nature and common humanity’s thought and feelings about the +world. As Hazlitt says, nature and feeling are the same in all periods. +So the common man understands the “Iliad,” and the story of Joseph and +his brothers, and “The Scarlet Letter” and “Silas Marner.” + +In Macaulay’s “Essay on Milton” is a very misleading piece of +philosophizing on the “progress of poesy.” It is a pity, when there +are so many better essays--Macaulay wrote twenty better ones--that +this should be selected for reading in the schools as part of the +requirements for college entrance. Macaulay sees that the “Iliad” is as +great a poem as the world has known. He also sees that science in his +own time is progressing by leaps and bounds, that, in his own vigorous +words, “any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself +for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew +after half a century of study and meditation.” He accordingly reasons, +or rather makes the long jump, that whereas science progresses, +poetry declines with the advance of civilization, and the wonder is +that Milton should have written so great a poem in a “civilized” age. +Macaulay was young when he wrote the essay; he seldom muddled ideas +as badly as that. Poetry, if we view the history of the world in +five-century periods, neither advances nor declines. It fluctuates from +century to century, but it keeps a general permanent level. Now and +again appears a new poet to add to the number of poems, but poetry +does _not_ change. Neither does the individual poem. The “Iliad” +is precisely what it was two thousand years ago, and two thousand +years from now it will be neither diminished nor augmented. Creative +art, dealing with universal ideas and feelings and needing only a +well-developed language to work in, can produce a masterpiece in any +one of forty countries any time the genius is born capable of doing +the work. This statement is too simple to exhaust a large subject. The +point is that once man has reached a certain point of culture, has +come to have a language and a religion and a national tradition, more +civilization or less, more science or less, neither helps nor hinders +his art. The arrival of a great poet can be counted on every two or +three centuries. It is because poetry and other forms of imaginative +literature are independent of time and progress that the reader’s +ability to understand them is independent of time and progress. Our +boys can understand the “Iliad.” Fetch a Greek boy back from ancient +Athens and give us his Greek tongue and we can interest him in Milton’s +story of Satan in half a day. But it will take a year or two to make +him understand an elementary schoolbook about electricity. The great +ideas about human nature and human feelings and about the visible +world and the gods men dream of and believe in, these are the stuff of +Imaginative Literature; they have been expressed over and over again +in all ages and are intelligible to a Chinaman or an Englishman of +the year one thousand or the year two thousand. That is why we are +all citizens in the democracy of readers. That is why we do not need +special knowledge to read “Hamlet,” why the most direct preparation for +the reading of “Hamlet” is the reading of “Macbeth” and “Lear.” + +Now, all special subjects, biology, geology, zoölogy, political +economy, are continually being forced by the imaginative power of great +writers into the realm of Imaginative Literature. Poetry is full of +philosophy. Our novels are shot through and through with problems of +economics. Great expositors like Huxley and Mill are working over and +interpreting the discoveries of science, relating them to our common +life and making, not their minute facts but their bearing, clear to the +ordinary man. So that there is a great deal of science and philosophy +within the reach of the untrained reader. And a wide general reading +prepares any person, by giving him a multitude of hints and stray bits +of information, to make his way through a technical volume devoted to +one special subject. The moral talks of Socrates to Athenian youths +lead one on, as Socrates seems to have intended to lead those boys +on, into the uttermost fields of philosophy. The genial essayists, +Stevenson, Lamb, Emerson, are all tinged with philosophy and science, +at least the social and political sciences. And when an idle reader +approaches a new subject, economics, chemistry, or philosophy, he often +finds with delight that he has been reading about it all his life. He +is like the man in Molière’s comedy who was surprised to find that he +had always been speaking prose. + +Yet there remains a good deal of the Literature of Information which +can be understood only after a gradual approach to it through other +works. You must learn the elements of chemistry before you can +understand the arguments of the modern men of science about radium. +You must read some elementary discussions of economics before you can +take part in the arguments about protection and free trade, socialism, +banking, and currency. + +At this point the Guide to Reading parts company with you and leaves +you in the hands of the economists, the historians, the chemists, the +philosophers. Special teachers and advisers will conduct you into those +subjects. They are organized subjects. The paths to them are steep but +well graded and paved. If you wander upon these paths without guidance +you will not harm yourself, and, if you do not try to discuss what you +do not understand, you will not harm anyone else. The list of works in +philosophy and science which I append includes some that I, an errant +reader, have stumbled into with pleasure and profit. I do not know +surely whether any one of them is the best in its subject or whether +it is the proper work to read first. I only know in general that a +civilized man should for his own pleasure and enlightenment set his +wits against a hard technical book once in a while for the sake of the +exercise, and that although for purposes of wisdom and happiness the +Literature of the Ages contains all that is necessary, everybody ought +to go a little way into some special subject that lies less in the +realm of literature than in the realm of science. + + +LIST OF WORKS IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY + +_Supplementary to Chapter XIII_ + +In this list are a few volumes of scientific and philosophic works, +notable for their literary excellence, or for their clearness to the +general reader, or for the historical and human importance of the +author. There is no attempt at order or system except the alphabetical +sequence of authors. Some philosophic and scientific works will be +found in the list of essays, on page 192. + + + GRANT ALLEN. _The Story of the Plants._ + +In _Appleton’s Library of Useful Stories_. + + + MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. _Thoughts or Meditations._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_ and many cheap editions. + + + JOHN LUBBOCK (Lord Avebury). _The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders + of the World We Live In._ _The Use of Life._ + +A popular writer on scientific and philosophic subjects. + + + LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY. _First Lessons with Plants._ _Garden Making._ + + + ROBERT STAWELL BALL. _The Earth’s Beginning._ _Star-Land: Being Talks + with Young People._ + + + JOHN BURROUGHS. _Birds and Bees and Other Studies in Nature._ + _Squirrels and Other Fur Bearers._ + +These books are especially suitable for young readers. + + + CHARLES TRIPLER CHILD. _The How and Why of Electricity._ + +For the uninformed reader. + + + JAMES DWIGHT DANA. _The Geological Story Briefly Told._ + + + CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN. _On the Origin of Species._ _What Mr. Darwin + Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship “Beagle.”_ + +The second of the two books named is especially for young readers. +The book from which it is taken, Darwin’s “Journal” of the voyage is +in _Everyman’s Library_. For expositions of Darwin’s theories, see +Huxley’s “Darwiniana,” Wallace’s “Darwinism” and David Starr Jordan’s +“Footnotes to Evolution.” + + + GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON. _The Greek View of Life._ _A Modern + Symposium._ + + + ROBERT KENNEDY DUNCAN. _The New Knowledge._ + +A popular exposition of theories of matter that have developed since +the discovery of radioactivity. Intelligible to any (intelligent) +high-school pupil. + + + EPICTETUS. _Discourses._ + +The English translation in _Bohn’s Library_. + + + FRANCIS GALTON. _Natural Inheritance._ _Inquiries into Human Faculty._ + +The second volume is in _Everyman’s Library_. + + + ARCHIBALD GEIKIE. _Class-Book of Geology._ + + + HENRY GEORGE. _Our Land and Land Policy._ _The Science of Political + Economy._ + + + ASA GRAY. _Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States._ + + + ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY. _The Education of the American Citizen._ + + + HERMANN LUDWIG FERDINAND VON HELMHOLTZ. _Popular Lectures on + Scientific Subjects._ + +In the English translation by Edmund Atkinson with Helmholtz’s +“Autobiography” and an introduction by Tyndall. + + + KARL HILTY. _Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life._ + +Translated by Francis Greenwood Peabody. + + + WILLIAM TEMPLE HORNADAY. _The American Natural History._ + + + CHARLES DE FOREST HOXIE. _How the People Rule; Civics for Boys and + Girls._ + + + THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. _Darwiniana._ _Evolution and Ethics._ _Man’s + Place in Nature._ + +Huxley is the greatest man of letters among modern English men of +science. A volume of his essays is in _Everyman’s Library_. + + + ERNEST INGERSOLL. _Book of the Ocean._ + +Especially for young people. + + + HAROLD JACOBY. _Practical Talks by an Astronomer._ + + + WILLIAM JAMES. _The Principles of Psychology._ _The Will to Believe._ + + + HERBERT KEIGHTLY JOB. _Among the Water-Fowl._ + + + DAVID STARR JORDAN. _True Tales of Birds and Beasts._ + +Especially for young readers. + + + WILLIAM THOMSON (Lord Kelvin). _Popular Lectures and Addresses._ + + + HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD. _Wealth Against Commonwealth._ + +An important work on modern economic and business problems. + + + JOHN STUART MILL. _On Liberty._ _Principles of Political Economy._ + + + JOHN MORLEY. _On Compromise._ + + + HUGO MÜNSTERBERG. _Psychology and Life._ _On the Witness Stand._ + + + FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS. _Science and a Future Life._ + + + SIMON NEWCOMB. _Astronomy for Everybody._ + + + GEORGE HERBERT PALMER. _The Field of Ethics._ _The Nature of Goodness._ + + + WALTER HORATIO PATER. _Plato and Platonism._ + + + FRIEDRICH PAULSEN. _Introduction to Philosophy._ + +The excellent English translation affords within easy compass a view +of philosophy equal to several elementary courses in philosophy at a +university. It may be begun by any young man or woman of, say, eighteen. + + + PLATO. _Dialogues._ + +The “Republic” is in _Everyman’s Library_ and in other cheap editions. +Several of the dialogues are to be found under the title, “Trial and +Death of Socrates” in the _Golden Treasury Series_. See also Walter +Pater’s “Plato and Platonism.” The great Plato in English is Jowett’s. + + + JACOB AUGUST RIIS. _The Battle with the Slum._ _How the Other Half + Lives._ _The Children of the Poor._ + +Among the most sensible, sympathetic and human of modern works on +sociology. + + + JOSIAH ROYCE. _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy._ _Studies of Good and + Evil._ _The World and the Individual._ + +“The Spirit of Modern Philosophy” is a beautifully written introduction +to the study of philosophy. + + + GEORGE SANTAYANA. _The Sense of Beauty._ _Poetry and Religion._ + + + GARRETT PUTNAM SERVISS. _Astronomy with an Opera Glass._ + + + NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER. _Aspects of the Earth._ _The Individual: A + Study of Life and Death._ _Nature and Man in America._ + + + DALLAS LORE SHARP. _A Watcher in the Woods._ _Wild Life Near Home._ + + + HENRY SIDGWICK. _The Elements of Politics._ _The Methods of Ethics._ + + + HERBERT SPENCER. _First Principles._ _The Principles of Ethics._ _The + Principles of Sociology._ + + + SILVANUS PHILLIPS THOMPSON. _Elementary Lessons in Electricity and + Magnetism._ + + + RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH. _On the Study of Words._ + +Contains all the philology that anyone needs. + + + JOHN TYNDALL. _Fragments of Science._ _New Fragments._ _Essays on the + Imagination in Science._ _Glaciers of the Alps and Mountaineering in + 1861._ + +The last volume is in _Everyman’s Library_, with an introduction by +Lord Avebury. + + + ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE. _Man’s Place in the Universe._ _The Malay + Archipelago._ _Australia and New Zealand._ + + + GILBERT WHITE. _Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne._ + +In _Everyman’s Library_. + + + WILHELM WINDELBAND. _History of Ancient Philosophy._ + + + WALTER AUGUSTUS WYCKOFF. _The Workers: An Experiment in Reality._ + +The story of a professor of economics and sociology who became a +laborer. Interesting as a story and a good popular introduction to the +problems of labor and wages. + + +THE END + + * * * * * + + + + +Transcriber’s note + + +Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation, +italics, and spelling of personal names were standardized. + +The following changes were made: + + Page 104: “Make my thy lyre” “Make me thy lyre” + Page 179: “Homor, who, according” “Homer, who, according” + Page 196: “Dr. Quincey’s beautiful” “De Quincey’s beautiful” + Page 215: “have “Eugenie Grandet”” “have “Eugénie Grandet”” + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76079 *** |